City of Austin neighborhood planning area
Dawson
Thinking about moving here? This page shows what the public record says about Dawson: the building permits the city has geocoded inside this exact boundary, the restaurant inspections Austin Public Health has published, the venues filing mixed-beverage receipts, and the registered construction projects. Every figure below carries the date and the agency it came from.
Dawson is one of 65 City of Austin Neighborhood Planning Areas — a zoning geography adopted by council ordinance, not a colloquial neighborhood name. Districts people name in conversation, like South Congress, Rainey Street or the Sixth Street entertainment district, are not separate areas in this dataset; they sit inside a planning area or straddle two. This boundary is a single polygon in the city's file, adopted under ordinance 19980827-B, and the city last modified it on . The dataset stores the name as DAWSON.
What the public record says about Dawson
- City of Austin Development Services has issued 2,117 building permits that it has geocoded inside the Dawson planning-area boundary, the earliest dated August 28, 1978 and the most recent August 10, 2026, for a combined declared construction value of $290,259,863. Declared value is the figure an applicant puts on the permit application — not market value and not finished cost. Counted over every issue date in the city’s Issued Construction Permits dataset (3syk-w9eu), building permits only. Placing a permit inside a boundary needs a mapped coordinate, and about one building permit in seven (13.8% of them, as published on 2026-07-26) carries no location at all — those rows cannot be placed in any neighbourhood, here or anywhere else, so this is a count of geocoded permits rather than of every permit issued. How busy it is now is a different question, and the list below is the honest answer to it: the 25 most recently issued permits here were all issued since January 9, 2026.
- The 3 most recent restaurant inspections we could place inside this boundary run from April 30, 2026 to May 18, 2026, averaging 89 out of 100. Austin Public Health publishes these in irregular batches, historically weeks after the visit, and this page lists at most 15 — so that count is the size of our list, not the number of restaurants in Dawson. A score is a single-visit snapshot.
- Of the 100 highest-grossing mixed-beverage filers the Texas Comptroller lists for ZIP 78704, 78701, 78741, 78744, 78745, 1 sit inside this boundary. The newest filing in that set is June 2026. Per-venue figures are gross receipts reported to the Comptroller, summed over each venue’s own filing months — never a total for Dawson. Filings are monthly and land three to four weeks late.
These controls filter the records already on this page. They do not re-query the agencies.
Map of the Dawson boundary
Boundary drawn from City of Austin Neighborhood Planning Areas, as last modified September 22, 2021. Markers are placed from geocoded street addresses, so a record whose address we cannot geocode is listed below but not pinned. The panels under the map are the full text equivalent.
Building permits
The 25 most recently issued inside this boundary (page limit 25)
Restaurant inspections
Austin Public Health · up to 15 most recent inside this boundary
Registered projects
Texas Dept. of Licensing & Regulation filings · up to 15 inside this boundary
Bars & restaurants filing receipts
Texas Comptroller mixed-beverage filers we placed inside this boundary
1 of 100 filers in ZIP 78704, 78701, 78741, 78744, 78745 placed inside this boundary. Each venue’s figure is its own gross receipts over its own filing months — there is deliberately no area total, because this is a sample, not a census.
Dawson: questions people actually ask
Is Dawson an official Austin neighborhood?
Dawson is one of 65 City of Austin Neighborhood Planning Areas — a zoning and planning geography adopted by City Council ordinance, not a colloquial neighborhood name. Well-known districts such as South Congress, Rainey Street and the Sixth Street entertainment district are not separate areas in this dataset; they sit inside a planning area, or straddle two. The Dawson boundary is a single polygon in the source file. The city last modified it on September 22, 2021.
Which ordinance adopted the Dawson neighborhood plan?
City of Austin ordinance number 19980827-B is recorded against this planning area in the city's Neighborhood Planning Areas dataset, with planning status plan approved.
How much construction is happening in Dawson?
City of Austin Development Services has issued 2,117 building permits that it has geocoded inside the Dawson planning-area boundary, the earliest dated August 28, 1978 and the most recent August 10, 2026, for a combined declared construction value of $290,259,863. Declared value is the figure the applicant put on the permit application, not market value or finished cost. Counted from the city's Issued Construction Permits dataset (3syk-w9eu), building permits only, over every issue date in that dataset. The boundary test needs a mapped coordinate, and about one building permit in seven (13.8% as published on 2026-07-26) carries no location, so those rows cannot be placed in any neighbourhood and are not in this figure.
What ZIP codes cover Dawson?
No ZIP code centroid falls inside the Dawson boundary, so we search the 5 nearest instead: 78704, 78701, 78741, 78744, 78745. We match ZIP codes to planning areas by testing each ZIP's centroid against the boundary polygon, so a large ZIP can overlap an area without its centre landing inside it. Use the boundary, not the ZIP, as the authority.