Roof Repair in MLK

The permit record for MLK

Roof permits in MLK, year by year

The busiest year on record for MLK was 2020, with 23 permits. Peaks like that are the paper shadow of a storm. Roofs do not age in unison; insurance claims arrive in unison.

MLK has gone quiet: 22 permits in 2023–2025 against 34 in 2020–2022, 35% fewer. That is what the far side of a wave looks like — the work happened, and the clock restarted on all of it at once.

Roughly 23% of the roof work permitted in MLK is on commercial buildings rather than houses — a mixed area, and worth remembering when you compare the total against a purely residential one.

Spread out, or packed in?

MLK covers 1.55 square miles, which works out at 109 roof permits per square mile — 31st densest of the 91 neighbourhoods with a measured area. The city average is 99.

Right around the city norm. Geography is not going to be the reason a price here comes in high or low.

Both rankings agree here: 31st by volume, 31st by density. Nothing about MLK is an outlier in either direction, which in this context is genuinely useful information.

What the work in MLK actually is

• Remodel — 58 (35%)
• New — 41 (24%)
• Repair — 36 (21%)
• Addition and Remodel — 27 (16%)

Most of this is maintenance on standing houses rather than anything new. In that situation the quote depends on what the contractor expects to find under the shingles, which is exactly why two honest numbers can be thousands apart.

What the neighbours declared

68 residential roof permits in MLK carry a declared value. The median is $24,500. Half the jobs came in above that and half below. An average would have been higher and less useful, because a couple of big projects always sit at the top end.

That sits close to the $21,890 median across Austin neighbourhoods, so general city pricing is a fair starting point in MLK.

A filed value tells you the order of magnitude and nothing finer. Useful for spotting a quote that is wildly out of line; useless for arguing over a few hundred dollars.

MLK and the twenty-year clock

Since 2006 the city has permitted 956 new homes inside MLK. 55 of them — 6% — went up between 2006 and 2010.

Only 55 homes from that window means the housing here is mixed in age. That is easier to live with: no year when the whole street needs scaffolding, and no scramble for crews.

Whose weather was it?

Austin as a whole peaked in 2024. MLK peaked in 2020 — a different year entirely. That year ran 163% above this neighbourhood’s own average, which is the signature of a hail band rather than ordinary wear.

A neighbourhood peaking out of step with the city is the clearest evidence there is that the damage was local. MLK had its year in 2020; whatever came through then stopped a few streets away.

For scale: MLK holds 1.1% of every roof permit issued in Austin.

If you own a roof in MLK

Everything above is public record. The point of putting it in one place is that a quote for a roof in MLK should now be readable: you know roughly what the neighbours declared and roughly how old the housing is.

Sources: City of Austin issued building permits, joined to the city’s own neighbourhood boundaries by permit coordinates; Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, active sales tax permit holders. Both public records, retrieved September 2026.