REPORT · #04 · CROSS-DATASET · UPDATED 3d ago
Mirror · 3d agoAustin Heat Index 2026. Where the city is changing fastest.
One composite score per zip code, fused from 13,149 rows across four City of Austin open-data feeds — what's being built, where Austin eats, what residents want fixed, and what they're calling 311 about.
◆ The four dimensions
Build · Eat · Fix · Call.
Four open-data feeds, four lenses on civic activity. Each normalized to a 0–100 axis. The composite Heat Index for each zip is the equal-weighted mean.
5,000
Build · permits
across 58 zips
2,000
Eat · inspections
7 scored < 70 (failures)
1,149
Fix · active code cases
active + pending only
5,000
Call · 311 requests
resident-driven attention
SECTION 01 · WHERE
Where the heat is.
Across 58 Austin zips, 78704 (South Austin) leads with a composite score of 73.7 — the only zip placing in the top quartile on every one of the four dimensions.
The map below sizes each zip by its composite Heat Index score — not by raw permit count or 311 volume alone. A small dot can still mean an active food economy or an aging code-case backlog; a big dot means a zip is moving on every front at once.
SECTION 02 · WHAT
Four lenses, one city.
Each row is one of the top 10 hottest zips. Each column is one of the four dimensions. Cell shading is the per-axis percentile within Austin — the bar inside the cell is the same number, re-rendered.
Read across a row to see whether a zip is hot for one reason or for all four. Read down a column to find the leaders on a single axis.
Cells shaded by per-axis percentile · raw count + 0–100 norm
SECTION 03 · RANK
Top 10 hottest zips.
Sorted by composite Heat Index. Each row shows the four dimensions side by side — the bar lengths are per-axis percentiles so you can scan for a zip's strength and weakness at a glance.
◆ Bottom 5 — for contrast
Quietest zips in the corpus — sparse activity across all four axes. These are typically peripheral or barely-Austin zips (university centroids, small slivers of metro overlap).
78640
score 0.1
2 total rows
78712
score 0.2
3 total rows
78641
score 0.2
3 total rows
78615
score 0.2
1 total rows
78634
score 0.2
1 total rows
SECTION 04 · WHEN
Twelve months, top five.
For each of the top 5 zips by Heat Index, the monthly composite — permits + inspections + violations + 311s — over the trailing 12 months. Each spark is normalized to its own peak so the shape shows the rhythm, not the volume.
ZIP 78704
74/100
25-06 → 26-05
ZIP 78745
66/100
25-06 → 26-05
ZIP 78744
64/100
25-06 → 26-05
ZIP 78702
63/100
25-06 → 26-05
ZIP 78758
60/100
25-06 → 26-05
Source · 4-dataset composite · 2025-06 → 2026-05
◆ Editor's note
"5 of the top-10 hottest zips sit east of I-35 — a striking inversion of the pre-2020 westside-heavy growth pattern."
— Composed by the reporter agent · grounded in 13,149 cached rows
◆ How this was made
Four agents, four datasets, one composite.
Specialists
Datasets cited
◆ Next angles to explore