Drive West Alabama or Kirby Drive through Upper Kirby right now and you will hit orange barrels before you hit a stop sign. That is not an accident of scheduling. It is the visible edge of a bet, and the bet is bigger than the potholes it is meant to fix.
While Houston City Council was signing off on a five-year, $125 million road rebuild for this district in February 2026, the neighborhood's own resale numbers were telling a much quieter story: prices holding roughly flat, homes sitting longer than the city average, nothing that would normally justify this much capital showing up at once. Those two facts are not in tension. Read together, they explain each other, and they explain something a buyer or seller comparing Houston neighborhoods right now needs to understand before they write an offer.
What the resale numbers actually say
Start with what a shopper actually sees on a listing sheet. As of April 2026, the trailing 12-month median sale price for homes in Greenway/Upper Kirby sat at $430,000, down 4 percent from the 12 months before it, according to Homes.com's neighborhood tracker. Condos in that same window averaged 80 days on market, well past the 55-day national figure the same tracker cited alongside it. A separate February 2026 reading on townhomes put the median at $439,000, with an average of 78 days to contract. By summer, one active-listing snapshot from Redfin showed townhomes averaging 107 days on market, close to double the pace of the city as a whole.
Compare that to Houston overall. The Houston Association of Realtors' June 2026 housing update, released July 8, showed the citywide single-family median holding steady at $345,000, with days on market ticking up modestly to 52 from 50 a year earlier. A separate market recap covering that same month put citywide condo and townhome sales down 12 percent year over year, with the median price for that segment falling 5 percent to $219,500.
That last comparison is the one worth sitting with. Upper Kirby's condo and townhome median runs roughly double the Houston-wide condo and townhome median, and its year-over-year price movement, down 4 percent, tracks almost exactly with the citywide segment's 5 percent decline. Upper Kirby is not uniquely soft. It is riding the same broad softening every Houston condo and townhome buyer is seeing, just from a much higher price floor. Anyone weighing a condo against a townhome here should read the current pricing as a citywide condition wearing a luxury price tag, not a local red flag.
The money that isn't waiting on the comps
Here is where it gets interesting. Nobody spending this kind of capital in Upper Kirby right now is pricing off those resale comps. They are pricing off something further out.
Houston City Council approved the Upper Kirby Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone's capital budget for fiscal years 2026 through 2030 on February 25, and the vote passed unanimously without discussion, as reported by Community Impact. The $125 million budget breaks down like this:
- West Alabama reconstruction, $47.4 million, running from Buffalo Speedway to Shepherd Drive
- Bissonnet reconstruction, $35.4 million, running from Kirby Drive to Edloe Street
- Kirby Drive improvements, $18.6 million, from Highway 59 to Bissonnet Street, including burying private utilities underground
- Westpark improvements, $100,000, to relocate the bikeway so the road itself can be rebuilt
- An Upper Kirby Civic Complex that would flip Levy Park's orientation from north-south to east-west, aimed at giving the park more visibility from the street
A tax increment reinvestment zone only works if the district believes the spending raises future property values enough to pay for itself through the added tax revenue. That is the whole mechanism. The TIRZ is not reacting to a hot market. It is trying to build one.
Private capital is moving on the same logic. Southern Land Company began construction this spring on a $270 million tower at 2811 Kirby Drive, at the corner of Kirby Drive and Kipling Street near the neighborhood's Whole Foods, according to Click2Houston's April 2026 coverage. Filings put the tower at either 37 or 38 stories depending on which document you check, with 331 apartments and 18 penthouses across roughly 460,000 square feet, plus a four-story, 77,500-square-foot office building and about 15,000 square feet of ground-floor retail and restaurant space. The company expects the project to support around 500 jobs across construction, hospitality, and office work once it opens.
A few blocks over at West Alabama and Buffalo Speedway, Transwestern is deep into the second phase of The RO, its 17-acre mixed-use campus on the former ExxonMobil Upstream site. The first building, a 145,000-square-foot Class AA office tower, is fully leased to the energy trading firm Vitol and was slated for tenant occupancy in June 2026, per Transwestern's own announcement of the project's next phase. The next phase includes The Birdsall, a 34-story Auberge Collection hotel and condominium tower designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox and named for Birdsall Briscoe, the architect behind many of River Oaks' original 1920s homes, along with The Clayton, a 317-unit luxury apartment tower designed by Pickard Chilton, and a retail village built around chef-driven restaurants. In March 2026, Transwestern filed plans for a three-story, 108,576-square-foot retail and parking structure at 3080 Buffalo Speedway priced at more than $34 million, with completion targeted for March 2028, per The Real Deal's reporting.
"This ambitious project is placemaking at its finest."
That is Transwestern Executive Chairman Robert Duncan, quoted in the company's own announcement of the groundbreaking. Strip away the marketing language and the underlying claim is a market one: build the amenities, borrow against the neighborhood's proximity to River Oaks, and let the resale numbers catch up later.
Why rents are doing what prices aren't
If developers are betting on demand the resale market hasn't priced in yet, the rental market is where you would expect to see it show up first, and it does. In the Market Line Report covering the three months ending July 2026, the Highland Village/Upper Kirby/West U submarket ranked as the second-hottest in greater Houston, with asking rents climbing at a 9.0 percent annualized pace and 1.6 percent of the market absorbed in that window.
That gap between resale softness and rental strength is not a contradiction. It is a timing difference. Renters and corporate tenants are making decisions today based on the district's current amenities and its walkability to Highland Village and West Ave. Homebuyers are making decisions based on comparable sales, and comparable sales lag construction by definition. A tower that broke ground in April 2026 will not show up in resale comps until buyers close on finished units, most likely in 2027 or later. The rental market is simply the earlier-arriving half of the same demand curve.
What this means if you're comparing neighborhoods right now
If you are cross-shopping Upper Kirby against The Heights, Montrose, or River Oaks itself, the practical read is this: you are buying into a neighborhood mid-renovation, and the disruption and the discount are the same thing.
The road work funded by the TIRZ budget runs through 2030, which means West Alabama, Bissonnet, and sections of Kirby Drive will see construction traffic, lane closures, and torn-up curbs for several more years. That is a real cost to daily life for anyone buying now, and it is a plausible part of why days on market have run so far above the citywide average. Buyers absorbing that friction today are, in effect, being compensated for it through softer pricing relative to the amenities landing in 2027 and 2028.
Sellers face the mirror version of that math. A listing photographed against an active construction corridor will compete on price with move-in-ready product in neighborhoods without that backdrop, regardless of what finishes out the block by 2027. That is exactly the kind of positioning problem worth working through with an agent before a property goes live, particularly for anyone trying to compete with new construction on the same street.
None of this is a prediction about where prices land once the cranes come down. It is a description of why the two numbers you are seeing right now, flat resale and record capital investment, can both be true without either one being wrong.
A few questions worth asking before you commit
Does the road construction affect every part of the neighborhood equally? No. The three funded segments are West Alabama between Buffalo Speedway and Shepherd Drive, Bissonnet between Kirby Drive and Edloe Street, and Kirby Drive itself between Highway 59 and Bissonnet Street. A property on a side street off those corridors will feel far less disruption than one fronting them directly.
Is the Southern Land Company tower going to be visible from nearby homes? Given its height and its location at Kirby Drive and Kipling Street, it will be visible from a meaningful stretch of the surrounding blocks once complete. Anyone concerned about sightlines or construction noise during the build should ask about the property's specific line of sight before touring.
When should I expect the neighborhood to look and feel finished? Based on current filings, the office tower at The RO was slated to welcome tenants in June 2026, the tower at 2811 Kirby Drive targets a mid-2027 completion, and The Birdsall, The Clayton, and The RO's retail village are slated for late 2027, with the newest retail filing there targeting March 2028. Road work funded by the TIRZ runs through fiscal year 2030.
Reading a neighborhood mid-transition takes more than a median price and a days-on-market number. It takes knowing which construction is temporary friction and which is a permanent repricing waiting to happen. That is the kind of read Spagnola Realty Group does for every buyer and seller working the inner loop right now. If you are weighing Upper Kirby against another Houston neighborhood, or trying to time a listing around the construction calendar, schedule a consultation and we will walk through exactly what your address is up against.
