Drive Hillsboro Road through Forest Hills this month and you'll pass survey stakes and fresh mulch beds where nothing used to be. Turn onto Kingsbury Drive off Old Hickory Boulevard and there's a stone column going up that wasn't there last year, cut to match the ones already standing at half a dozen other entrances around town. None of it reads as a single project. It reads like four or five unrelated crews showing up in the same few months, which is close to what's actually happening.
The interesting part isn't the list of work. It's that Forest Hills doesn't send its residents a city property tax bill to pay for any of it, and the way that funding actually works explains both what's getting built this year and why some of it won't start until 2027.
What Changed Around Town This Year
The City of Forest Hills has been running several capital and beautification projects at once, each on its own timeline. Taken together, they're the busiest stretch of visible civic work the small city has had in a while:
- The Tennessee Department of Agriculture approved a grant to plant cherry trees and pansy redbuds along the Hillsboro Road corridor between Harding Place and Old Hickory Boulevard, the main artery running through the middle of the city.
- The city's Master Stormwater Plan has cleared surveys and design work, with construction expected to wrap by the end of this summer.
- Crews are finishing the last of a set of stone entrance columns at Kingsbury Drive, built to match similar markers the city has installed at other neighborhood entrances over the years.
- New patriotic decor has gone up at the city's stone wall features around town.
- The Tyne Blvd Pathway, a planned walking route from Hillsboro Road to Robert E. Lee Drive, is on track to break ground in 2027.
Four of those five are active or nearly finished. The fifth is still a year out. That gap is not a scheduling accident. It's a function of how the city pays for things.
No City Tax Bill, So Where Does the Money Come From
Forest Hills is what Tennessee calls a satellite city, one of several small incorporated municipalities inside Davidson County that kept their own charters when Nashville and the county consolidated into a single metropolitan government in 1963. Forest Hills residents pay their property taxes to Davidson County, not to the city itself. The City of Forest Hills levies no municipal property tax of its own.
That matters because it changes how a capital project gets funded. A city with its own tax base can raise revenue for a stormwater overhaul or a new pathway by adjusting its own rate. Forest Hills instead relies on its share of state sales tax revenue for ongoing operations, and on grants like the Tennessee Department of Agriculture award for the Hillsboro Road tree planting to fund specific improvements it wouldn't otherwise budget for in a given year.
That's a meaningfully different funding model than a lump sum capital campaign. It means projects tend to arrive as a patchwork rather than a single coordinated build-out, which is exactly what's visible on the ground right now: a tree grant here, a stormwater plan finishing there, a set of stone columns going up on its own schedule. It also means a project like the Tyne Blvd Pathway waits for the right funding cycle to line up before it can move from design to construction, which is why residents are seeing survey work and planning language now and a 2027 start date rather than crews already digging.
For a city with roughly 5,000 residents and no commercial tax base to draw from, this is a fairly efficient way to keep infrastructure current. It also explains the pace. Improvements show up when a grant clears or when a multi-year plan reaches its construction phase, not on a fixed annual budget cycle the way they might in a city funding projects through its own property tax levy.
The Pathway System Is Building One Grant Cycle at a Time
The Tyne Blvd Pathway isn't the city's first pedestrian project. The John C. Lovell Bikeway already runs 1.5 miles from Percy Priest Elementary to Radnor Lake, giving residents on that side of town an established route between a neighborhood school and one of the region's best-known natural areas. It's been part of daily life in Forest Hills for years, used for walking dogs, running, or just getting from one end of the corridor to the other without a car.
The Tyne Blvd Pathway would extend that same idea to a different stretch of the city, connecting Hillsboro Road to Robert E. Lee Drive. But where the Lovell Bikeway is finished and in daily use, the new pathway is still in the design and funding stage a full year before ground gets broken. That's consistent with the grant-and-cycle funding pattern. Rather than building a citywide pedestrian network all at once, Forest Hills has been adding pathway segments as funding and planning line up, which is also why the stormwater plan is scheduled to finish this summer while the pathway sits a year further out. Different projects, different funding windows, same underlying constraint.
What the City Touches and What It Doesn't
It helps to separate what the city actually builds from what residents use for recreation, because they're not the same thing and the distinction says something about how the town works.
Richland Country Club sits on 170 acres in Forest Hills, including part of the former Battle of Nashville site, and offers a golf course along with a private club setting for members. Sequoia Swim & Tennis Club is another private gathering spot residents rely on for pools, courts, and community events. Neither is a city project. They're private amenities that happen to sit inside Forest Hills' boundaries, funded and run independently of anything on the municipal side.
What the city itself maintains looks smaller and more modest by comparison. Bison Meadow is a public park of a little over two acres on Hillsboro Pike, planted with native grasses and wildflowers and marked by a set of topiary bison that give the park its name. The site sits along a terminal branch of the Old Natchez Trace, the same route bison and elk once used to reach a salt lick on the Cumberland River before European settlement. It's a quiet, low-maintenance park that the city owns and keeps up on its own, without needing the kind of budget a golf course or swim club requires.
That contrast is the clearest way to see how Forest Hills actually spends what money it has. The big recreational draws in the city are privately funded and privately run. The civic dollars, the grant money, the sales tax share, go toward smaller and more functional things: a stormwater system, a stretch of new trees along a state highway, a set of entrance columns, a future half mile of sidewalk. It's not a flashy way to build a city, but it's a consistent one, and it's the reason this particular summer looks like several small projects finishing at once rather than one big ribbon-cutting.
Residents who've lived here through a few of these funding cycles already know the pattern. The ones newer to the city are getting a live example of it this year: watch for a grant announcement, expect construction to follow on its own schedule, and don't expect a tax bill to explain any of it.
If you're the kind of person who likes understanding how a small city like this actually runs, that curiosity tends to carry over well when it's time to think about property here too. Greg Sanford has spent years working inside Williamson County's civic processes as well as its real estate market, and brings that same level of detail to conversations about land, homes, and investment property across Middle Tennessee. Request a private consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.
