Stand on Beverly Road right now, in front of Creekside Taphouse, and you can see almost everything that matters to daily life in Haw Creek without turning your head more than ninety degrees. PennyCup is across the street. The East Asheville Public Library is a few hundred feet up the road. Haw Creek Park is close enough to walk to if the shoulder weren't so narrow that most people don't. For a neighborhood built around these landmarks, it's strange how much of it you still have to drive to.
That's the part of Haw Creek that's about to change, and it's changing for a reason most residents haven't connected yet. Three separate projects, each with its own funding history and its own timeline, are converging on this same short stretch of road within months of each other. Not because someone planned it that way from the start, but because the piece that had been missing for years finally got built, and everything downstream of it started moving at once.
A trail that took eleven years and a hurricane
The Haw Creek Community Association has been trying to build a public greenway through the valley for a long time. The idea traces back to Haw Creek Park's heritage trail, which the association designed with commemorative markers documenting the oral histories of the schools, churches, and families that shaped the area. That trail was always meant to be the first link in something bigger.
The bigger version is now fully funded. Residents raised $11,115 through their own campaign, and the HCCA used that as leverage to secure the rest, including $127,784 from Buncombe County's Open Space Passive Recreation Bond. The county board approved that grant by unanimous vote on November 18, 2025, more than a year after Hurricane Helene had delayed it. A Senior Water Resource Engineer at Wildlands Engineering named Jake McLean donated his time to draw the plans. None of that shows up when you walk past the empty lot next to Creekside, but it's the reason there's now a start date instead of another postponement.
The route itself is unglamorous in the best way. It's a natural surface trail, mostly flat, starting at Beverly Road directly across from Creekside Taphouse and PennyCup, then following the creek through woods and a meadow before reaching the library, the park, and the neighborhood's small commercial cluster. It will be the first public access point to Haw Creek itself in the valley's history. The HCCA's own target is to open it this fall. Fall arrives this week.
The sidewalk that was always the real bottleneck
None of that trail does much good if you can't walk to it safely, which is why the second project matters as much as the first. The New Haw Creek Road sidewalk has been under construction since early 2025 and is expected to finish by the end of this year. It runs along the west side of the road starting near Beverly, then shifts to the east side just past Dogwood Grove, where a new mid-block signalized crosswalk with curb cuts will let people cross without playing chicken with traffic.
This is the connective tissue the HCCA has been waiting on. Their own greenway page says it directly: once the sidewalk is finished, the trail becomes something hundreds of residents in the valley can actually reach on foot or by bike, not just the households lucky enough to live within a block of the trailhead. A greenway without a safe way to walk to it is a nice idea on a map. A greenway with one turns a scattered valley into a place where the park, the library, the coffee shop, and the creek are all part of the same afternoon.
The 26 acres nobody expected to move
The third piece of this is the one that surprised longtime residents most. Two days before this was written, 828 News Now reported that a 26-acre property at 767 New Haw Creek Road, including five homes, a barn, a workshop, and a mix of wooded and open land, had been purchased by a local builder called Alair Asheville, operating under its Red Tree Builders name. The land had been family-owned for generations before it quietly became a gathering place for Asheville's music community, the kind of property people who lived there for years talk about with real affection.
Brandon Bryant, who leads the project, has been careful about how he's framing it so far.
"We know we have something special here, and we only get one chance to do this right. Our goal is not to erase what has been here. It's to understand the history of this property, respect the people who have shaped it and thoughtfully determine what its next chapter can be." —Brandon Bryant, quoted by 828 News Now.
The stated plan is housing first, with the possibility of a wellness-oriented outdoor space down the line. Early ideas floated by Bryant's team include walking connections, restoration of wetland and stream areas on the property, and shared community gardens, though the evaluation work with civil engineers and landscape professionals is still in its early stages. Bryant has also said the team wants to connect with the former residents and artists who called the property home before deciding what comes next.
What matters for the valley is where this sits. New Haw Creek Road is the same corridor getting its sidewalk this year, a short walk from the same Beverly Road intersection where the greenway begins. A property that spent decades as private, half-forgotten land is now part of the same few hundred yards that's becoming the most walkable stretch in Haw Creek's history.
What actually sits within reach of that one crosswalk
It helps to see the cluster laid out plainly, because the geography is the whole point:
- Creekside Taphouse and PennyCup, facing each other across Beverly Road
- The East Asheville Public Library, a short walk up New Haw Creek Road
- Haw Creek Park, including the heritage trail that started this whole idea
- Masters Park, with its own overlook trail and oral-history markers
- The 767 New Haw Creek Road property, now entering its first real transition in decades
None of these are new to the valley. What's new is that by the end of this year, for the first time, a resident could plausibly walk between all of them without getting in a car.
Why this is worth paying attention to now
Haw Creek has always described itself as a place that feels rural inside city limits, a valley of more than 2,500 households ranging from apartments to single-family homes, held together by two schools, several churches, two parks, and a scattering of small businesses. That description has been true for a long time. What hasn't been true is that the pieces were physically connected. You could love the library and love Creekside and still have no way to get from one to the other except by driving.
This fall changes that, not because of one ribbon-cutting, but because three separate timelines, a decade-old trail idea, a two-year sidewalk build, and a two-day-old property sale, all happen to be resolving in the same season on the same short stretch of road. That's not a coincidence you'd notice from any single news item. It only shows up when you put the projects next to each other and look at the map.
If you've lived in Haw Creek a while, this is worth watching over the next few months, not because it changes what the valley is, but because it finally lets you move through it the way it's always felt like you should be able to.
If you're curious about what any of this means for property near that corridor, or just want to talk through what's happening in the valley, Nick Coco Signature Properties is always glad to talk. Let's Connect.
