Live in Forest Hills

Forest Hills, on this page, is the area the City of Durham's own Neighborhoods layer draws south of West Lakewood Avenue, between Kent Street and South Roxboro Street: 337 acres around University Drive and Forest Hills Boulevard. The City keeps that layer as a reference for its work orders, with no date, author or definition of a neighborhood, and the line is clipped to the current City limits. It is not an association's territory, and this guide claims nothing about where residents think Forest Hills ends. The 2020 census counted 1,057 residents in 445 housing units inside it, 2.38 people a unit, and the City park at its center takes up a good share of the ground.

The golf course came first, and the park came out of a bankruptcy. The New Hope Realty Company had Earle Sumner Draper draw a subdivision here in 1917; the 1917 newspaper account the National Register nomination quotes describes separate sections for white and Black buyers. The company could not pay for it and failed. Under James O. Cobb and J. Fuller Glass the plan was trimmed, and from 1923 the streets were cut along the hills and creek bottoms either side of the old New Hope Valley Road, renamed University Drive, around a nine-hole course. The nomination calls it Durham's first automobile suburb. The course failed too: John Sprunt Hill bought it at auction in 1929 and gave it to the City in 1938, and it has been a public park since. The Beverly Drive loop was added about 1951.

A historic district with no local review. On the City-County layers, 738 of the residents live inside the Forest Hills Historic District, listed on the National Register in 2005, which covers three-quarters of the guide. A Register listing restricts nothing a private owner does with private money. No local historic district and no Neighborhood Protection Overlay touches the line, so the Historic Preservation Commission's certificate does not apply here, and the Unified Development Ordinance's other rules were not read for this guide.

The creek is the constraint. On the City's flood insurance layer, 14.4% of the guide's ground is in the special flood hazard area, half of it floodway, and 95 residents lived on blocks whose center is in the floodway in 2020. OpenStreetMap does not name the stream; the nomination calls the creek under the East Forest Hills Boulevard bridge Third Fork Creek, and no flood history for it was read. FEMA puts the reference point in zone X. A block is not a house: look the address up on FEMA's map, and know that any land disturbance in a mapped floodplain needs a City floodplain permit. Durham's Community Rating System class is 7, worth 15% off flood insurance inside the hazard area.

The bill is the plain city rate. County and City charge 101.63 cents per $100 for fiscal 2027, on values set at market on 1 January 2025; the next reappraisal is 2029. North Carolina has no homestead exemption for an ordinary buyer, and stormwater comes on the City utility bill. No sale price is published for the neighborhood; Zillow's typical value for the whole 27707 ZIP, condominiums included, was $406,475 in August 2026, down 3.1%. North Carolina Central University is about 0.9 km east, and the census tract counts 10.2% of its residents in college, with wide margins.