Live in Sherwood Forest

The streets give the date and the joke away: Castle, Devonshire, Foxboro, Donnybrook and Locksley, named for the Robin Hood story, lined with brick and concrete-block ranch houses. The land was platted as early as 1910 but built out mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, and in 1956 its developers and Osceola Forest's gave the county the land for a park, with Sherwood Forest Elementary built beside it the same year. Through the 1960s and 1970s, as urban renewal cleared Sugar Hill, Hansontown and LaVilla and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 took effect, Black families moved in and white residents left. Ennis Davis of The Jaxson calls it a mid-century Black community that survives.

This guide's line is one an association drew, not the City. It takes the area the Sherwood Forest Community Network filed with the City, about 871 acres between Sibbald Road, Soutel Drive, Gibson Avenue and the Trout River; a second group, Sherwood Forest Paradise Park, filed nearly the same ground. The City publishes no neighborhood map of its own. It does have a plan: 4,570 of the residents, 88%, are inside the Sherwood Forest-Lincoln Villas neighborhood action plan the Council adopted in 2008, which makes the Planning Department read development applications here against the plan. It is not a historic district, and no City landmark is inside.

Owners stayed. The census counted 5,166 residents in 2020 against 5,017 on about the same ground in 2010. Owners lived in 60% of the 2,012 occupied homes, and 494 of those owners had no mortgage; only 134 of the 2,146 homes, 6%, stood vacant. Every resident is in ZIP code 32208, where Zillow's typical value was $149,376 in August 2026, down 1.8% on the year, but that ZIP held 33,286 people in 2020 and reaches well beyond these streets. No sale price for Sherwood Forest alone was found.

A paid-off house hides the real bill. Every address pays the same four levies as the rest of the consolidated city, 17.7412 mills for 2025. A homesteaded buyer at the ZIP figure owes about $1,922 a year on the base exemption amounts; a landlord owes about $2,650. The City's solid waste and stormwater fees, about $414 a year for a house in 2026, come on the same bill and no exemption reduces them. Save Our Homes caps a long-held homestead's assessed value at 3% a year and resets on a sale, so the seller's bill understates yours. The sliver of the Kings-Soutel redevelopment area at the edge adds no rate. The arithmetic is on the Jacksonville page.

The river sits at the back fence, not under the houses. FEMA puts 9.2% of the filed area in its 1% annual chance zone, along the Trout and its creeks, but no resident lives on a block inside it; FEMA's preliminary 2025 map changes that by a tenth of a point. JaxReady puts the reference point in evacuation zone E and the 264 residents nearest the river in zone A, the first called out. In September 2017 Irma pushed the Ribault River into homes on Ken Knight Drive, about 2 km south. A homeowners policy does not cover rising water.