Stand on Beverly Road in front of Creekside Taphouse on a warm evening and you can hear Haw Creek before you can see it. The water runs close along the back of the property, just past the volleyball court and the playground where kids have splashed around the edges for years. But walk two minutes in any direction and that access disappears. There has never been a public way to follow the creek itself through the valley that carries its name.
That's about to change, and the reason it hasn't happened until now says more about how this neighborhood actually works than any list of new coffee shops could.
A valley that never had the right of way
Haw Creek was settled as farmland in the early 1700s, named for the native black haw shrubs that grew thick along its banks. It grew up around narrow, informal roads built for wagons and neighbors, not sidewalks. The Haw Creek Community Association, which has represented residents since 1984, has said plainly that the lack of public right of way along New Haw Creek Road and Old Haw Creek Road has been the community's central infrastructure problem for decades. There was no legal way to build a sidewalk because there was no strip of land set aside to build one on.
That single fact explains a lot about why a neighborhood named after its creek has never had a public path along it. The water runs through private land almost the entire way through the valley. You can hear it from a bar stool at Creekside. You cannot walk beside it.
The Haw Creek Community Association has now secured full funding for a natural surface greenway that fixes this. It will start on Beverly Road, directly across from Creekside Taphouse and the Haw Creek location of PennyCup Coffee, then wind through woods and an open meadow alongside the creek itself. The association describes it as the first public access the neighborhood has ever had to its own namesake waterway.
What the trail is actually stitching together
The route matters less as a hiking novelty and more as a connector. Right now, the library, the park, the elementary school, and the small commercial strip on Beverly Road all function as separate destinations that happen to sit within a few blocks of each other. Nobody walks between them, because nothing links them.
The greenway is designed to change that by tying together, in one continuous walk:
- The East Asheville Public Library
- Haw Creek Park, a six-acre park at the corner of Beverly and Avon roads with a heritage trail featuring commemorative markers built from residents' own oral histories
- The Beverly Road commercial strip, including Creekside Taphouse and PennyCup Coffee
- The surrounding residential streets
- Haw Creek Elementary School, which already runs a public STEAM nature trail on its own grounds
A Senior Water Resource Engineer named Jake McLean, from Wildlands Engineering, donated his time to draw the greenway plans. Buncombe County's greenway advocacy group Connect Buncombe has noted that the fuller vision extends the trail from Haw Creek Park toward Arco Road, meaning the Beverly Road segment is really the first piece of a longer spine through the valley rather than a standalone loop.
The sidewalk that finally makes it usable
None of this works without a way to actually reach the trailhead on foot, and that piece has been under construction separately for years. The City of Asheville is building roughly one mile of new sidewalk along New Haw Creek Road, running from Beverly Road to Bell Road, complete with accessible ramps and crosswalks. The project traces back to the 2016 bond referendum, when residents flagged pedestrian safety along that stretch as a priority. As of late July 2026, the sidewalk was actively under construction, with crews working on the section between Beverly and Bell.
The community association has been explicit that these two projects are meant to function as one system. Once the sidewalk is finished, the greenway becomes something hundreds of residents in the valley can reach on foot or by bike, rather than a trail that only makes sense if you already live within a block of Beverly Road.
Why "fall 2026, if not sooner" is a believable timeline
The association's own goal for opening the greenway to the public is fall 2026, with a note that it could happen sooner. That kind of soft, self-imposed deadline is worth taking seriously here, because this isn't the first time the Haw Creek Community Association has moved a community project from idea to open gate on its own initiative.
Masters Park is the clearest precedent. When the nine-acre property on Maple Drive came up for sale in 2009, the association organized a fundraising campaign that split the $720,000 purchase price three ways, with local residents, the City of Asheville, and Buncombe County each covering a third. That park now connects Haw Creek to the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, and its hiking trail has documented more than 210 different wildflower species along the way. The same organization that pulled that off in a single fundraising push is the one now saying the greenway will be ready by fall.
None of this is guaranteed to hit on schedule. Construction timelines shift, especially for volunteer-driven civic projects layered on top of a municipal sidewalk build. But the track record here is a community association with a real history of finishing what it starts, not a developer's marketing promise.
What this actually changes for a Tuesday evening
Set the planning language aside for a second. What this means in practice, once both pieces are open, is that a resident can walk out their front door in Happy Valley or off New Haw Creek Road, pick up the new sidewalk, cross to the trailhead on Beverly Road, follow the creek through the woods and meadow, and come out within sight of Creekside Taphouse and PennyCup Coffee. From there it's a short walk to the library or to Haw Creek Park's gazebo and picnic shelter.
That loop doesn't exist today. Right now, getting from a house on the east side of the valley to a beer and a plate of wings at Creekside means driving, or walking along a road with no sidewalk. The greenway and the New Haw Creek Road sidewalk together turn that same trip into something you can do on foot with a dog, in daylight, without crossing a road that wasn't built to be walked.
It also gives the East Asheville Recreation Club, which has served the neighborhood's families since 1968, and Haw Creek Elementary's STEAM nature trail, a natural extension into the rest of the valley instead of sitting as isolated amenities on their own separate lots.
The through line
The interesting part of this story isn't that a small neighborhood is getting a new trail. Plenty of Asheville neighborhoods have added trails in the last few years. What makes this one worth paying attention to if you already live in Haw Creek is that it closes a gap the community has lived with since it was farmland: a valley defined by its water, with no legal way to walk along it. The greenway and the sidewalk are arriving at the same time, built by two different institutions, aimed at the same handful of blocks on Beverly Road, and both tracing back to community pressure that goes back years, not months.
If you're already walking these streets, keep an eye on the Haw Creek Community Association's own greenway page for construction updates, since that's where the fall 2026 target will get confirmed or adjusted as work progresses.
And if watching your own corner of the valley get more connected has you curious what that kind of neighborhood investment does to what your home is actually worth today, that's a conversation worth having sooner rather than later. Elevate Asheville Realty Group offers a free home valuation any time you want a clear, no-pressure read on where things stand.
