In February, a Boy Scout troop sat through a Terrell Hills City Council meeting to earn a citizenship badge. The topic on the agenda that night was ground cover. Specifically, whether the grass under the live oaks on Geneseo Esplanade had thinned out enough to justify tearing it up and starting over, and who should pay for it.
Two months later, the same council approved $2.4 million for a Broadway Street beautification project without a single dissenting vote. Wider sidewalks, new heritage oak plantings, custom lighting the length of the corridor. Done. No troop needed to sit through that one for a badge, because there was nothing to debate.
If you live here, that gap is worth understanding, because it says something true about how this small city actually works that no realtor listing or lifestyle roundup will tell you: Terrell Hills will move fast and unanimously on projects that read as belonging to everyone, and it will stall for months on projects that read as belonging to a few.
The Easy Vote
The Broadway project cleared council on April 18, 2026. The scope is public infrastructure in the clearest sense: pedestrian walkways, heritage oak trees, and lighting fixtures along a stretch of Broadway that every resident drives, walks, or bikes at some point, whether they're headed to Cappy's for dinner or just cutting through to Alamo Heights. It's the kind of project where the beneficiary is diffuse enough that nobody in the room has to ask "why should my taxes fix someone else's block."
That's the pattern worth naming. Broadway belongs to the whole city because everybody uses it. The vote reflected that.
The Grass That Won't Grow
Geneseo Esplanade is a different animal. At the February 9 council meeting, Mayor John B. Low explained the actual problem: the oak canopy over the esplanade has grown so dense over the years that grass and ground cover underneath it can no longer get enough light to survive. The city had already gone through preliminary plans, then new plans, then new budgets, trying to find a fix that would hold.
The bids on the table ranged from $105,000 to $230,000 depending on scope, according to figures shared at that meeting by resident Dick Tips, who said the higher number included street work along with the esplanade itself. Compare that range to Broadway's $2.4 million and the esplanade fix looks almost trivial in scale. But it hasn't moved.
Part of the holdup showed up directly in the meeting discussion: some residents pushed back on whether the esplanade project would functionally raise property values for the handful of homes that front it, while others argued the street-level improvements benefit the whole community the same way Broadway does. Frank Burney told the council he and a neighbor had already raised some private money toward the project and would help however they could. Mayor Low, for his part, said the next step was another round of community feedback before deciding whether to move forward at all.
No vote happened that night. The session closed on that note.
Why the Small Number Is the Harder Vote
This is the part that doesn't show up if you only skim city news headlines. A $2.4 million line item sailed through because everyone in Terrell Hills touches Broadway. A project one-tenth the size stalled because the perceived beneficiary is a specific street of specific homes, and specific homes raise the question of who's actually paying for whose lawn.
If you live on or near Geneseo, this matters directly. If you don't, it's still a useful lens for reading how this city allocates money generally: scale isn't what determines speed here. Visibility of benefit is. A resident trying to predict whether the next infrastructure ask in their own part of town will move quickly should ask the same question the council quietly asked itself in February: does this read as everyone's project, or one street's?
What Else Is True About Broadway Right Now
The corridor getting the $2.4 million isn't an abstraction. It's the same stretch that's carried Terrell Hills' dining identity for decades. Cappy's Restaurant has been serving the neighborhood since 1977, and it's still the place most residents point to first when asked where to eat close to home. A few doors down the mix gets more varied:
- BIRD Bakery, for the daily case of fresh cupcakes and cookies
- Paloma Blanca and Paladar Fusion, both offering their own takes on Mexican cooking
- Bistr09, a French-leaning bistro with dishes like steak frites and duck confit
None of that changes because of a streetscape vote. But the new plantings and lighting will change what it feels like to walk between those spots after dark, which is worth knowing if you've been driving three blocks for what used to be a five-minute walk.
The Irony in the Garden Tour
Every spring, the Terrell Hills Green Spaces Fund runs a self-guided tour of seven private gardens and architecturally notable homes around the city. It's a genuinely old tradition in spirit. The Alamo Heights-Terrell Hills Garden Club traces its roots back to 1932 and has been a member of the Garden Club of America since 1978, and the tour is one of the ways it raises money for shared greenery projects around the city.
Here's the part that ties back to the esplanade question directly. The same civic instinct that gets residents to buy tickets to walk through seven private backyards in spring is, in practice, harder to mobilize around a stretch of public grass on Geneseo. Private gardens get toured and funded. A public esplanade with a well-documented problem sits in budget limbo for months. It's not that residents don't care about green space. It's that a shared median asks a different question than a private garden does, and that question apparently takes longer to answer.
The Rest of the Year, for Context
None of this happens in isolation. Terrell Hills runs on a fairly consistent civic calendar, and this year followed the pattern:
In early April, more than 200 residents turned out for the annual spring cleanup, collecting over two tons of debris and planting new native ground cover across the city's parks, including Crestwood Park. Later that same month, the police department hosted a bike and e-bike safety event at the station on New Braunfels Avenue, with a bicycle rodeo for younger kids and a guided ride for anyone ten and up. Art on Broadway brought galleries, studios, and artisan vendors out for an afternoon of curated work and live music. And the Fourth of July Parade ran its usual route down Ivy Lane, with Eldon and Geneseo streets closed off for the block party that followed.
If you missed any of it, the rhythm repeats close to the same shape every year, which makes it easy to plan around next time.
What This Means If You're Watching Your Own Street
The lesson from this year isn't really about Broadway or Geneseo specifically. It's that the size of a dollar figure tells you almost nothing about how fast a project moves in a city this size. What predicts speed is whether the benefit reads as belonging to the whole community or to a handful of houses on one block. Broadway cleared in a single vote because it belongs to everyone. The esplanade is still waiting because it doesn't, at least not in the eyes of everyone weighing in.
If there's a project on your own street someday, that's the question worth asking before you assume city dollars will follow: who, besides you, actually benefits from this.
If you're new to Terrell Hills or thinking about what life here actually looks like day to day, beyond the pace of city council votes, Nathan Dumas has spent years working in and around this neighborhood and is always glad to talk through what's changing and why. Let's Connect.
