Green Hills, Tennessee

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This locality is not to be confused with the census-designated place of Green Hill, Tennessee in Wilson County.

Green Hills is an area in Nashville, Tennessee. Although there were some preliminary plans toward making it an incorporated town in the late 1950s and early 1960s, these plans were never completed.

Green Hills is located south of downtown Nashville on Hillsboro Road (U.S. Highway 431). It is relatively affluent and home to the high-end Green Hills Mall, which began as a "strip center" (one of the first two sizable such developments in Nashville) in the early 1950s. Early important businesses located nearby included the Green Hills Market, one of Nashville's first true supermarkets, and the Green Hills Theater, a cinema. (Both of these businesses are now defunct.) Hillsboro High School, located directly across the highway from the Mall, actually predates much of the neighborhood, which began on a small scale in the 1930s but was not highly populated until after World War II. Another public educational institution is Julia Green Elementary School, a primary school. A major private educational institution is Lipscomb University and its associated elementary and high schools. Another is Harpeth Hall School, a prestigious girls' high school.

Green Hills is in many ways a typical development of its era. It is designed for automobile, not pedestrian, traffic and originally consisted primarily of brick-veneer "ranch" style detached houses on large lots (in part due to the presence of subsurface septic sewage disposal systems; sewers were not added until well after the original development). In more recent years there has been considerable "infill" as many of the larger lots and other remaining open spaces have been redivided to become the sites of higher-density developments.

As Green Hills is neither an incorporated town nor a census-designated place, exact boundaries are disputable and hence an exact population impossible to calculate. However, the most common definition of Green Hills is an area coextensive with the United States Postal Service's ZIP code 37215, designated "Green Hills Station". It is, though, part of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County. Therefore, mail sent to residents of, and businesses in, Green Hills have "Nashville, TN" in the address, not "Green Hills, TN."

Green Hills is not be confused with Green Hill, Tennessee, an unincorporated area located slightly to the east of Nashville along U.S. Highway 70 in Wilson County, some 20 miles away.