Brentwood is the first city south of the Davidson County line on I-65 and Franklin Road, incorporated in 1969 and home to about 46,000 people. One decision made at the start explains almost everything about it: residential zoning in most of the city calls for one-acre lots, and there are no apartment complexes inside the city limits. The result is a city of large brick homes on big lawns along quiet, curving streets — subdivisions built from the 1970s to today, from Brenthaven and Raintree Forest to the gated golf-course streets of the Governors Club and the new estate homes still going up on the last open land.
What Brentwood does not have is a downtown. Maryland Farms, a former horse farm turned office park at the center of the city, holds the corporate headquarters and the YMCA; the shopping centers along Franklin Road and Old Hickory Boulevard do the errands; Franklin’s Main Street, ten minutes south, is where Brentwood goes for a Main Street. The outdoor life is in the parks — Crockett Park and its summer concerts, Marcella Vivrette Smith Park around the Ravenswood mansion, Deerwood Arboretum — and a greenway system that connects many of the subdivisions. Radnor Lake, just over the county line, is the nearest wild place.
The commute to downtown Nashville is 25 to 40 minutes at peak by I-65 or Franklin Road, and 10 to 20 minutes to the Cool Springs offices and the Williamson County hospitals in the other direction. The property tax rate is the lowest of the three places people compare: $1.49 per $100 of assessed value in 2025 (county $1.30 plus city $0.19), which on a $650,000 home is about $2,421 a year, roughly $2,150 less than the same home in most of Nashville. The catch is that in Brentwood, $650,000 mostly buys a townhome or a condo near Maryland Farms; the houses on the acre lots start well above it.