Village Green opened its Publix in Nolensville on November 19, 2025, with roughly 200 people lined up before 7 a.m. Elsewhere along Nolensville Road, a second grocery-anchored project anchored by a Kroger Marketplace is moving forward next to the town's new Nolensville Town Square, with its first phase expected to open in 2027. Between those two projects sits a fact that doesn't show up on either one's signage: for about three years, Nolensville has effectively stopped approving new development, because two sewer lines that serve the town are running out of room.
That is the part of the Nolensville growth story that gets skipped in most conversations about the town. Everyone can see the rooftops going up. Fewer people are tracking the pipe underneath them, and that pipe is the reason some projects are moving at full speed while others are stuck waiting on an engineering fix that hasn't been built yet.
The Threshold Nobody Voted On
Metro Water Services operates the two sewer lines that serve most of Nolensville, and both have reached roughly 80 percent of their rated capacity, the point at which state environmental regulators stop letting a utility issue new capacity permits until it has a documented plan to expand. Nolensville Town Manager Victor Lay laid this out plainly at the town's third annual address in April 2025, telling residents that Metro had told the town it was "essentially not allowing any future development approvals" until an agreement with the state moves the capacity ceiling higher.
Lay's timeline for the fix was blunt:
"They think they can get that resolved in about three years. That's kind of some negative news because developers want to come here and try to develop properties, and that's going to constrain them."
That single number, 80 percent, is doing more to shape Nolensville's next few years of housing supply than the town's zoning map, its planning commission agenda, or anything showing up in a listing description. It is a plumbing constraint, not a demand signal. Nolensville hasn't cooled off. It has hit a ceiling on how much wastewater the existing infrastructure can carry while the utility builds a parallel line to raise that ceiling.
Who Already Has a Tap
A moratorium framed around future approvals sounds absolute, but it isn't retroactive. Projects that locked in their sewer capacity before the 80 percent line was crossed are still moving. That creates a visible, and fairly specific, list of what's grandfathered in:
- Fairington (formerly named Storyvale), Southern Land Company's 372-acre, 700-plus-home master-planned community at the corner of McFarlin and Fly roads. As of the town's own August newsletter, sewer lines to serve the community were still being installed, with blasting work continuing several times a week.
- Village Green, the Publix-anchored center developed by Watkins Real Estate Group, already open with tenants including Jersey Mike's and Chipotle alongside the grocery store.
- The Kroger Marketplace project, a 36-acre mixed-use development anchored by a roughly 78,000-square-foot Kroger, planned next to Nolensville Town Square with its first phase targeted for a 2027 opening.
- Nolensville Town Square, a mixed-use project from Land Innovations and Rochford Realty and Construction bringing more than 400 residential townhomes and condominiums along with retail and office space.
Lay has said the town has roughly 2,200 already-approved home constructions on the books that will proceed over the next decade regardless of the moratorium. That is the piece worth sitting with. Nolensville's construction cranes right now are mostly working through a backlog that was permitted before the capacity ceiling hit, not a fresh wave that cleared the current bottleneck.
What Three Years Actually Means If You're Shopping Subdivisions
For a buyer comparing Nolensville to Franklin, Brentwood, or Spring Hill right now, the practical question isn't whether Nolensville is still building. It obviously is. The question is which subdivisions you're seeing represent the last of what got approved before the pause, and which ones would need the sewer expansion to finish before they could even start.
That distinction matters for how you read a builder's timeline. A community with an active sewer tap and grading already underway, like Fairington, is on a real construction schedule. A parcel that hasn't broken ground and doesn't have a documented sewer agreement is, functionally, waiting behind the same three-year clock the town itself is waiting behind. If a listing or a builder's marketing material doesn't specify when sewer capacity was secured, that's a legitimate question to ask before treating a projected delivery date as reliable.
It also reframes what "more inventory is coming" means in Nolensville over the next couple of years. The visible pipeline of approved, in-progress subdivisions is close to the whole picture until Metro completes its capacity expansion. That's a different supply story than a market where new subdivisions get approved on a rolling basis.
The Tax Rate Is Carrying Weight It Wasn't Built For
The moratorium also shows up in the town's budget, and the mechanism there is worth understanding because it explains a second, related pressure on the market. Building permit fees have historically brought in upwards of a million dollars a year for Nolensville, money collected when a home is certified for occupancy. With new approvals paused, that revenue is set to shrink once the currently approved projects finish building out, and town budget commentary published in May 2026 noted it will likely take a couple of years after the moratorium lifts before permit fee revenue meaningfully returns.
The board's response was a property tax increase of 15 cents per $100 of assessed value, bringing the rate to 34 cents, still one of the lower rates in the state but a real jump from where it sat before. That increase isn't only a budget footnote. It's the town paying, in the near term, for the gap between how fast Nolensville grew and how fast its sewer infrastructure was built to keep up.
Why the Pipe Fell Behind in the First Place
None of this happened because a single bad decision was made at some council meeting. Nolensville incorporated in 1996 with about 1,800 residents. By 2025, the population had passed 17,000. That is not linear growth. It's a decade and a half of subdivision after subdivision plugging into a sewer system that was sized for a much smaller town, and the capacity math finally caught up with the pace.
That context matters because it tells you this isn't a one-time hiccup that a single new line will fully resolve. Nolensville's growth trajectory means the town will likely be managing infrastructure capacity against development demand on an ongoing basis, even after this particular expansion is finished.
What This Means If You're Actually Looking at a Lot
If you're comparing Nolensville new-construction communities right now, whether you're a family relocating for the schools or a builder client evaluating where to put a spec home, the sewer story is the kind of detail that separates a casual search from a well-informed one. It's also the kind of detail that surfaces in town commission minutes and utility correspondence long before it shows up in a listing description.
That's the value of working with someone who tracks these mechanics directly rather than relying on what a builder's sales office volunteers. At Susan Gregory Group, decades of builder-side relationships across Williamson County mean these questions, sewer tap status, permit history, which phase of a master-planned community is actually funded and moving, get asked before a client falls in love with a floor plan that's further from delivery than it appears.
A Few Questions Worth Asking Directly
Does the moratorium affect homes that are already built or under active construction? No. The pause applies to new development approvals. Homes in communities like Fairington, Village Green, or the Kroger-anchored project that already secured sewer capacity are proceeding on their existing timelines.
Could this push prices up in the communities that are exempt? It's reasonable to expect that a narrower near-term supply of new-construction options could support pricing in the communities already under construction, since they represent most of what's actually deliverable in the next few years. That's an inference from the supply picture, not a guarantee, and it's worth discussing against the specific community and price point you're considering.
How would I actually confirm a project's sewer status before making a decision? The town's commercial and residential project records, along with commission meeting minutes, document when sewer agreements were finalized. It's a detail worth confirming directly rather than assuming from a builder's sales materials, and it's exactly the kind of due diligence a Nolensville-focused agent should be doing on a client's behalf before an offer goes in.
If you're weighing Nolensville against other Williamson County communities, or trying to figure out which subdivision timeline you can actually count on, request a consultation with Susan Gregory Group. We track this market closely enough to tell you not just what's for sale, but what's actually positioned to get built.
