If you have walked a dog along Sunset Street or Glencrest Drive any time in the past few years, you have seen the fence line where University Heights stops and an unruly stretch of trees takes over. Officially, that patch is Swisher Woods, 11.8 acres of wooded ravine the city bought in 2018 and has managed quietly ever since. Last year, a real trail plan finally showed up for it. But run the acreage and something doesn't line up: the plan the city's consultants unveiled covers roughly 36 acres, about three times what University Heights actually owns.
That gap is the real story here. It isn't hidden. It sits in council minutes and a design firm's own report to the city. But it changes what "trail plan" means for anyone checking the calendar for a ribbon cutting, because two-thirds of the mapped network sits on land the city has never purchased.
What $555,000 Actually Bought
The land itself has a specific origin. The Ruth V. Swisher Revocable Trust put the tract up for auction on June 14, 2018, with a poster advertising it as "an unprecedented land development opportunity in the popular University Heights area." Four other parties bid on it. University Heights won with an offer of $480,000, with the bid entered under then-Mayor Louise From.
Buying the land was one vote. Paying for it was another. Five days after the auction, the City Council approved a $555,000 general obligation bond, a 10-year term carrying a 50-cent levy, to cover the acquisition and the costs that came with it, including the soil and forestry reports the city needed before it could call the land a park. According to the city's own description, Swisher Woods is the largest undeveloped parcel remaining inside University Heights, and it sits between the residential streets north of Melrose Avenue and property owned by the University of Iowa.
Seven Quiet Years
For most of the time the city has owned this land, the only formal planning document attached to it was a Forest Management Plan, dated August 2018 and updated in January 2024. That is a document about tree health and invasive species, not about where a person would walk. If you assumed the 2018 purchase came with a build-out timeline, it did not. The city spent seven years managing a forest before it commissioned anyone to design a trail through it.
Two Meetings, One Summer
That changed in the summer of 2025. On June 10, Think Iowa City and the landscape architecture firm Bolton & Menk presented a multi-use trail master plan to the City Council. Josh Schomburger, the Think Iowa City project lead, was careful about what the document actually was. Presenting it to the council, he called it
"really just, a vision and a plan, a proposed document."
Landscape architect Ryan Anderson and trail consultant Ken Barker of Backyard Trails walked the council through two preliminary concepts and a preferred option that blends elements of both. On August 5, the city held a public open house at City Hall with exhibits prepared by Bolton & Menk so residents could react to the same materials before anything moved further.
The Acreage Nobody Mentions
Here is where the plan gets interesting for anyone trying to guess when they will actually use this thing. The preferred concept calls for about two miles of single-track trail and roughly a quarter mile of wider, ADA-accessible double-track, all designed to connect approximately 36 contiguous acres of forested land near the University of Iowa. The city owns 11.8 of those acres. The rest belongs to someone else.
That is not a drafting error. It reflects where the trees actually are. Swisher Woods borders University of Iowa land, and the most useful version of a trail loop threads through both properties rather than stopping at a fence. The consultants were direct about the consequence: any trail on university-owned ground needs a formal agreement before a single boardwalk gets built. Schomburger told the council he had already discussed the plan with university officials, who signaled openness to a use or lease arrangement, but he stressed that nothing is finalized. The one piece that does not require that negotiation is the accessible double-track segment, since it sits entirely on land University Heights already owns and could, in theory, move forward without waiting on anyone else's signature.
A Trail Designed to Stay Small
The dollar figures reinforce the same point. Bolton & Menk's ballpark construction estimates for the earlier concepts ranged from $690,100 to $736,300. Adding a trailhead and a detention basin for the preferred concept pushed that number up by roughly $100,000, putting the likely cost somewhere between $790,000 and $836,000, a figure that already includes a 20 percent contingency built from past bids and local trail-builder experience. Schomburger estimated the city could seek about 80 percent of that from outside grants, which means University Heights is not planning to fund this out of pocket so much as apply for it.
The design choices tell you what kind of trail this is meant to be. There is no permanent lighting in the plan, a decision the consultants described as intentional: this is built as a low-impact, daytime recreational system, not a regional destination or a commuter route. Anderson described the trail layout as "socially sustainable," meaning it is meant to keep slower walkers and faster cyclists from colliding with each other, with several creek crossings using engineered armoring or boardwalks specifically to reduce erosion.
Residents who showed up to comment pushed the plan in the same modest direction. People asked about invasive species removal, benches, and signage, and pressed the consultants to avoid lighting that would disturb bird habitat in the ravine. One resident, David Giese, asked whether a pond had been considered. The consultants said it had not been part of the plan to date. Nobody at that meeting was asking for a destination park. They were asking for a well-marked path through the woods they already look at every day.
What You Can Actually Do Right Now
There is no built trail in Swisher Woods today. The tract remains accessible informally from Sunset Street and Glencrest Drive, the same way it has been since 2018, which is to say you can walk to the edge of it but there is no constructed loop waiting for you. Whether that changes soon depends on two things happening on separate tracks: the city landing a meaningful share of that 80 percent grant target, and a formal land-use agreement getting worked out with the University of Iowa for the two-thirds of the plan that sits on university ground. The consultants left the master plan document with the council for further review, along with an offer to help pursue grants and refine the design if University Heights chooses to move forward.
If you want to watch this develop in real time rather than wait for a mailer, the city's own Swisher Woods page posts the underlying reports, and council agendas get published ahead of each meeting. For a city that covers a quarter of a square mile, this is about as close as local government gets to your backyard.
For a place this small, land decisions carry more weight than they would somewhere with more room to spread out. Understanding how University Heights actually moves on projects like this, in careful phases, funded through bonds and grants rather than one big check, is part of understanding what it means to own property here. Adam Pretorius tracks these shifts as part of the neighborhood-level work behind every listing strategy in Johnson County. If you're weighing a move into or out of University Heights, request your home valuation and start that conversation with someone who already knows what's happening behind the fence line.
