Forestbrook Doesn't Need Visitors to Grow. It Just Needed a Coffee Shop.

Drive Forestbrook Road past the intersection with Belle Terre Boulevard on a Tuesday morning and you'll notice the same thing longtime residents have been noticing for a year now: the empty bays in Forestbrook Commons are filling in. Not with another gas station. Not with a vacation rental office. With the kind of small, independent storefronts that only show up once a neighborhood has enough rooftops to support them without a single tourist walking through the door.

That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Most of the restaurant news coming out of the Grand Strand this year has been built for visitors first. A 40,000-square-foot distillery and brewery from Ole Smoky and Yee-Haw opened at Broadway at the Beach in May, complete with a screen big enough to anchor a live music venue. Guy Fieri's Downtown Flavortown took over a former department store space at Myrtle Beach Mall in June. Those are destination bets, aimed at the millions of people who come to this coast for a week and leave.

Forestbrook is doing something different, and it's worth understanding why.

The Coffee Shop That Chose Forestbrook on Purpose

In November 2025, Rebecca Dechir took over Milk & Honey Coffee Café, a small shop that had built a loyal following on Highway 17 Business in Surfside Beach on the strength of its signature drinks and an unhurried morning pace. Rather than open a second location somewhere with obvious foot traffic, she expanded north into Forestbrook, a corridor that had seen years of residential growth but had no independent coffee option of its own.

That's not an incidental detail. It's the whole thesis of this piece in miniature. Dechir has described building the Forestbrook shop around the neighborhood rather than around foot traffic, the kind of place where she recognizes regulars by name and knows their order before they reach the counter. She's already thinking about a third location, one built from the ground up as a dedicated gluten-free facility, a response she's tied directly to the number of people in the area managing celiac disease.

You don't make that kind of bet on a corridor unless you've concluded the people already living there are enough to sustain you. Forestbrook didn't get a coffee shop because Myrtle Beach needed another coffee shop. It got one because a business owner ran the numbers on an established, growing residential population and decided they were the customer base, not a bonus.

Forestbrook Commons and the Fight Over What Comes Next

The bigger structural story is unfolding a few hundred yards away at Forestbrook Commons Shopping Center on Belle Terre Boulevard, where several new businesses have been announced as the center continues to lease up. The most visible is Dank Burrito, a fast-growing regional chain with locations across North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida, confirmed for a spot in the center. As of this writing the chain still lists the Forestbrook location as opening soon without a firm date, which tells you the leasing and buildout process is real but not finished.

What makes this development worth watching isn't the burrito chain itself. It's what residents said about it when a local news crew showed up to ask.

"I remember when 544 was just a two-lane road, so I've seen a lot of changes. I'm just hoping that it doesn't grow too much where I feel like we're getting pushed out."

That's David McLean, describing the pace of change along the corridor even as he says he's largely in favor of it, hoping for better food options. Bob Higginbottom, who has lived in Forestbrook for years, took the more skeptical side, telling the same reporter that the growth had reached a saturation point and that he worries about the area becoming unlivable as the trees and small forest patches around it keep disappearing.

Both of those reactions are correct at the same time, which is the honest version of what's happening. Forestbrook is absorbing genuine commercial density on Belle Terre Boulevard, and it's doing it because there are now enough people living along that corridor, in subdivisions like Forestbrook Estates and the newer construction pushing toward Carolina Forest, to make a shopping center pencil out. That's a different kind of growth than a beachfront strip adding another souvenir shop. It's a neighborhood earning its own infrastructure.

What This Actually Changes for Someone Already Living There

If you already live in Forestbrook, the practical shift is this: fewer reasons to drive toward Myrtle Beach proper or out to Carolina Forest for something as basic as a decent cup of coffee or a quick dinner. The neighborhood has had Forestbrook Grocery on Forestbrook Road for a while, an international grocery store that's become its own quiet fixture. Add Milk & Honey and, once it opens, Dank Burrito, and you get the outline of a corridor that can handle an ordinary Tuesday without sending residents somewhere else.

That's a small thing until you notice how rarely it happens on this stretch of the county. A lot of Horry County's residential growth over the past decade has outpaced its commercial growth, leaving people in newer subdivisions driving several miles for anything beyond a chain pharmacy. Forestbrook closing that gap, even partially, is the kind of change that shows up in daily routines before it shows up in any market report.

It's also worth being honest about the tension Higginbottom raised. A shopping center filling in means more traffic on Belle Terre Boulevard and Forestbrook Road, at least in the near term. Whether that settles into something manageable or becomes a genuine headache probably depends on how the county handles road capacity along that corridor as the leasing continues, which is a fair thing for residents to keep watching rather than assume away.

The Difference Between Growing for Visitors and Growing for Yourself

Step back and the pattern is clear. The Grand Strand's biggest restaurant openings this year, the moonshine hall, the celebrity chef compound, the kosher counter on Kings Highway, are built to capture people who are already coming to the coast for other reasons. Forestbrook's version of growth is smaller, slower, and pointed inward. A coffee shop that knows your name. A burrito counter filling a gap in a shopping center that residents have watched go from mostly empty to mostly leased. A grocery store that's been quietly doing its job the whole time.

None of that makes headlines the way a 40,000-square-foot brewery does. But it's a more reliable signal of where a neighborhood actually stands. Businesses that need tourists to survive will chase tourists. Businesses that bet on a residential corridor are making a quieter, more specific claim: that enough people live here, permanently, to be worth building for.

Forestbrook just passed that test twice in the same year.

If you're already living in Forestbrook and curious what this kind of growth means for your own property or your next move within the Grand Strand, Lindsay Jones tracks these corridors block by block, not just at the median-price level. Work With Lindsay to get a read on what's actually changing around you.