Living in Cedar Knolls

Cedar Knolls runs along Cedar Knolls Drive on Cedar City's southwest side, in the 1000 to 1200 South area west of Main Street. It sits southwest of the Canyon View and Cedar South East neighborhoods, close to the Exit 57 interchange. The places you drive to every day, like the Providence Center big-box shopping, the freeway on-ramp, and Cedar Middle School, are a short hop, not a cross-town trip.

It feels like an established neighborhood, not a raw new one. The streets curve with the terrain instead of running a hard grid, the landscaping has matured, and the walk feels settled. I tell every buyer this first: Cedar Knolls is not one kind of home. It has single-family homes and a run of townhomes on Cedar Knolls Drive. One large detached house can pull the community average up and make the townhomes look like a different market, and in truth they are one.

That makes careful comparing the key here. Before I settle on a price, I look at the kind of home, square footage, and how the garage works. I also look at parking, how exterior upkeep is handled, age, and whether the nearby sales really match the home in front of you. Get those right and the value picture gets a lot clearer.

Cedar Knolls is genuinely mixed, and that is the part most online searches get wrong. Under one name you have established detached homes on settled streets. You also have a run of townhomes on Cedar Knolls Drive, where recent listings have started in the high $300,000s. If you lump them together, the numbers mislead you. A row of attached units can drag an average far from what the finished detached homes actually sell for, and the reverse is just as true.

That is why I look at them in two groups. I compare detached homes with similar detached homes on age, square footage, garage setup, and condition. I compare townhomes with attached homes of the same kind, including how the exterior upkeep is handled. Few homes are usually for sale here at one time. You might see only a handful, or a single large one that makes the whole area look pricier than it is.

Because so few homes are for sale, the sales you compare matter a lot. With a small mixed group of homes, the right three recent sales of similar homes tell you more than any neighborhood average ever will. I would rather widen the search by kind of home than reach for whatever sold nearest.

Cedar Knolls is part of the Iron County School District. On the southwest side, the neighborhood generally goes on to Cedar Middle School (grades 6-8) at 2215 W Royal Hunte Drive and Cedar High School (grades 9-12). Both are in the south and central part of the district, not the northern Canyon View area. For elementary, this side of town falls in the South Elementary (grades K-5) area.

Assignments are in flux right now. The district is changing which schools serve which streets. Elementary boundaries change for the 2026-27 year as the new East Elementary building opens, and middle and high school boundaries change for 2027-28. Check the current assignment for any home you are serious about directly with the district, by address, rather than guessing from a map. For independent school information, GreatSchools and Niche both publish data you can weigh for yourself. Southern Utah University is a short drive across town.

The most useful thing about Cedar Knolls is where it sits. It is tucked in behind Exit 57, the interchange that most people use as their front door to town. Exit 57, the South Cedar interchange, was rebuilt as a diverging diamond in 2014-15. The west side of it has the city's densest run of shops along Providence Center Drive, Royal Hunte Drive, and Cross Hollow Road.

For daily life, that convenience is the big draw. The big-box shopping, the credit union, the city recreation offices on Royal Hunte, and the freeway are all within a few minutes. The neighborhood itself is not on a busy through street. You get the close-by errands of a shopping area while living on a quiet, curving residential street.

The catch is worth naming honestly. Being close to a freeway and a retail cluster means some traffic and some background noise, and it varies a lot from street to street inside the neighborhood. That is why I walk the specific block at different times of day before I call any one home the right buy up here.