Fort Worth has welcomed growth, but will its ‘cavalier’ attitude on development change?
Fort Worth’s booming population, oft-mentioned as a sign of success, has strained the city’s infrastructure and forced leaders to weigh the economic benefits of continued development.
Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price, in a recent interview about Tarrant County attracting more residents from out of state, said the city may need a more critical eye when considering new development. Dallas-Fort Worth leads the nation in population growth. Roughly 20,000 new people arrive in Cowtown every year, giving Fort Worth the third-greatest gain of any city behind Phoenix and San Antonio.
“We do need to take a hard look at our growth,” Price said. “I think this council is willing to do that.”
A sizable group of residents from north of Loop 820 were ecstatic earlier this month when the City Council denied a rezoning request that would have allowed a developer to build a larger number of homes on vacant land just west of U.S. 287 that borders narrow Bonds Ranch and Willow Springs roads. Neighbors feared more traffic on already congested streets.
Rusty Fuller, president of the North Fort Worth Alliance, said his neighbors hoped the denial was a sign the council would stop development until roads are improved. Many east-to-west connectors in the far north are old farm to market roads that have not been widened despite a rush of new residents.
“I think it will take a few more cases to know whether we’ve had an effect,” Fuller said. “I do get the sense there’s support for what we want.”
Fuller said his neighbors want the city to pause dense residential development as new roads are built, and to prioritize commercial development so residents in the northern suburbs have closer access to shops and jobs.
The rally against development reminded Councilwoman Gyna Bivens of residents in far east Fort Worth, where longtime property owners blamed developers for increased flooding. With those concerns in mind, she called for more aggressive monitoring of development and an end to new building in 2018.
“I think the city has been rather cavalier in its attitude toward development,” she said. “We need to keep people, not developers, at the heart of it.”
Councilman Dennis Shingleton, who described the challenge of growth as “a pain in the ass” during a recent council meeting, said the city should be careful about new development. While he had said a hiatus to development north of the loop would help the city get a handle on infrastructure needs, such a move could be dangerous to the city’s long term health.
Instead, he said he would remain critical of projects on a case-by-case basis.
“We can be accommodating to developers, but we’re not going to accommodate more apartments on a farm to market road when there’s no turn lane or no sidewalk,” he said. “They’re going to have to find another place to put that.”
It’s not just roads, Shingleton noted. Libraries, fire stations and stormwater drainage are all strained by the city’s growing population. In September, the Star-Telegram reported that more than a third of projects voters approved in 2014 were unfinished. Meanwhile, the city has the funding to fix about 40 of roughly 300 dangerous flash flooding locations.
“Growth is a wonderful thing,” Shingleton said. “But it’s got its challenges.”
BEHIND THE STORY
MOREWhy we did this story
Fort Worth’s pro-growth attitude has made it one of the fastest growing cities in America. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram is exploring the consequences as well as the benefits of adding 20,000 people a year.
For this story, the Star-Telegram sought to measure whether the city would slow development as it tries to catch up with the boom.
Asked for data on how often zoning requests are rejected by the City Council, city employees spent several days following up with emails before saying that the city’s legal department said the information would not be released without a formal records request. The Star-Telegram made the request on Friday. The city did not immediately respond.
Economic development
Cities have a number of options to reduce sprawl while still encouraging development, said Alan Klein, director of the Institute for Urban Studies at UT Arlington. Fort Worth has recently started pushing some.
Encouraging a mix of commercial and residential zoning creates high-density neighborhoods where residents no longer have to drive to work, stores or restaurants. Fort Worth’s revised economic development plan calls for an increase of those neighborhoods, but the focus has been inside Loop 820 and near transit stops.
Klein said cities can also use incentives to encourage landowners not to develop their property while redirecting that development to areas ready to accept new residents. Citing a need to preserve open space around Fort Worth, city planners in December pitched identifying and then purchasing tracts of undeveloped land for preservation.
Texas’s robust property rights laws often handcuff cities’ ability to accommodate growth.
“Many of these measures can be seen by property owners as reducing the effective value of their properties or restricting their rights to benefit from their land,” Klein wrote in an email.
The demand for apartments and dense housing developments is immense, said Will Northern, chairman of the city’s zoning commission. He’s brokered real estate deals in Fort Worth for 10 years and has served on the commission for six.
The commission attempts to prioritize commercial zoning so Fort Worth can attract jobs and take the property tax burden off residential owners, but the demand isn’t there yet, Northern said. Developers are instead looking to feed the growing residential market.
Some who protested the rezoning of Bonds Ranch Road said they were surprised the zoning commission gave the green light. The Star-Telegram requested data about how often the City Council rejected a zoning request approved by the commission, but after a few email exchanges, zoning staff said the city’s legal department advised it not to release the information without a formal records request.
Northern said he thought it was rare for the council to reject something his commission had approved.
The commission often “does a dance” balancing the developers’ interests, neighbors’ concerns and the city’s goals, he said. When mulling a zoning case, commissioners look at the land use for the specific parcel of land and consider how it could best fit.
“We have to think about what makes sense on that parcel in perpetuity,” Northern said. “Whether or not the infrastructure is fully there isn’t under our purview because we’re thinking way ahead.”
Innovative city
Price said it’s important for the city to be thinking long term, not just about how things are now.
“We need to be thinking about 20, 30, 40 years from now,” she said.
To do that, Fort Worth needs to be creative, she said.
Trinity Metro, with ride share company Lyft, launched a program in the Alliance and Mercantile Center business parks called Zipzone. It connects bus and TEXRail riders to ride share drivers. Plans are in place to expand the program to the city’s medical district in the Near Southside, and Price said the idea could expand to other parts of the city as a way to help alleviate congestion.
For Councilman Cary Moon, the answer to Fort Worth’s growth may lie with the private sector.
City engineers, planners and designers are overworked, he said. Private firms can handle more design and construction of thoroughfares and other infrastructure projects. If a developer wants to build a subdivision off a narrow road, it could manage the improvements, Moon suggested, with the city reimbursing the cost.
“This is the kind of dilemma businesses want to have — how do we handle all these customers?” Moon said.
This story was originally published February 1, 2020 at 8:00 AM.
