How dense is too dense on Fort Worth’s West 7th? Will these new apartments push the limit?
On Fort Worth’s West Seventh Street, the consensus is clear: The area is packed.
Up and down the street, apartment complexes rise against the downtown skyline. Residents at seven area complexes are among the 12,594 people who call the area around West Seventh Street home — the corridor’s population has increased by 89% in 20 years.
And on the ground below, traffic dances between lanes as construction workers add bike lanes and medians.
Soon, if the city approves a developer’s plans, a cluster of new apartments off Carroll Street in Montgomery Plaza will pop up, prompting fears the project will exacerbate the area’s traffic and density.
Everything happening on West Seventh Street, including the potential new apartments, matches Fort Worth’s vision for the area and for the Cultural District. City officials expressed a desire for urban and residential development in the area as well as walkable neighborhoods across Fort Worth in their comprehensive plan, which serves as a blueprint for managing development.
But creating a dense, more walkable city comes with challenges in an area where most people drive a car. Just 2% of the city’s residents walk or take public transportation to work, according to the U.S. Census.
The proposal would bring 595 apartments: one five-story building with 315 units and a seven-story with 280.
To make room for the apartments, 90,000 square feet of retail would be eliminated, including Michael’s, Five Below, Office Depot, PetSmart and Dollar Tree. Though developers plan to add 20,000 square feet of retail on the ground level of one of the buildings, it is not clear if the displaced shops will occupy the new retail space, said D.J. Harrell, the city’s director of development.
Shoppers will have to drive 8.5 miles to get to the next nearest Michael’s on Overton Ridge Boulevard. The closest Dollar Tree is 4.5 miles away in River Oaks. The next closest Office Depot is in Ridgmar Plaza — 6.2 miles away. The next closest PetSmart and Five Below are on Lake Worth Boulevard 7.3 and 7.2 miles away, respectively.
A Zoning Commission hearing for the proposed apartments is scheduled for Sept. 14.
Neighbors and shoppers worry about the loss of the convenient shops and an increase in traffic and density in an already crowded area.
“That is just way, way, way too dense, first of all,” said Cheryl Robinson, who has lived in the city’s Cultural District for nearly 30 years and remembers when it was a quieter place. “There’s got to be someplace else that they can find to build, and I don’t want them to take out my PetSmart or my Dollar Tree or my Michael’s, or even my Office Depot, even though I don’t go in there that much. They’re very convenient for me.”
The apartment complex off Carroll would join other incoming housing developments in the area. Down the street on Camp Bowie Boulevard, developers are working on Bowie House, a 106-room hotel with seven condominiums, which is expected to be finished in the latter part of 2023. Up the road across from the Kimbell Art Museum, workers are constructing The Crescent, a 200-room hotel that includes 167 apartments.
Can West Seventh handle more traffic?
The big question for residents and shoppers in Montgomery Plaza is whether it can handle the cars and people that would come with the complex. New bike lanes and medians on Seventh Street have made it narrower. Some people are afraid the traffic problems could become worse.
“Seventh Street’s a disaster and they’re just going to add more cars to an already congested, potentially dangerous through way,” Carol McCluer, who lives in Rivercrest, said. “It’s just, you know, we only have those three arteries into downtown on the west side, and they just can’t seem to keep their hands off.”
Complaints about the impending complex have poured into the office of council member Elizabeth Beck, who represents the neighborhood. She thinks residents’ concerns are valid.
Beck’s own concerns with the project fall in line with the majority of complaints about increased traffic and population, and she said the current road construction on West Seventh Street is making traffic problems worse.
“I think that as a city, we have to look at what density really means,” Beck said. “And what I mean by that is I think increasing density is something that folks in the urban planning world, and quite frankly those of us in government, appreciate, right, because a denser city is a cheaper city to maintain and we want to conserve our green space.”
Beck thinks the city needs to be mindful of the community’s realities. Fort Worth does not have the same development and culture that supports multiple forms of transportation the same way cities like New York and Chicago do. She believes there needs to be a traffic study for the project.
But even in dense communities that were made for foot traffic, most are still hopping in cars to go where they need to go.
“We should be mindful of how dense we’re becoming,” Beck said. “I don’t have a problem with density, but we have to make sure that we have the infrastructure to handle it.”
Elizabeth Bittner lives in lower Monticello, just a rock’s toss from the planned apartments.
Bittner frequently shops at the stores that may go away, including the PetSmart she visits every week. The area already has retail spaces with housing on top, like the Montgomery Plaza Condominiums and apartments by Tom Thumb. Bittner wonders if more of the same development be useful.
“That’s not what I consider to be retail that’s useful for daily living,” Bittner said. She thinks the loss of retail will come as a loss for new residents, too.
Weighing the benefits of high density
Cities must pay careful attention when they plan high-density developments to ensure there are resources and infrastructure to support it, said Chanam Lee, landscape architecture and urban planning professor at Texas A&M’s College of Architecture.
High-density development — long referred to as growing up instead of out — is embraced by Fort Worth and urban planners and sustainability experts. The design can be more sustainable, but it can also add traffic in already dense areas, Lee said.
In an already highly developed city like Fort Worth, there can be challenges to making it more walkable. It takes a short time to build a new project but can take decades to fix if it isn’t built correctly, Lee said, which is why retrofitting is important, as is working within the public right-of-way.
“I don’t know if there’s a solution to it, and probably there’s not a single solution,” Lee said.
This story was originally published September 2, 2022 at 9:08 AM.
