Fort Worth, developers and residents debate affordable apartments near West 7th
As the day drew to a close Oct. 15, a developer and six members of the River District Neighborhood Association squeezed into the meeting room of an apartment building on White Settlement Road.
The space was well groomed, fitted with a nest-shaped light fixture and decorative books, some with their spines turned inwards.
The homeowners sat looped around a table facing Daniel Smith, a managing director at Dallas-based real estate firm Ojala Partners. Smith stood at the front of the room beside a TV screen, flanked by two blown-up digital renditions of the development he hoped his audience would support.
“We think that getting rid of a bunch of 60-year-old two-story apartments that have really high crime rates in the area is a good thing for everyone,” he told them.
Ojala and Fort Worth Housing Solutions, the city’s public housing authority, want to level hundreds of aging subsidized apartments just north of the West 7th entertainment district and build mixed-income complexes in their wake.
Smith and his team pitch the project as an obvious boon for the city — revamping worn down pockets of a bustling neighborhood while maintaining a smaller but meaningful level of affordability in new units.
Nearby businesses, Smith says, have been enthusiastic supporters. Surrounding home and condo owners have been skeptical but not unswayable, concerned largely with how tall the buildings will climb, how many people they’ll house, and how many future apartment developments they might invite.
Existing tenants of the buildings slated for demolition have yet to be informed of the plans.
The Springs
“I love it over here, even though it’s ugly.”
Trish stood in the driveway under her apartment wrapped in a robe, sipping coffee from a plastic cup. (She preferred to only use her first name to avoid trouble with building management.)
“My mom was scared for me to move over here because of how they look,” she said. “But we have no problems. The people are so nice. It’s quiet. I can’t complain.”
Trish, in her forties, moved to The Springs over the summer. She’d lived with her mom for a spell after separating from her ex-husband. She now pays around $1,200 a month to share a three bedroom flat with two of her elementary-aged children; she has two other kids in college, another in cosmetology school.
Early struggles with roaches and broken A/C have more or less passed, and she now felt steady.
“It’s helped me out a lot,” she said.
Trish earns a living hauling cement to nascent residential subdivisions across the city. A dry spell in contracts and mechanical issues with her truck have left her homebound for much of the fall, making $15 an hour through a remote job.
The Springs, built in 1962, only houses tenants making between 30 and 60% of the area median income. An individual hoping to rent one of its 430 units would need to make less than $42,840 annually, according to the complex’s website; a household of three can’t earn more than $55,080. The average renter in The Springs, Smith says, pays $899 each month.
For cash-strapped families, the caps offer rare and precious stability in a city suffering from soaring housing costs and a dearth of affordable residences.
“Rent’s steady going up,” Trish’s sister, who moved into the apartment below her a few weeks ago, chimed in. “People can’t survive anymore.”
Housing Solutions plans
Fort Worth Housing Solutions bought the two bundles of buildings making up The Springs in 2008, offloaded the properties in 2015, and repurchased them in 2018, according to Tarrant Appraisal District records.
The agency and Ojala plan to more than double the existing number of units (to roughly 900), packing them into five-story buildings spread across 15 acres. Moving forward with the project requires changing the land’s zoning to high intensity mixed-use, a change city planners, keen to densify the area’s housing, readily endorsed.
“We truly believe this is the right move for The Springs and the residents living there,” Mary-Margaret Lemons, the president of Fort Worth Housing Solutions, told Fort Worth zoning commissioners during a hearing Oct. 9. “They will have an option to come back to that property when it is reconstructed.”
Half of the new apartments will be rented out at market rates; the other will be reserved for tenants making less than 80% of the area median income.
Some skeptics note the raised ceiling will, in turn, increase the rents of subsidized units, likely pricing out many residents hoping to return.
“Those residents ultimately will be pushed further out,” commissioner Jacob Wurman said at the hearing. “These people aren’t going to have the same number of affordable units at the current level of affordability if this goes forward.”
Other Fort Worth Housing Solutions properties with an 80% area median income cap set aside units for lower income households, Lemons said. The Springs could be the same.
“Believe me, we will ask for deeper affordability,” she told commissioners. “It hasn’t been hammered out.”
The decision to bump up the income limit boiled down to business considerations.
“There’s a math equation: it’s very challenging to justify demolishing 15 acres of land, building it back, and then guaranteeing all 60% AMI units, because those rents are about $900,” Smith told commissioners. “It’s very hard to make the numbers work to get it to finance.”
An 80% cap is “still very affordable,” he added.
When and where Fort Worth Housing Solutions will move The Springs’ residents isn’t clear. Lemons says they’ve yet to hash out the plans.
“In my nine years with the housing authority we’ve successfully relocated four different properties — over 1,500 people — with minimal issues or impact,” she said. “We have a long runway to make sure that we get it right.”
Should they secure the zoning they seek, Ojala and the housing authority plan to demolish The Springs in 2026. Construction on phase one of its revamp will start that year; phases two and three will begin in 2029 and 2031.
Trish isn’t thrilled by the prospect of moving. She loves the neighborhood, its greenery and its quiet. She also isn’t certain she’ll be able to afford coming back.
“I would be hurt to move because the rent’s cheap — it’s affordable,” she said. “But other people, I’m sure, will have a lot harder time.”
She spoke of her neighbors, some disabled, some elderly and alone.
“There’s a lot of really, really poor people,” she said. “Nothing wrong — I’m poor too, but there’s people that are way more poor than me.”
Neighborhoods surrounding The Springs
Neighborhood organizations surrounding The Springs exhibited little concern with the new affordability plan.
Few objected to rebuilding the development, which they’ve long viewed as a blight. Most of their qualms dealt with the potential replacement’s height and layout.
The new zoning designation allows 10-story buildings; would The Springs 2.0 leer over nearby homes, despite the developer’s promises to cap its project at five? Would its facades fit in with the neighborhood aesthetic, however they defined it? Would new traffic pour out near residential streets?
“These cases that you have today will set the precedent for the future of this triangle,” Margaret DeMoss, a leader of the West 7th Neighborhood Alliance, told zoning commissioners. Her organization sometimes hosts its meetings at The Stayton, an eleven-floor apartment building in the corridor. “Who will coordinate this development if you let this first domino fall with no site plan?”
Smith and his team made several concessions to their would-be neighbors to assuage their concerns.
To appease Monticello homeowners, Smith offered to route apartment traffic away from Bailey Avenue. He said his team flew a drone over the site at roughly a five-story elevation to show that a renter living on one of the building’s higher floors wouldn’t be able to peer into their yards; in any case, Smith said, they’d limit the construction of balconies facing west.
Council member Elizabeth Beck, who represents the area, has tried to help smooth over potential disagreements.
“I am supportive of additional workforce housing in close proximity to our job centers. Our office is working with the neighborhood and developers to provide a development we are proud to bring to the area,” she wrote in a statement. “We will continue to collaborate before the zoning change is brought before council. An example of this collaboration is a height limitation to 5 stories.”
Council member Macy Hill, whose district includes the Monticello neighborhood, did not respond to a request for comment. Neither the Monticello Neighborhood Association nor the West 7th Neighborhood Alliance responded to requests for comment.
The zoning commission couldn’t reach a consensus on the project. Ojala presented the development in two separate cases — one for each parcel of land they need to reclassify. Commissioners recommended denying the first case against the recommendations of city staff, but, after more debate, recommended approving the second.
“One of the things that makes me comfortable with this is just the track record of Fort Worth Housing Solutions in this community, and how much this stuff is needed,” commissioner Jeremy Raines told his colleagues. “It’s a 60-year old property that needs to be rehabbed or torn down.”
The dialogue
Changing a property’s land use in Fort Worth requires campaign-levels of public engagement with surrounding landowners and neighborhood groups — mass emails, phone calls, elevator pitches in cafes and conference rooms.
The city has notified at least 16 organizations of the proposed zoning change since late September, according to zoning filings — the Fort Worth school district, a Camp Bowie business development group, and eight neighborhood associations among them.
The developer’s team has spent weeks attempting to rally the support and address the reservations of nearby businesses and homeowners, extending their canvassing well outside the immediate periphery of their project. (The River District is roughly three miles west of the sites in question.)
Fort Worth Housing Solutions and Ojala have yet to directly notify residents of their plans to rebuild the apartments. Smith says they intend to do so at some point after the zoning process — should they receive the designation they seek.
“Residents have the same rights as the public to be involved in any public meeting and provide thoughts and feedback,” Lemons said in a statement to the Star-Telegram.
When asked why residents wouldn’t receive word of the project unless the city approved the zoning changes, Smith said “We do not want to notify people that the property will be developed yet as we don’t know if we will get zoning. If we get zoning, we have to put together a much larger business plan (i.e. financing) that will dictate the timing of the redevelopment and relocation of residents.”
City council will decide the project’s fate Nov. 12.
