City planners endorse replacing this old Fort Worth golf course with apartments, homes
Fort Worth zoning officials unanimously endorsed plans on Jan. 8 to redevelop the abandoned Woodhaven Country Club.
Crescendo Development, a two-person land management outfit headed by Fort Worth real estate broker and ex-zoning commissioner Will Northern, plans to rework 150 acres of neglected greens and fairways into a patchwork of stores, apartments, and single-family homes.
Northern’s team, and the Woodhaven residents who have rallied behind him, believe the project will help revitalize a community that boasted great promise at the time of its creation but has since, in the eyes of some community leaders, fallen by the wayside.
“I like everything that he’s proposed,” Greg Goodman, a property owner raised in Woodhaven, told zoning commissioners Wednesday afternoon. “I think that it can be nothing but good for the neighborhood.”
The country club welcomed its first golfers in 1972. The course was the centerpiece of the fledgling Woodhaven development, a real estate venture unveiled by Fort Worth business moguls Sid and Perry Bass and Gov. John Connally.
Wedged between the northwestern intersection of Interstate 30 and Loop 820, Woodhaven’s patrons expected the neighborhood to become an engine of economic growth in east Fort Worth. Promises of sustained prosperity and development failed to materialize over the ensuing decades.
“Woodhaven has traditionally suffered from a lack of community amenities, largely due to the low average household income of the community,” the vice president of Woodhaven Community Development Inc., a neighborhood business group, told commissioners.
“Over half of the neighborhood is cost insecure,” John Wood, a Woodhaven resident and the founder of Econautics, a local development non-profit, later added.
The pandemic forced the golf course, long beset by financial struggles, to close permanently in 2021. Northern, which co-manages a real estate brokerage with Fort Worth council member Michael Crain, purchased the property at a foreclosure auction for $8.5 million in May.
Woodhaven residents hope the project heralds a turnaround for the community.
“I was happy to see this, and I think it’s in furtherance of what the community was looking for, for a revitalized Woodhaven,” Wood said.
Northern’s firm spent months seeking input from Wood and other neighborhood stakeholders — homeowners, businesses, and community organizations.
Crescendo’s plans have morphed over the course of discussions. The property is sprawling and gerrymandered, carved into incongruous shapes by apartment complexes and single-family homes.
The latest blueprint for the project, presented to zoning commissioners Jan. 8, envisions 62.4 acres of half-acre lots on the eastern portion of the property and 24 acres of apartments to the west, bridged by a 41-acre plot of mixed-use development in between. Around 22 acres of floodplain on the old course’s westernmost edge will be set aside as green space. City planning staff deemed the proposal appropriate for the area.
“The development vision for this property intends to revitalize the area by providing a variety of different uses but protecting the existing fabric of the neighborhood,” Crescendo wrote in its rezoning application. “With existing multi-family adjacent to the western portion of the development there is an opportunity to create a mixed-use central area that can provide appropriate commercial to support the neighborhood.”
Not all Woodhaven residents have embraced the plan.
“There is a sea of apartments from Interstate 30 going north to Randol Mill,” one homeowner told commissioners. “The high density has not brought better economics, hasn’t brought better development. It has done just the opposite.”
The commission pushed the project forward to the City Council, which will decide its fate Jan. 14.
