Fort Worth buys 7-acre truck lot for $3.4 million to keep warehouse out of neighborhood
A sustained campaign by neighborhood residents and environmental activists compelled Fort Worth city leaders in Jan. 2024 to begin rezoning a 6.84-acre truck lot along Village Creek Road for nonindustrial use.
The winding dispute that followed — played out in city hall hearings, community meetings and federal court — may have finally drawn to a close March 25, with Fort Worth electing to purchase the property and settle all pending legal claims surrounding it for $3.455 million (including closing costs).
The contested patch of gravel hugs the northern edge of U.S. 287, a short drive west of its intersection with East Loop 820. The plot is boxed in by single-family homes to the west, a community center to the north, and a sliver of truck depots and a nursing home to the east.
Dallas-based developer Provident purchased the property in June 2022, with plans to convert the vacant lot into a logistics warehouse.
Nearby homeowners and community organizers in southeast Fort Worth have long lobbied to undo the neighborhood’s industrialization and fend off new efforts to expand it. The growing sprawl of highways and truck lots, they say, has polluted the area’s air, damaged its streets, and decimated its green space.
City leaders, sensitive to their concerns, voted unanimously in May to rezone the Village Creek property for residential use.
“It was a heartbreaking day to see what had been a beautiful grassy knoll become a haven for trucks,” council member Gyna Bivens said of the property at the time of the vote. “I am in support [of the zoning change], with this neighborhood.”
Provident didn’t share the council’s enthusiasm. Worried the new designation would tank the land’s value, it sued Fort Worth in August.
Provident’s legal team claimed the city had violated state and federal law by failing to adequately notify and negotiate with the firm over the course of the rezoning process, according to Provident’s complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.
City hall attorneys, in subsequent filings, denied that the city “failed to provide notice” of the zoning change at the legally-required stages. They also rejected the plaintiff’s assertion that the city had “arbitrarily refused” to try and find a land use or a sales prices that both parties could agree on.
Provident, in its complaint, said it had offered to sell the property to Fort Worth for $3.097 million sometime between May and July 2024 — a sum that, they claim, covered the $2.082 million purchase price and roughly $1.014 million more in improvements they’d made since buying the land. The city, in a December filing, denied that the “plaintiff attempted to negotiate an appropriate price.”
The city ultimately agreed Tuesday to settle the lawsuit for several hundred thousand dollars more. Neither city spokespeople nor Provident executives commented on how the parties arrived at that amount or why they’d decided to settle in the first place. (The city did not provide answers to questions by the time of publication; Provident declined to comment “on pending litigation.”)
What exactly the city plans to do with its latest land acquisition isn’t clear. Jeanette Martinez, the District 11 council member who spearheaded the rezoning effort, hopes the property will be folded into the city’s community land trust, a bundle of properties reserved for low-income tenants or homebuyers.
“There’s nothing concrete,” Martinez said.
This story was originally published March 25, 2025 at 1:47 PM.
