Could East Lancaster Avenue be Fort Worth’s next hot neighborhood?
To the untrained eye, there’s a dull sameness to East Lancaster Avenue.
Block after block, it’s convenience stores and liquor stores, bars, used car lots, check cashing and title loan places, and aging apartments and motels. The names on the signs differ, and the buildings themselves vary, but just about everything of substance along the old main drag is eerily similar, forcing the inquisitive onlooker to wonder how market forces could allow for such a homogenous commercial landscape.
Daniel Haase, though, isn’t a casual observer. He’s lived in the neighborhood for more than 40 years, and when you’ve been around a place that long, you not only know where the proverbial bodies are buried but also where the gold lies. And from Haase’s perspective, there’s a lot of unmined gold on East Lancaster, just waiting for the right people to come along and collect it.
“Our motto here on the east side should be ‘I had no idea,’” joked Haase while driving on East Lancaster. He sometimes gives impromptu tours to real estate developers and others looking for investment opportunities in the area. And the refrain he hears most when he points out the neighborhood’s bright spots is “I had no idea.”
Take the Central Handley Historic District just east of Loop 820. The little pocket is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the row of wedding-related businesses occupying the brick storefronts in the 6500 block of East Lancaster wouldn’t look out of place in higher-end neighborhoods like West Magnolia.
Then there’s the Reby Cary Youth Library, which opened in 2021. The steel-and-glass structure stands out against the cracked pavement and decades-old buildings that surround it, appearing as an island of modernity on the avenue. And there are other places, too, like the under-construction Palladium City Skyline apartments and Coffee Folk, a hip coffee shop operating from a trailer outside a historic fire station just off Lancaster.
These pioneers, Haase hopes, will help attract more new investment along the East Lancaster corridor, transforming it from a neighborhood with a reputation for crime and vagrancy into something akin to Fort Worth’s other recently revitalized neighborhoods.
“There aren’t any bargains left on the Near Southside, and there aren’t any bargains left on West Magnolia,” Haase said, referring to buying opportunities for people hoping to move into those areas. “This is where there are still bargains.”
One of the original East Lancaster pioneers
For more than 20 years, Julie West has owned and operated Paper Planet, a stationary boutique in the Handley Wedding District. West admits the neighborhood was “not great” when she first set up shop, but she’s seen it change for the better.
“I feel like it’s really heading in the right direction,” said West.
Even before opening her business, West was an east side resident, and she said she’s always believed in a vision of what East Lancaster could be. The area’s architecture and its history — it was once a flourishing stretch of the coast-to-coast Bankhead Highway — are what initially attracted West. She has watched other businesses in other parts of Fort Worth try to manufacture that same aesthetic, and she wonders why.
“It doesn’t make sense to try to recreate that when we have it right here.”
In West’s opinion, the east side has a bad reputation that’s undeserved and outdated. She’s happy to dispel any notion that East Lancaster is crime ridden whenever longtime Fort Worth residents come to her store from other parts of the city.
“It’s about educating people,” West said. “This is not your mom and dad’s East Lancaster.”
Since starting Paper Planet, West has recruited other businesses to the wedding district, and she remains steadfast in encouraging investment in East Lancaster. Along with the building her stationary shop occupies, West owns two nearby properties, and she’s in talks with businesspeople to rent out those spaces. She’s hoping to see a coffee shop open soon in her property at 6621 E. Lancaster Ave., which, West said, would be a step toward helping the area become more of a destination.
Crime on East Lancaster
There’s no denying the perception of East Lancaster as a dangerous area, though, and indeed much of it is rough around the edges. The western end is dotted with homeless encampments, and people experiencing homelessness occupy sidewalks along the avenue between Interstate 35 and Loop 820. Then there are the hallmarks of urban blight — the windowless bars and the bars on the windows.
Focusing on the homelessness issue, Haase said these individuals pose little to no threat. Many are on East Lancaster because there are resources for them there, like the Union Gospel Mission and the nearby Presbyterian Night Shelter.
Haase cited Fort Worth Police Department statistics that showed 672 total crimes on the main stretch of East Lancaster in 2024. The majority of those, more than 440, were property crimes like theft. Less than half, 230, were crimes against people, like assaults.
According to 2024 Total Crime Index figures, the Fort Worth police’s East Division, which encompasses East Lancaster, ranked fourth out of six divisions with an index of 143. The Central Division had the highest crime index at 182; the Northwest Division had the lowest at 101. For context, a crime index of 100 is considered average.
Scott Dyson, the owner of Competition Music at 3136 E. Lancaster Ave., possesses a stoicism and dry sense of humor that are assets to a man running a business in the neighborhood. He’s been there since 1987, and talking in his shop one afternoon, surrounded by drums, guitars and amps, he said the neighborhood hasn’t changed much over that time.
“It’s always been an interesting place,” Dyson said. “There’s drugs, prostitution.”
In 2019, East Lancaster business owners joined together to form a public improvement district. Using assessments collected from merchants, the PID paid for things like license plate reader cameras on the avenue and private security patrols in an effort to curb crime. In 2024, off-duty Fort Worth police officers took over security patrols from a firm called Texas Industrial Security.
Dyson said the PID has had some impact on crime, but he, like other East Lancaster merchants, said the off-duty police officers are slow to respond to calls. A Fort Worth police spokesperson said that’s a misperception, and that PID members often call to report minor issues like people loitering on nearby properties. In those cases, the spokesperson said, there’s little officers can do, since the person calling doesn’t own the property on which the loitering is taking place.
“No one’s pulled a gun on me,” Dyson joked, saying most of what he’s witnessed has been nonviolent offenses. Recently, though, he was so frustrated with the city’s lack of action on crime and vagrancy in the area that he put his shop up for sale. He’s since taken it off the market.
“I don’t see it changing anytime soon,” Dyson said of East Lancaster. “I guess I should keep my phone out and video it. It would make for good TikToks.”
A newcomer’s view of East Lancaster
In May, Southern California native Mario Osuna bought Smith’s Balloon Works and Homecoming Headquarters, a longstanding business at the corner of East Lancaster and Forby Avenue. Over the past few months, he’s added new coats of paint and additional lighting to the property, and he commissioned acclaimed local artist Juan Velazquez to paint a “Greetings from Fort Worth” mural on the building.
Osuna said East Lancaster reminded him of his childhood neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles, and that he had no qualms about running a business there.
“None of it scared me,” he said. “Coming from where I come from, I’ve seen how an area can come back around.”
Osuna was drawn to Smith’s because it was a family business with a rich legacy. It is, in his words, “a diamond in the rough,” and he and his family are intent on turning it into something the neighborhood can be proud of. That starts with product selection and customer service, Osuna said, but he’s also striving to make his property stand out as a beacon of renewal.
“Social media has really been driving it,” Osuna said of his growing clientele, some of whom have come to Smith’s primarily to check out Velazquez’s artwork. “About half the people who have come in have been first-time visitors.”
According to Osuna, one of the biggest issues when he moved in was a suspected drug house around the corner from Smith’s, but he said the city had taken care of that.
“I want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem,” Osuna said of his efforts to make a difference on East Lancaster. “This could really become a destination. It’s like they say in ‘Field of Dreams’: ‘If you build it, they will come.’”
That’s Haase’s mantra, too. He’s a tireless evangelist for East Lancaster, and he’s determined to see it go back to what it was years ago.
Haase said getting the PID established was the first step toward that. The PID gave business owners hope and a sense that others, including the city of Fort Worth, were finally watching out for their interests, said Haase. From that hope sprang property renovations and revitalization. That, Haase believes, is what attracted recent developments like the Palladium apartment complex and a new storefront for the Mi Tierra market on East Lancaster.
“These are all substantial investments in the street,” Haase wrote in an email, “and the next phase is when more developers come, to the point where they start falling over each other to be next. I can’t wait.”
Star-Telegram editor Steve Wilson contributed the Total Crime Index figures for this report.
This story was originally published September 18, 2025 at 4:50 AM.