Fort Worth neighbors fought to stop industrialization. State rules may undo their victory.

For years, residents across southeast Fort Worth have channeled frustrations about the steady, seemingly relentless industrialization of their communities into petitions, public meetings and protests.

The effort yielded a small yet significant victory on Jan. 30, when city leaders voted unanimously to begin rezoning a 7-acre patch of industrial land in the Village Creek neighborhood for residential use.

The property’s owner, Dallas-based real estate firm Provident, felt less enthused by the news. It had bought the lot in late June 2022 with plans to build a trucking facility, not homes. Company representatives fret reselling the land with a residential label could burn a hole in their pocketbook.

Met with unwavering neighborhood resistance to anything connected to the industry residents blame for polluting their air and damaging their streets, the firm plans to build a warehouse anyway, citing development rights enshrined in state regulations. City officials have suggested the dispute may devolve into a legal battle if the City Council greenlights the zoning change next month. (Provident representatives declined to comment.)

The Village

The city zoning commission took up the case on Valentine’s Day. A handful of Village Creek residents appeared at the council chamber to vouch for the change.

Patrina Newton, a retired Fort Worth civil servant sporting a pin-stripe blazer over a magenta blouse, approached the dais first.

“We need more compatible land uses next to residential, and this is an example of that,” she explained to the commission, with the firm, measured tone of a professor or politician. “The homeowners in this area want quality development.”

Many of the neighbors had spent decades of their lives working for local government. Newton grew up in Village Creek before dedicating 25 years of her career to planning the city’s layout. Perry Williams, a tall man with a gentle drawl, clocked in 36 years with the city’s water department.

“I would not want industrial in my backyard, to where fumes and chemicals would affect my 5-year-old grandchild who lives with me,” Williams told the zoning commission, standing beside his wife Norma.

The Williams residence on Moorview Avenue is one of more than a dozen homes stitched to the western edge of the contested lot. A small, centuries old cemetery is packed between the thin layer of fencing and trees dividing the properties.

A black metal barrier separates the warehouse site from a community center to the north. Just across Village Creek Road to the east, a nursing home is surrounded incongruously by refueling stations and truck lots.

Trucking and logistics companies have found fertile ground for growth across the Metroplex in recent decades. Southeast Fort Worth has become a hub within a hub, thanks to its proximity to U.S. 287 and East Loop 820.

The property behind Williams’ house was, for decades, green space. Around 2017, its previous owner tore up the grass, paved it over with gravel, and parked semitrailers on the site. Neighborhood advocates like Letitia Wilbourn say the transformation symptomized broader ills afflicting residents across southeast Fort Worth — booming, unchecked industrial growth eroding the spaces that once defined their communities.

“We think this [rezoning] is a way of healing the community and correcting a lot of wrongs that have been done to this particular side of town,” Wilbourn told zoning commissioners.

Provident’s team rose to the podium next. They pitched themselves as good neighbors, describing the steps they’d taken since acquiring the land to correct the litany of code violations apparently let loose by their predecessor (transgressions, they say, they hadn’t been aware of until months after purchasing the property).

“We’re more than willing to talk to the neighbors about finding some sort of compromise,” said Chris Cate, the company’s director of acquisitions and development. “We have more things that we want to do to improve the site and to improve the drainage and to make it better for everybody around here.”

But their space for compromise had limitations.

“We bought this under the pretense of an IP [industrial park] zoning,” Cate’s colleague, Kip Platt, said. “We want to do what’s right, but we can’t take an absolute downzoning. That’s just not in the cards.”

Ultimately, the neighborhood’s concerns won over the commission.

“This particular area is inundated, being in that growth center,” commissioner Jacob Wurman said. “I think any chance we get to offer them a buffer — it’s compatible, it makes sense for us to do that.”

The Creek

Cate and Platt met with the Village Creek Neighborhood Association in the meeting room of the Eugene McCray Community Center around two weeks later. A city zoning planner and a staffer for council member Jeanette Martinez, who initiated the zoning change, also attended.

The groups coordinated the meeting with the tacit intention of digging up some middle ground on the future of the property, just a fence-hop away. No one budged.

“We’re not looking to change our mind,” said Williams, dressed in a suit for the occasion. About a dozen community members nodded or hummed in affirmation as he spoke.

The respectful, if stubborn, back and forth lasted just under an hour. Residents shared fears and frustrations about how rampant trucking had harmed their livelihoods. The developers, standing against cabinets at the front of the room, repeated that no other land use but industrial made financial sense for their firm.

“If there’s some way we can mitigate millions of dollars of losses on this project, I’m open to anything,” Cate said. (Public filings value the land at $1 million.)

The meeting finished inconclusively. Weeks went by with no news. The City Council was supposed to decide the property’s fate on March 19, but the case didn’t appear on the agenda.

Then, out of the blue, council member Martinez convened a meeting with Village Creek residents on a rainy afternoon April 20.

Her updates were bleak: the developer planned to build a warehouse regardless of the zoning change, a right, she explained, granted to them by state development laws.

She circulated copies of the firm’s site plan: a 54,000 square foot warehouse, up to 35 feet in height, encircled by parking spaces (at least 21 of which were allotted for tractor trailers).

“Regardless of what we do, it’s going to be some form of storage facility because we’re not at that point to where they’re going to sell,” Martinez said.

A spokesperson for Fort Worth’s planning staff said Provident notified the city of its intention to build a warehouse in March. Chapter 245 of the Texas Local Government Code, they argued, gave them the right to build and use the warehouse allowed under the land’s current zoning, irrespective of a future change.

“The statute mandates that all projects be governed in accordance with the regulations that were in effect at the time the applicant gave fair notice to the City of their project and permit sought,” the planning spokesperson wrote in an email to the Star-Telegram. “The property owner is also asserting that the zoning from industrial park zoning to residential zoning would interfere with their property rights such that it would be an unconstitutional taking of the property.”

The neighborhood’s resolve upon hearing the plans was unshaken.

“It’s a health issue; it’s a bigger issue,” Newton told Martinez. “If residents of more affluent areas had been raising their voice about something like this, the city would have listened a long time ago.”

Martinez listened and agreed to vouch for them, not without noting the disputes could become a legal battle.

Newton and others were still unfazed. “Let this go to a court of law,” she said.