After months of hearings and meetings and fits and starts, Fort Worth city leaders on Tuesday evening cleared the way for the drastic revamp of an abandoned golf course in east Fort Worth.
Fort Worth developer Will Northern intends to transform 150 acres of neglected greens and fairways into a patchwork of stores, apartments, and single-family homes. The vision excited city planners, community leaders and local development nonprofits, while some nearby apartment-wary homeowners greeted the project with skepticism.
Council member Gyna Bivens last month instructed Northern’s team to seek more community input before moving the project along. This time around, the mayor pro tem embraced the enterprise.
“The outreach is what makes this okay with me,” Bivens said before she and her peers unanimously supported the zoning change. “I don’t care about the outcome; I care about the process.”
Woodhaven Country Club welcomed its first golfers in 1972. The course was the centerpiece of the fledgling, namesake Woodhaven development, a real estate venture unveiled by Fort Worth business moguls Sid and Perry Bass and Texas Gov. John Connally.
The pandemic forced the golf course, long beset by financial struggles, to close permanently in 2021. The course’s closure, residents told council members, was symptomatic of the neighborhood’s economic withering.
Northern, a former zoning commissioner who co-manages a real estate brokerage with Fort Worth council member Michael Crain, purchased the property at a foreclosure auction for a reported $8.5 million in May. (Crain abstained from the Tuesday vote.)
Northern’s plans to repurpose the property 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 blueprint for the project that received the council’s support envisions 62.4 acres of half-acre lots on the eastern portion of the property and 23.8 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; Fort Worth’s zoning commission unanimously endorsed the plan.
At least a dozen Woodhaven residents and east side community leaders, almost all sporting green tops, vouched for the project and its potential — an unusual show of public support for a zoning case. Advocates credited Northern for his extensive engagement and flexibility, and they expect (or hope) the undertaking will reverse the neighborhood’s steady, seemingly relentless decline.
“I remember Woodhaven Country Club, when it was a jewel in the east Fort Worth crown,” said Brad Wright, who’s lived half a mile from the site since the 1980s. “I also then remember witnessing the sad, slow demise of the area.”
Local dining establishments shuttered, Wright recalled; the course languished.
“It’s been painful driving along South Randol Mill and look at the golf course and think about what it used to be; now comes a plan to bring that decaying golf course back to life,” Wright continued. “It seems like our little part of the world is starting to come back to life, and wouldn’t it be nice to add this project to it.”
Other homeowners from farther afield predicted the project’s positive effects would ripple throughout nearby communities, heralding an upswing for east Fort Worth writ large.
“People can drive through east Fort Worth along I-30 or Loop 820 for years and never have a reason to stop and get out of their car,” said Daniel Haase, a Central Meadowbrook resident. “What Will [Northern] is proposing could help change that by giving people a reason to visit, which could prompt other developers to do something equally transformative.”
Enthusiasm wasn’t universal.
“Woodhaven has none of the economic drivers that contribute heavily to the success of Near Southside or West 7th — no major employment hubs, no tourism traffic, and no anchor institutions,” said Erika Graham, a Woodhaven resident who lives beside the course. “Trying to impose the same retail-heavy plan in an area without these assets is setting it up for failure.”
Northern, summoned to the dais to flesh out his plans, assured skeptics that the development’s mixed-use environment, stitched together with high-density apartment complexes and new single-family homes, would nurture the bustling, amenity-rich community Woodhaven residents so craved. Wright and his neighbors are banking on it.
