North Fort Worth is growing rapidly, and some in the community say new housing is being built before the area has the roads to sustain it, leading to major traffic backups.
Community leaders recently pushed back against a development called Terra Vella that would bring 1,400 homes to an area west of Haslet, only supporting it when the developer committed to improving the area’s infrastructure.
In the stretch of far north Fort Worth between US-287 and Haslet, rush hour traffic can mean long waits at a standstill.
“It’s hard, and people get impatient, and they’re going to go around you on these roads,” said Rusty Fuller, president of the North Fort Worth Alliance. “And that’s dangerous.”
The reason?
Fuller told NBC5 that most people have to get around the area on older two-lane county roads. But now there are 4,700 homes in recently constructed subdivisions with just two roads leading out of the development.
“Terra Vella was going to come in and put in another 1,200, and they weren’t going to build a way out until almost nine years into their buildout,” Fuller said.
He’s talking about a neighboring area made up of more than 570 acres of empty land.
At the end of 2023, developer Green Brick Partners petitioned to annex the land into Fort Worth for a future 1,400-home development called Terra Vella.
The North Fort Worth Alliance pushed back.
“We spoke with the city, and said that doesn’t seem reasonable, number 1, to put all those people back through an area that’s already got 4,700 people through it,” Fuller said.
The developer ultimately changed their plans, moving up the timeline to build a new road running east to west in the development, and the Fort Worth city council approved the annexation request for the project at the end of January.
“It’s something that we didn’t have to do, but we thought just based on communication and feedback that we were getting from public outreach as well as staff and councilmember [Alan] Blaylock, that that would be a good thing to just make a commitment to do,” said Bobby Samuel with Green Brick Partners.
Officials in the area told NBC 5 the conversation around Terra Vella highlighted the need for more infrastructure in the growing north.
“So a lot of development’s come out there, and there were no roads, you had the two-lane roads to contend with,” said Gary Hulsey, mayor of Haslet.
Hulsey said the city has been meeting daily with transit officials from Fort Worth and TxDOT to discuss road improvement projects.
One of those projects expected to bring major relief: Avondale-Haslet Road, which starting in 2025 is set to begin a bond-funded expansion to four lanes.
But community leaders told NBC 5 the construction was expected to take two years to complete, and should bring its own set of traffic backups.
“They’re making adjustments, and this is what we need, to make those adjustments, learn from our history, and move forward,” Fuller said. “Because the growth doesn’t look like it’s going to stop.”