Today we visited the Fort Worth Trinity Vision Center. This office's goal is to create a new river environment that would encompass 88 miles of the Trinity River and its greenbelts and tributaries throughout the Fort Worth Area. The most well known project is to create an urban waterfront community to the north of downtown Fort Worth. The community would consist of residential homes and apartments that would not compete with the entertainment value that the current downtown brings. This project would connect downtown to the Cultural District and the Stockyards. It would combine recreational opportunities with flood control and environmental enhancements to greatly improve the public utilization of the river. This new infrastructure would offer twelve miles of active urban waterfront and a 33 acre lake just north of downtown, which would make the entire area attractive for private development and mixed income housing.
Trinity uptown will provide increased access to the rives and its numerous trails in Fort Worth. An added 1.5 mile bypass channel will change the current flood control measures and eliminate the need for five miles of levees that have blocked the river access in the downtown area. Along with the river front access and new community this will take Fort Worth to a whole new level that it deserves. The infrastructure needed for the the flood control and transportation will bring a once aging industrial area back to life. There will be 800 acres of underdeveloped land accessible for private development that would double the size of the current Downtown. The new zoning and guidelines would create high density waterfront community with 10,000 mixed housing units and three million square feet of office, retail, and restaurant space. This in turn equals housing for 40,000 residents and provides 16,000 new jobs.
Another major project is to enhance Gateway Park to be one of the nation's largest urban programmed parks. This development would connect the East and Southeast neighborhoods of Fort Worth to the Trinity River corridor. The park would consist of a new soccer and baseball/softball fields, disc golf course, mountain biking course, expanded trail, and an amphitheater to name a few. The park would also aid in ecosystem restoration such as 80,000 new trees, lake and wetland creation in the old drying riverbeds, and clean up and return water to the historic Riverside Oxbow.
Currently, two-thirds of the land needed for the project has already been acquired. This is actually quite impressive due to the fact that the land is owned by private persons of companies. Part of the office's responsibility is to help relocate each business to a place that is suitable for their business such as where they were before the move. Most of the acquisitions have been smooth with many of the companies coming to the office ready to sell and with a potential spot to relocate their business already chosen. For those companies that were not as forth coming to sell and relocate had smooth transitions once they understood the project, its goals, and the services it would be providing to help them relocate.
Having made Fort Worth my new home I am very excited to start to see progress on this program. Even though this will take over a decade to complete, once this is done Fort Worth will be on the map not just Dallas. From the looks of how successful the San Antonio River walk is, if the project comes out like it is suppose to there will be nothing but goods things to come.
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