Why sprawling Fort Worth is doubling down on green space

Fort Worth, Texas, is one of the fastest-growing cities in one of the fastest-growing regions of the country. In 2019, the North Texas city was building out so quickly, it was losing roughly 50 acres of land a week to new developments.

But today, Mayor Mattie Parker says continuing that growth isn’t just about attracting new businesses and building places for their employees to work and live. It’s about preserving green space for the future—and lots of it. In October 2023, Parker announced the Good Natured Program, with a goal of setting aside 10,000 acres in the next five years and creating a nonprofit land consultancy.

“Not doing this will be a detriment to our community,” says Parker. “We need to protect the North Texas prairie, the tree canopy, and the trails. It’s not all about sticks and bricks and building; we want to create a place to raise kids.” 

Proof that parks are a good investment

Parks and green space have always been sought-after amenities that bolster real estate value. But a recent analysis by the Trust for Public Land highlighted how investing in and creating additional parks, trails, and green space have become more crucial for economic development. Conducted with HR&A Advisors, the study focused on five major cities where park spending is more than twice the average of large U.S. cities: Atlanta; Boise, Idaho; Boston; Minneapolis; and Plano, Texas. It found “a strong correlation between park investment and economic vitality.”

TPL has long advocated for more investment in park equity. That effort includes pushing cities to change development patterns to help disinvested neighborhoods get better access to parks, and asking local leaders to foreground concerns about the environment and equity in park policies. But this study showed that cities were making positive investments in parks for economic reasons, “more intentionally than we had maybe recognized,” says TPL Senior Director Bianca Clarke.

Cities with more robust park investments benefitted from greater labor force participation and higher concentrations of highly educated residents, TPL found. Boise, for instance, saw a 60% increase in the formation of new businesses after nearly doubling its park investments since 2011. In Plano, increased park spending helped save $21 million a year on healthcare costs. In Boston, real estate along the Rose Kennedy Greenway commanded a 30% rent premium compared to space in the central business district. 

Even in North Texas, an area renowned for sprawling development, civic leaders and developers have seen a pronounced return on investments in green space. Numerous cities in the region have recently embarked on significant park initiatives, like the Dallas Greening Initiative or Five Mile Creek Greenbelt. Dallas, where Mayor Eric Johnson spoke of a “golden era” of parks, passed the $345 million Proposition B this past May, and is working with TPL on new models for effective park maintenance. Fort Worth voters approved Proposition E in 2022, and Plano passed the $81 million Proposition B in 2021. 

Fort Worth’s Parker spoke about a change in perspective; cities need to think about climate change, hotter weather, and sustainability, as well as maintaining economic competitiveness, all of which benefit from parks. For her, this kind of plan isn’t necessarily a departure from the sprawling development style that has defined Fort Worth. In a city that stretches over 350 square miles and has still only developed half of its land, she says it’s important to make sure that parks, green space, and tree canopy are strategically and thoughtfully included and prioritized in the other half.

Park strategy for cities is getting more data driven, says Doug McDonald, Plano’s Economic Development Director. With examples like the Katy Trail, a rails-to-trails project in Dallas that conferred significant real estate benefits to nearby properties, cities have become much more intentional about adding parks and making parkspace a development requirement.

Parks as a corporate incentive

Plano even provides grants for corporate offices: Fisher Investments, which recently relocated, was given a $2 million grant to rework their office campus to add more trail connections and green space. These kinds of parks don’t just help the larger goal of public access and park equity, they also add climate resiliency and improve transportation options. 

“From our perspective, just giving people the ability to hop on a trail during the workday has a benefit for the city,” says McDonald. “Obviously, helping the tax base is huge, which adds to the general fund that can then be used to update parks and buy more parkland.”

It’s important to note that the study talks about correlation, and not causation, says Connie Chung, a managing partner at HR&A Advisors. And it’s not all for selfless reasons: A pandemic-era shift toward hybrid and remote work means companies competing for talent, and cities competing for corporate relocations, have zeroed-in on quality-of-life metrics. But still, cities that view parks as part of an economic development strategy can create a virtuous cycle, where creating quality of life amenities attract businesses, workers, and residents.

Public-private partnerships

Establishing public-private partnerships, where government and local businesses or business groups collaborate, has become a popular vehicle for expanding park systems, says Clarke. In one TPL study looking at 20 U.S. cities, the group found that over a third of parks established over the last five years were created through land dedication, with developers providing parkland to cities as part of a larger negotiation around developing a large piece of property.  

Even with this shift in mindset, parks nationally are still “chronically underfunded,” says TPL’s Clarke. Cities also struggle with park maintenance costs, to the point where many may be reluctant to add to their park networks for fear of taking on unfunded or underfunded liabilities. TPL wants to help cities set up more funding mechanisms, like ballot measures, or creating special assessment districts to tax real estate near parks that then funds maintenance.

Near Washington, D.C., an area called National Landing has made park investment a central part of its pitches to corporations, says Tracy Sayegh Gabriel, President and CEO of the National Landing Business Improvement District. Systematic investment in green space, like Metropolitan Park and a water park with fountains and shade, has been part of the pitch to companies seeking to relocate. The area is also home to Amazon’s HQ2 project.

“I think we can reframe our thinking about parks as not solely recreation, but as critical economic, social, and environmental infrastructure,” says Gabriel. “I think fast-growing places where development gets ahead of that necessary natural and social infrastructure won’t perform as well.”

Developers and corporate tenants have also seen the value of their own property increase with park development, and have become more likely to make that investment themselves. Amazon, and the commercial landlord JBG Smith, both operate a number of privately-owned public spaces in National Landing. 

John Hardaway, a partner at Dallas-based Triten Real Estate Partners, says his firm’s developments in the area included substantial green space that gets programmed with local events and farmers markets. It’s not especially common for developers to spend an extra few million dollars on green space for a project; it’s still hard to justify spending that much on non-revenue producing uses. But with most potential tenants looking for hospitality and outdoor programming, it’s a smart business move. 

He also says cities that promote this kind of development, and make it easier to do public-private partnerships to add more park space, help themselves, by making projects more successful and more valuable, thereby increasing local tax revenue. 

“There’s a social good that comes with it, a little pat on the back for us,” Hardaway says of adding park space to projects. “But we’re capitalists. We’re providing this for the users of the project. But what’s different today is that we want to invite the whole community here, where commercial developers in the past wanted to welcome users and keep everybody else out.”