Growing Tandy Hills

Tandy Hills, a 160-acre parcel of public land famed for downtown views and fields of wildflowers, just grew by 16 acres thanks to a $2.75 million purchase by the city. The deal may someday provide space for more parking and even a visitors’ center, but for now the biggest impact may be to frustrate dumpers, campers — and developers.

The main purpose of the transaction from the city’s standpoint was to protect the area’s ecological integrity by keeping it from getting paved over, said Allison Docker, City of Fort Worth Green Space Champion.

“Development would have added impervious surfaces, increased stormwater runoff, and potentially caused pollution and erosion within the park,” Docker said.

That might or might not have happened if the city had not stepped up with $750,000 from the Open Space Program provided by a 2022 bond and $2 million from park fees. Plans for commercial development were in the works, said David Hinson, executive vice president at Younger Partners, the Dallas real estate firm that brokered the deal, but developers had hit some sizable snags.

“We had intended for it to be multifamily or high-density residential of some kind,” Hinson said, “but it was cost-prohibitive based on providing access, and there’s a lot of topo on it, too. There would be a lot of grading and retaining walls and things of that nature.”

Currently, the property that includes three addresses on Ben Avenue and one on East Freeway houses only a scattering of tents occupied by people with nowhere else to stay. A crumbling street and a parking lot for a long-defunct restaurant provide wheeled access for people looking to dump unwanted furniture and other trash.

Don Young, an environmental activist who lives across from the park’s main entrance at 3400 View Street, has long been a champion of the facility through the citizen group Friends of Tandy Hills. Young applauds the city’s purchase and says volunteers plan to start improving the property by uprooting the many non-native trees, bushes, and other vegetation growing on it.

“We’re looking forward to restoring it and getting out the invasive species,” Young said, gesturing at a hedge of privet marring the original prairie landscape.

The new addition will also serve as a buffer to block tents, motorcycles, four-wheelers, dumpers, and other undesirables from the area reserved for nature and hiking. For now, at least, it won’t do much for the main irritation — besides foreign plants — getting Young’s goat. That is photography.

On any sunny spring weekend, Young said you can find a hundred cars parked along View Street, many driven there by photographers seeking splashy fields of flowers and dramatic downtown views as backgrounds for images. There are so many shutterbugs that they trample the flowers while jockeying for superior angles.

“These photographers come in here with families with 10 kids, and they run out in the meadow and ruin it,” Young said.

He also points to well-worn trails where dirt bikes and four-wheeled off-road vehicles have rutted the hilly land, which is supposed to be reserved for foot traffic.

For now, the various non-vegetative invaders may notice little change. The new city property is technically not accessible to the public, although eventually 11 acres or so will be part of the park. The paved sections along Ben Avenue may be used to provide more parking, and it’s possible the city will build a long-sought visitors’ center on the site of the former restaurant.

Young likes the idea of the visitors’ center, in part because it would mean parks department personnel would be on-site to staff it and police the various undesirable activities.

“The main thing we need is somebody on the property all the time,” he said.

All this and more will be explored in depth later this year when the city renews its partnership agreement with the Friends of Tandy Hills. Park planners will also examine and revise the 2008 master plan for the area, a process that will provide for community engagement.

Unrelated, ongoing improvements planned include additional trails and signage on the Broadcast Hill parcel adjoining Tandy Hills to the east. The big Tandy Hill news, however, is this current acquisition, which fulfills a longtime vision for expanding the facility.

The latest purchase also exhausts the funding remaining from the city’s 2022 bond program. Further down the road, the parks department proposes that the next bond election provide another $25 million for purchasing open space.

But even if that money for more parkland comes through, this latest deal probably represents the endgame as far as adding to Tandy Hills’ scope.

“We’ve been asking the city for many years to buy this land,” Young said. “Now I think we’ve gotten all the land that can be gotten.”