Hey Westoplexians,
Some weeks the news shows up all at once, and this was one of them. A barbecue joint on a back road got the fanciest award in food. A grocery store we've been whispering about for two years finally said it out loud. A ranch west of town sold, a mall got its last date circled, and a Fort Worth woman turned 100 and spent the morning starting a construction project.
None of it happened fast. Most of it took years. Maybe that's the point.
Here's what caught my eye this week.
-josh
🌟 Fort Worth Finally Has a Michelin Star, and It Belongs to a Barbecue Shack
Goldee's Bar-B-Q is now the first Michelin-starred restaurant in Fort Worth history. The crew found out Thursday morning by text message, with a line already forming outside and smoke already in the air.
It took three years. Fort Worth is one of five Texas cities that paid to bring Michelin here, and we went home without a star the first two. Goldee's got a Bib Gourmand both times, which is cool, but it’s not as cool as a Michelin Star.
Not this year. The star went to five friends who grew up in Arlington, who make their own bread, mayo, and pickles, and who serve brisket next to Laotian sausage.
The line is not getting shorter. Go anyway.
🛒 The "Known for Its Tortillas" Grocery Store Has a Name Now. It's H-E-B.
If you've been reading this newsletter for a while, you know I've been circling the corner of Chisholm Trail Parkway and Oakmont Boulevard like a buzzard. Back in 2024, at a city zoning meeting, somebody asked the developer's engineer whether the mystery grocer planned for that site was "known for its tortillas." Nobody answered. Everybody understood.
It's official. H-E-B bought more than 20 acres on the northeast corner of that intersection, inside Overland, a 250-acre piece of the Edwards Ranch. Construction starts in early 2027. Doors open in late 2028.
Here's the part I like. The Edwards family has owned that land since 1848. Their company, Cassco, has been developing it since 1956, one careful piece at a time: Tanglewood, Overton Park, Riverhills, Clearfork. An H-E-B executive said customers have been asking for years when a store would land closer to downtown Fort Worth. The family that's held the dirt for 178 years was apparently in no rush.
Do the count with me. There's this one. There's the lot H-E-B is grading farther south at Chisholm Trail Ranch. And there's the store announced for Walsh. That's three on our side of town, from a company whose only full-size Fort Worth store today is up in Alliance. The west side waited a long time for one. So maybe we get three.
🐮 Brown Ranch Sold. 3,800 Homes Are Coming, and the Roads Have to Come First.
West of Fort Worth, right next door to Walsh, there's a 1,476-acre ranch that's been in the Brown family for generations. Houston developer Hines just closed on it. The plan is a master-planned community of about 3,800 homes built out over roughly 12 years, with at least three amenity centers, 10 neighborhood parks, a trail system, and 70 acres set aside for shops and services. The family's broker says homes should average around $500,000.
That's the headline. The fine print is better.
It took about a year of back-and-forth with the city to get here, and the city's condition was simple: build the roads up front. Walsh Ranch Parkway becomes the main north-south route. A new West Point Boulevard gets built. Old Weatherford Road gets upgraded. The reasoning, according to the broker, is that Fort Worth did not want a repeat of what happened up north, where the houses showed up years before the lanes did.
If you've ever sat through four light cycles near Alliance, you just nodded.
Twelve years is a long runway. Nobody's moving in next spring. But if you live in Aledo, Walsh, or anywhere along that stretch of I-20 and I-30, this is the shape of your next decade, and for once the plan starts with pavement instead of ending with it.
🏡 13.9 Million Homes Are About to Change Hands. Almost None of Them Are Small.
While we're on the subject of who lives where next. Realtor.com put out a report Monday on what people call the "silver tsunami," which is a dramatic name for something pretty ordinary: folks getting older and moving out of the houses they've been in for 30 years.
The numbers are big. Baby boomers and the generation before them own about 36.7 million homes right now. Over the next ten years, roughly 13.9 million of those are expected to change hands. That's a lot of front doors.
But look at what kind of houses they are. Out of that 13.9 million, only about 380,000 have two bedrooms or fewer. The rest are family-sized. Three and four bedrooms. A yard. The room that still has the height marks on the door frame.
So the wave is real, but it's not starter homes, and that's the catch for first-time buyers. The house that feels too big and too quiet for one couple is exactly what the family behind them has been looking for. The economist who wrote the report expects the effect to be uneven, market by market, and a place still growing like ours is not going to behave like a place that's shrinking.
Anyway. Worth knowing that the big shuffle everybody keeps predicting has already started, and it looks a lot like your street.
🏬 Ridgmar Mall Has a Last Day Circled
Speaking of things that are too big and too quiet.
JCPenney closes its Ridgmar store on November 1. It's been there since the mall opened in 1976. Fifty years, same anchor, same corner. After that it's down to a Dillard's clearance store, the movie theater, and a handful of small businesses holding on.
You probably know the rest. A Dallas firm called Ramrock bought the mall and plans to replace it with six warehouse buildings, about 931,000 square feet in all, under the name Ridgmar 30 Logistics Crossing. The developers have said demolition is likely more than a year out and construction could start around 2028. They've also said no data centers, which I'll take.
I'm not going to pretend warehouses are romantic. But an empty mall isn't either, and that corner of I-30 and 183 has been waiting on a plan for a long time.
If you want one more lap past the fountain, you've got about three weeks.
🥾 The Bootmaker Is Building a Parking Garage
The most valuable thing in the Stockyards is not a pair of handmade boots. It's a parking spot. So it makes a certain kind of sense that the people fixing the problem are the ones who make the boots.
M.L. Leddy's and the Franklin family broke ground Thursday on a $14 million garage at Ellis Avenue and 25th Street. Four and a half stories. About 246 new spaces on top of the 55 that are on the lot today. The Leddy's folks have been on that corner for more than 85 years, so they've watched the parking situation get worse in real time.
The Stockyards pulls in around 10 million visitors a year now, and the overflow has been spilling into the neighborhoods to the west. A city traffic study back in 2023 said, in more polite language, that the core of the district was jammed. This is the first real answer to it.
Two hundred and forty-six spots won't fix a Saturday in December. But it's a start, and it's being built by neighbors instead of handed down by somebody from out of town. I'll take that too.
I can’t talk about boot makers in the Stockyards without a shoutout to Capitan Boots - love those guys!
🎂 Opal Lee Turned 100 and Spent It Starting a Museum
On Wednesday, Opal Lee turned 100 years old. Most people would take the day off.
She spent the morning at the old Southside Community Center, where crews started clearing the site for the National Juneteenth Museum. It's a $70 million, 50,000-square-foot project that's expected to open in 2029.
About that timeline. The museum was first supposed to break ground in early 2023. It got pushed. Then it got pushed again. And if anybody in this city knows how to wait on something without giving up on it, it's her. She was 12 when a mob drove her family out of their Fort Worth home, on Juneteenth, in 1939. She taught school here for decades. And at 89, an age when nobody would've blamed her for sitting down, she started walking toward Washington, two and a half miles at a time, to ask for a federal holiday. She got it in 2021.
So a three-year construction delay was probably not going to rattle her.
Happy birthday, Ms. Opal. Fort Worth is lucky you stayed.
📚 Before You Go: The Library That Started With a Meeting
One more birthday. The Fort Worth Public Library turns 125 this year.
Here's how it started. In April 1892, a group of Fort Worth women sat down together and decided this town was going to have a public library that every resident could use. They chartered it as the Fort Worth Public Library and Art Association. Then they went to work raising the money, and the story goes that they asked the men of Fort Worth to chip in the price of a good cigar.
The doors opened in 1901. Nine years after that first meeting.
Nine years for a library. Fifty for a mall. A hundred and seventy-eight for a grocery store. Nobody in this week's newsletter was in a hurry, and look how it turned out.
🏡 Homeowner tip: plant a tree now.
Fall planting gives roots a whole cool season before a Texas summer. It covers digging wide instead of deep, calling 811, keeping big trees away from the slab, mulching, watering, and a short list of trees that do well here. It ends on Texas Arbor Day, Friday, Nov. 6.
Fun fact for the week: Governor James Hogg asked for a pecan tree at his grave instead of a monument, with the nuts handed out for Texans to plant. The pecan became the state tree in 1919. It picks up straight from the tip with “Speaking of pecans.”
That's the week in Fort Worth. As always, if you have questions about the market, want a free home value estimate, or just want to know what's happening in your neighborhood — I'm one reply away.
See you next week,
Josh Harville
Real Estate Professional | Fathom Realty, LLC | SA-0682306 Westoplex Region: Fort Worth · Aledo · Weatherford · Benbrook & surrounding communities
📞 817-917-8923
✉️ [email protected]
🌐 http://joshuaharville.fathomrealty.com/
Instagram: @Westoplex_Harville
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