Hey Westoplexians,

Born and raised on this side of the Metroplex, I'll tell you — it's a good time to be in the Westoplex. The world is watching, the west side is growing, and there's a lot to talk about this week.

Here's what caught my eye this week.

-josh

Look, I'm not going to pretend I've been a lifelong soccer guy. But when the United States beats Australia 2-0 to clinch a spot in the knockout round of the FIFA World Cup — and the semifinals are being played thirty minutes from my house — even a football-and-barbecue Texan starts paying attention.

The 2026 World Cup is the first to feature 48 teams and the first co-hosted by three nations: the United States, Canada, and Mexico. And of all the cities in the world that could be hosting matches, North Texas got nine of them — more than any other venue in the tournament. Nine. AT&T Stadium in Arlington is pulling double duty as "Dallas Stadium" for FIFA purposes, which, if you've ever tried to tell a Fort Worth person they live near Dallas, you understand the irony.

Sundance Square is broadcasting every single match with food and drink to match. The whole region has gone full soccer mode. Fort Worth doesn't always get the spotlight when Dallas is next door, but right now the world is coming through our front yard and our city is showing out. Go USA.

📎 Source: FOX 4 News DFW

If you've lived in the Westoplex for any length of time, you know the Aledo Bearcats. Multiple state championships. A football culture so strong it basically defines the town's identity. And they've built all of it competing in smaller classifications — the kind of program that dominated because they were simply better than everyone around them.

Well, that era is over. Starting this fall, Aledo moves up to 6A — the largest and most competitive classification in Texas high school football. It's a new district, new competition, and a whole new level of scrutiny for a program that has never had to worry much about losing. Texas HS Football called it "one of the biggest challenges in program history," and they're right.

I'll be watching this one closely. The dynasty has never had to prove itself at this level. Friday nights in Parker County just got a lot more interesting.

📎 Source: Texas HS Football

There's a 90-year-old building at 1400 Henderson Street that spent most of its life as a farmers market and then just kind of... sat there. It's a Mission Revival landmark — the kind of building that makes you slow down when you drive past it — and for years, Fort Worth watched it wait for something worthy of it.

That something is finally here. Chef Jenna Kinard and her husband Micah are leading three concepts inside the restored Fort Worth Public Market, headlined by Madrone — an upscale fine dining restaurant built around chef's tasting menus and locally sourced Texas ingredients. Think wagyu tartare, Gulf oysters, and hamachi with mesquite bean miso. Kinard describes it as seasonal Texas cooking with a Southeast Asian touch. Fort Worth is ready for this.

The project also includes Willow, an upscale cocktail lounge, and Public Market Café & Goods — a community-focused café for the rest of us who just want good coffee and a pastry on a Saturday morning. The whole thing is part of a multimillion-dollar renovation by Wilks Development. Madrone is targeting a mid-2026 opening.

Fort Worth's dining scene has had a remarkable few years. This might be the crown jewel.

📎 Sources: PaperCity Magazine | Fort Worth Magazine

On March 5, Mayor Mattie Parker picked up a shovel at the corner of University Drive and Westside Drive — that's Westside Drive now, for those of you who still call it by its old name — and officially broke ground on Westside Village.

"This development will bring all those things together," Parker said, gesturing at a location that sits about a mile from downtown, a mile from the Stockyards, and within walking distance of the Cultural District. That's not an accident. That's a $1.7 billion bet on the west side of Fort Worth.

The full build-out is 37 acres and four phases, eventually delivering 880,000 square feet of Class AA office space, 1,785 apartments, 238,000 square feet of retail, and a boutique hotel — all to be completed by 2035. But what's already underway in Phase One stands out: Fort Worth's first mass timber office building and an underground jazz club.

An underground jazz club. In Fort Worth. Right by the Cultural District. I did not have that on my bingo card but I am absolutely here for it.

The development sits on the former Fort Worth ISD headquarters site — a place that represented bureaucracy for decades and will now represent something entirely different. Phase One is targeted to deliver by end of 2030.

📎 Sources: Fort Worth Report | Fort Worth Inc. | CandysDirt

For the last decade, every time someone said "DFW growth," they meant Frisco. Or Plano. Or McKinney. The northeast corridor got all the headlines, all the corporate relocations, all the master-planned communities stacked so close together you could borrow sugar over the fence.

That era is ending.

Land costs in Collin County have climbed to the point where builders are looking west — hard. The corridor stretching from North Fort Worth out through Parker County has become what analysts are now calling "the Westoplex expansion," and it's becoming the region's primary release valve for housing demand. Fort Worth alone added about 32,000 new residents in the past year. Tarrant County has grown from 1.8 million people in 2010 to about 2.3 million today — a 26% increase — while staying younger and more affordable than the Dallas-centric core.

UTA real estate professor Sriram Villupuram put it plainly: the Westoplex is increasingly absorbing the corporate expansions, industrial tenants, and population growth that previously flowed into Dallas and Collin counties. In many ways, it's the part of the Metroplex with the most room to grow. The numbers are starting to catch up to what people out here already knew.

📎 Sources: DFW Housing Weekly | HousingWire | UTA News

Here's the number that matters this week: $345,000.

That's the median home sale price in Tarrant County right now. Compare that to the overall DFW metro median of $420,000, and you start to understand why buyers who've been priced out of Dallas, Collin, and Rockwall counties keep ending up on the west side. Rockwall County is sitting at $448,000. Dallas County closed sales are down nearly 10% year over year.

The broader DFW market has cooled — home values declined about 5% across the region in 2025, and analysts expect prices to remain flat or tick down slightly through the rest of this year. That cooldown is hitting hardest in the markets that ran the hottest. The Westoplex, which grew more deliberately and didn't spike as dramatically, is in a comparatively healthy position.

If you've been waiting for the right moment to buy on this side of the Metroplex, the table is set. The value is still here. It may not be for long.

📎 Source: Dallas Express

If you want a concrete example of what the Westoplex expansion actually looks like on the ground, here it is.

On June 8, the Reilly Brothers Property Company filed a preliminary platting application with the city of Fort Worth for a 238-acre development at the southeast corner of Farmer Road and Old Weatherford Road — north of I-20, way out west. The development is called "Aledo 240" and the numbers are significant: 650 single-family homes, 1,500 multifamily units, and 1,000 townhomes. That's more than 3,000 residences on land that right now is mostly open space.

The plat also shows 31 acres of mixed-use space and nearly 87 acres of open space woven throughout. So this isn't just a subdivision — it's a small community being built from scratch in far west Fort Worth.

There's also a subplot worth watching. The Aledo 240 site sits directly across I-20 from the planned Dean Ranch development, which is currently at the center of a lawsuit filed by the cities of Aledo and Fort Worth against the city of Willow Park. The allegation: Willow Park illegally annexed land to claim the Dean Ranch development for itself. That fight is still working its way through the courts.

Reilly Brothers didn't respond to requests for comment, so this is still early. But a preliminary plat filing is a real step — not just a rendering on someone's website. The west side keeps growing.

📎 Source: Fort Worth Star-Telegram

You might not see this on the front page — defense contracts don't exactly trend on social media — but Fort Worth is flexing some serious economic muscle right now, and it deserves to be said out loud.

Lockheed Martin's Fort Worth facility just secured more than $1 billion in new military contracts for F-35 fighter jet upgrades. A billion. With a B. The work is being performed right here in Tarrant County, employing thousands of the skilled workers who make up the backbone of this city's economy.

And that's not all. Fort Worth-based Air Center Helicopters — the largest helicopter operator in the DFW Metroplex — has landed contracts to provide logistics support to the U.S. 7th and 5th Naval Fleets. A local company. Supporting naval operations. In two different theaters.

People sometimes describe Fort Worth as having a "quiet confidence." I think that's right. We're not out here making noise about it. We're just building fighter jets and supporting the Navy while hosting the World Cup and putting up a billion-dollar development. Busy summer.

📎 Sources: WFAA | Fort Worth Report

If you haven't made it out to the Cultural District this summer, this is a good week to go.

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art is currently running two exhibitions that, taken together, make for one of the more compelling museum afternoons Fort Worth has offered in a while.

The first is Fortune of the Spirit — a retrospective of photographer Robert Bergman's 65-year career, on display through August 10. Bergman is known for his intimate style: black-and-white street work and color portraits that don't just photograph people, they seem to see them. The show includes 51 works that the Amon Carter acquired in 2020, many of which haven't been publicly displayed before.

The second is East of the Pacific, running through November 30. Organized by Stanford's Cantor Arts Center, the exhibition explores the impact of Asian migration on American art through the work of 32 artists spanning the mid-19th century to today. Six thematic sections — including Points of Contact and Visions of Chinatown — make it the kind of show you can get lost in.

Both shows are running through the summer. Worth an afternoon.

📎 Source: PaperCity Magazine

I came across a piece this week from the Fort Worth Report's "Where I Live" series — an essay by recent TCU graduate Hiya Bhatte about moving to Fort Worth as a student, landing in the Clearfork neighborhood, and slowly falling in love with this city through the Trinity Trails.

She writes about seeing the river for the first time — brown water, littered banks — and not being impressed. Then, over time, something shifted. She started walking the trails. The river became a connector. A place to slow down.

"The Trinity connects Fort Worth's neighborhoods as it flows through them," she writes, "reminding us to slow down and appreciate where they are."

I'm not going to reproduce too much of it — you should go read the whole thing yourself. But I'll say this: there's something about an outsider falling in love with Fort Worth that always hits a little harder than someone who's been here their whole life telling you it's great. Hiya came in skeptical and stayed. That's the best endorsement a city can get.

The Trinity Trails are a 40-plus mile network that almost nobody fully appreciates until they discover it for themselves. Go read Hiya's piece. Then go walk the trails.

📎 Source: Fort Worth Report

Nothing big happened in Weatherford this week. That's kind of the point.

Weatherford is the county seat of Parker County, about 25 miles west of Fort Worth on I-20, and it is one of the most historically loaded small cities in all of Texas. Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight — the legendary cattle drivers whose partnership inspired Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove — both have deep roots in this part of Parker County. Bose Ikard, Goodnight's most trusted trail hand and one of the great unsung figures of the Texas cattle drives, is part of this story too. These aren't just names in a history book. They're the reason the West is the West.

Beyond the cattle history, Weatherford gave us Broadway star Mary Martin and her son Larry Hagman — who, for the younger readers, played J.R. Ewing on Dallas, which is either a fun fact or an existential crisis depending on where you stand on the whole Dallas-vs-Fort Worth thing.

As the Westoplex grows — and it is growing fast — I think it matters to remember what was here before the master-planned communities and the new retail corridors and the defense contracts. The land we're building on has a story. Weatherford is a pretty good place to start learning it.

📎 Source: City of Weatherford

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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