Spotlight on The 400: Meet 5 Locals Bringing Innovation to the Fort

Innovation is our idea for the theme of this year’s feature piece that introduces Fort Worth Inc.’s annual issue of “The 400.”

by

Innovation is our idea for the theme of this year’s feature piece that introduces Fort Worth Inc.’s annual issue of “The 400: 400 of the Most Influential People in Fort Worth.” Of course, at the time we came up with the idea, COVID-19 didn’t exist. That became another layer to the interviews we ran with a number of our influencers on topics ranging from next-generation transportation to housing, education and economic development.

The magazine’s editorial staff, for the third straight year, produced “The 400,” drawing on our knowledge of the market and its rich history. We examined influence across a range of sectors locally from the arts to business, education, economic development, government, professions, nonprofits and philanthropy.

Because community is the way Fort Worth goes, we look annually at community participation, compiling, for one, a robust database drawn from the makeup of numerous nonprofit and civic boards to use as a tool in gauging influence. We looked toward big themes Fort Worth thought leaders have identified as key in moving our fast-growing city forward. We asked for ideas from the people we speak to daily and even ran segments of our list by them for feedback. We heard ideas, too, many pitched to us by denizens of “The 400” and other community members. COVID-19 forced a late re-examination, with some new faces making their way on as a result. This year’s list has 424 influencers.  

Attacking Homelessness: Flora Brewer Flora Brewer, a Fort Worth developer and investor with a long history of being interested in homelessness, won praise — and awards — for buying the run-down Palm Tree Apartments on Race Street in Fort Worth, a district that’s in fast transition today to higher uses, and converting it to 100% permanent supportive housing for people who were homeless. Brewer says all tenants were previously “unsheltered,” meaning they were staying in city parks and other similar places.

Skeptics wondered whether it would be possible to replicate Brewer’s project, given likely neighborhood opposition. “I made many abortive attempts to try and buy another property,” she said in an interview.

Brewer, through a nonprofit called New Leaf Community Services formed in 2019, acquired a 3-acre vacant lot early last year at 4444 Quail Trail in the Fair Oaks Addition in West Fort Worth near River Oaks, and she’s organized a coalition to get it built. It will be a $4.75 million project, 48 units, twelve 1,700-square-foot fourplexes, with four units of equal size.

Developers Randy Gideon and Tom Purvis are joining as project managers; Gideon, a longtime Fort Worth architect, designed the buildings. Brewer said she has locked up the funding from First Presbyterian Church Fort Worth ($1 million), her own Paulos Foundation, City of Fort Worth Housing Finance Corp., and the Amon G. Carter, Sid Richardson, Ryan, and Morris foundations. The project will be 100% permanent supportive housing. DRC Community Solutions to End Homelessness, the former Day Resource Center and the nonprofit that does on-site case management for Brewer’s Palm Tree Apartments, will do on-site case management for the new property. It’s the first project under a $5 million city allocation to the HFC for this kind of development.

“It’s a really terrific location,” with access by Trinity Metro bus to retail and other services, Brewer says. “We’ve got all the financing in place. We’re just finishing the contracts with the City of Fort Worth. Once that’s done, we’re going to break ground.”

Brewer has acknowledged a stroke of luck in being able to secure the Palm Tree site, while developer Pretlow Riddick was acquiring other lots around it in preparation for his ongoing upscale redevelopment. As Brewer tells it, Riddick had made an unsuccessful run at the Palm Tree’s listing broker and conferred with Brewer. She called the broker and was able to take the property under contract and close on a purchase.

That was in the summer of 2015. Brewer paid about $700,000 for the property and put in about as much for a total $1.4 million, all funded by her foundation, which owns it and maintains tax-exempt status. “We had it renovated and leased fully by June 2016,” she says. “It all happened very, very fast.”

The foundation has disclosed in federal IRS filings that the 24-unit property does about $230,000 per year in gross rents, and Brewer confirmed that is current. It pays $3,300 per unit per year to DRC for case management, and it provides nighttime security twice a week. Maintenance costs run high. “It is the 1955 gift that keeps on giving,” she says.

A fully permanent supportive housing development in a for-profit model would be very difficult because of factors such as the case management fees, Brewer says. “It does not work,” she says.

The foundation could easily sell the Palm Tree, but Brewer wants to be part of the solution. “Hardly a day goes by when I don’t get a call from a broker.”

Transit in Arlington? Mayor Jeff Williams Arlington is a city not known for transit, or historically interested in it. But city leaders want to change that — it’s a matter of what’s most effective. The city has completed two pilot programs with autonomous shuttles in its entertainment district — one with vehicles in traffic, the other not — and is in development on a third that could mesh with the popular Via rideshare program Arlington is participating in, using minivans. Arlington is in conversations with regional transportation authorities on potential east-west and north-south solutions.

Next year, the city, North Central Texas Council of Governments, and General Motors will launch a pilot funded by COG and GM to create and test an autonomous, electric, rubber-wheeled vehicle on an elevated steel platform to be built between the GM Arlington plant over Texas State Highway 360 to the Arlington Logistics Center. The vehicle would pick up completed truck interiors at the logistics center and drive them to GM. Arlington Mayor Jeff Williams, an oddity among U.S. mayors in that he's an engineer, believes the technology and infrastructure can be created at a fraction of the cost of light rail and, importantly, be significantly less intrusive to neighborhoods in construction and operationally. 

One day, such an elevated network could connect, say, the University of Texas at Arlington to South Arlington, down the spine of South Cooper Street, and run north to DFW Airport, Williams said in an interview. He sees the possibility of a central, multi-modal station that links various transit modes. Regional cargo-carrying like GM’s could help fund operations in the future.

‘“This is the real state of the future,” Williams says. If Arlington chooses not to continue with the GM vehicle after the pilot, the automaker would still use it to transport parts between the plant and logistics center.

Arlington also is participating in broader regional conversations about high-speed rail, hyperloop, and urban air taxi. Arlington’s interested, say, in a stop on a high-speed rail line between Dallas and Fort Worth, Williams says. But it would first have to join a regional transportation authority like Trinity Metro or figure out another way to fund it.

Williams says it’s important to note that other solutions will could come along. “We probably have not seen the technologies that are ultimately going to be transporting us,” he says. “We have opened up our city as a laboratory. We are going to be looking at all these technologies.”

Transportation King: Michael Morris Michael Morris, as director of transportation for the North Central Texas Council of Governments, gets to help the region define its priorities for everything from roads to public transit — and then hunt funding. 

His office is launching three transportation studies, including one that will focus on the western half of the metroplex, at the request of local leaders. Right now, in Tarrant County, he’s interested in better connecting Arlington within itself, and to DFW Airport and Trinity Railway Express to the airport, and extending TEXRail south to Fort Worth’s Medical District. Morris is advocating for a westbound high-speed rail line to Fort Worth from Dallas if the proposed privately funded Texas Central Partners line connecting Dallas to Houston goes forward. If Fort Worth got such an extension, the line could extend to Mexico. Morris also is looking into an array of next-generation technologies, like hyperloop, in which vehicles travel at high speeds through sealed tubes.

Overlaid on all of this is the unknown impact that COVID-19 will have on transportation in the future. “I think this is going to stay with us for a very long time,” Morris said in an interview.

Arlington is experimenting with next-generation technologies that could solve its problems, creating a north-south line and connections to the airport and Trinity Railway Express. Twenty-passenger, autonomous elevated vehicles could connect the Trinity to DFW Airport via the CentrePort station, which currently runs traditional shuttles over the road to the airport.

The first segment of TEXRail, which launched service between the Near Southside’s T&P Station, Fort Worth Central Station and DFW Airport last year, was originally slated to run all the way to the Chisholm Trail at Altamesa Boulevard but was later truncated. TEXRail has $38.9 million in leftover funding that can be applied to the medical district station. Morris is pressing for completion of an environmental assessment, and authorities are negotiating with the Union Pacific Railroad and Fort Worth & Western Railroad for right of way. TEXRail would run beneath the UP line. Fort Worth & Western has questions about liability on its right of way, Morris says. “We’re in conversations about how best to purchase insurance for this particular purpose,” he says.

Conversations about high-speed rail to Fort Worth are early, with Morris focused on environmental clearance for Texas Central. What’s not clear is how a Fort Worth-Dallas extension would connect to the Dallas line, who would operate it, or whether another technology such as hyperloop could surface as a better alternative. Once environmental clearance is complete, “it’ll be a whole lot easier to figure out who’s interested,” Morris says.

Logistics and COVID-19: Mike Berry Mike Berry has had an interesting perspective of the impact of COVID-19 in his job as president of Hillwood, developer of the 26,000-acre AllianceTexas master-planned community and major international logistics hub in north Fort Worth.

Movement of goods has spiked through Alliance’s logistics tenants, like UPS, FedEx, General Mills, Walmart, Craftsman, and Tom Thumb. “It’s been interesting to watch, in a positive way,” Berry says. “I don’t have access to numbers. We can only gauge in terms of what you see, what you hear. Hiring. Aircraft movements. Alliance is a very critical, central supply chain logistics hub.”

Many of AllianceTexas’ companies have been hiring through the outbreak of COVID-19. “Walmart, Amazon, logistics,” he says. “Fidelity Investments has been hiring. The financial service companies have had a huge spike in business. A lot of people are just having to transact. I was a little surprised by that.”

COVID-19 disrupted the world’s supply chain, including for badly needed medical goods. AllianceTexas, which is about 50% built-out, is front and center in regional conversations about whether COVID-19 presents opportunity for the region to bring business like manufacturing and distribution to the U.S. that's currently located in places like China.

Berry agreed this spring to serve on the Fort Worth NOW task force, co-chaired by Mayor Betsy Price, banker Elaine Agather, and businessman John Goff, to look into ways to help local business restart and determine whether COVID-19 presents economic development opportunities for Fort Worth.

Post-COVID-19, assuming there is a post-COVID-19 period, “I think we’ll see continued expansion and growth in the sections that are part of our backbone again,” Berry says. “Logistics, supply chain, e-commerce. [Business will] replenish inventory, at higher inventory levels probably, just to protect and buffer against any future disruption.”

President Trump’s high U.S. tariffs on goods coming in from China and other countries — along with factors such as efficiency, reliability, and cost of transportation — had already triggered conversation about prospects for onshoring business before COVID-19 struck.

“We need to reduce our reliance on offshore sourcing,” Berry says. “We need to do everything we can to create an environment where U.S. manufacturing can be encouraged to reshore.”

U.S. tariffs have closed the cost gap with China to an extent. Are they sustainable? What’s not clear is how Joe Biden, this year’s presumptive Democratic nominee for president, would approach China and U.S. trade policy if he were elected.

“Not to be political, but if Trump stays in office, I think they’re pretty sustainable,” Berry says of the tariffs. “You’ve got to balance economics and impact of tariffs on consumer prices in the U.S. It’s a long strategy. Every business is different. Every company’s going to have to make a different decision. Mexico’s going to be attractive to some. Vietnam’s going to be attractive to some. The U.S. will be attractive to others. Nobody’s going to bring back 100% of their manufacturing. Asia is still a huge market.”

Berry predicts major investment in new distribution technology coming out of COVID-19, such as autonomous surface vehicles. Hillwood is teamed up with Bell and Uber on the development of urban air taxi — manned and unmanned — in the region. Such vehicles could be used to carry passengers and deliver cargo, and the Jetson-esque vision has captured the public imagination.

Testing of autonomous surface vehicles is much farther along, Berry says. “That’s where most of the attention is going right now, because it can happen faster” than autonomous air vehicles, he says. “I think you can grow that at a fairly rapid pace.”

At Bell, Michael Thacker, the senior executive who leads the company’s team in developing new technologies for use in Bell products, can give a timeframe for when Bell’s first vehicles might be ready to go. But more important is the necessary infrastructure — vertiports and charging infrastructure for the electric vehicles.

“Building that out will take years,” he said during an interview in mid-March at the company’s Fort Worth headquarters, just before shelter-in-place orders took effect. “It’s not just a vehicle. Building and flying a vehicle is not the hardest part.”

Educating Our Children: Mattie Parker Fort Worth thought leaders have coalesced around a number of key issues that present impediments in moving the fast-growing city forward on strong economic footing. One all-encompassing umbrella covers children from when they’re born, all the way through high school, and ensuring they’re prepared for adult life — in jobs, college and community.

Mattie Parker earlier this year left her job as chief of staff to Mayor Price to join a new nonprofit called Cradle to Career as CEO, whose mission is aimed at helping shepherd Fort Worth children along to readiness. 

With primary backing of the Rainwater Charitable Foundation, Cradle to Career’s first initiative will be the Tarrant To & Through Partnership, which will pay to send counselors into six Fort Worth high schools this fall to boost guidance to students. Not clear yet is how the school district, which is moving to a combination of in-person and online instruction beginning this fall in response to COVID-19, will handle its many outside partners who send people into the schools every year.

Tarrant To & Through is teaming up with the TCU College Advising Corps, which will send college advisers into the Dunbar, Poly, Eastern Hills, O.D. Wyatt, Western Hills and Diamond-Hill Jarvis high schools to coach basics ranging from filling out financial aid forms to taking the ACT and SAT tests.

“No one’s asking the kids these questions,” says Parker, who has a law degree. “Are you on track to graduate? What about FAFSA? Do you have post-graduate plans [for after high school]? Are you taking the tests?”

Local school districts, Tarrant County College, and universities in the area have struck partnerships to try and improve college access and affordability, pointing out that most in-demand and well-paying jobs of the future require college. Many high school students don’t complete a FAFSA, the form used by colleges and universities to determine eligibility for financial aid.

“There’s still the belief that college is unaffordable,” Parker says. “It’s not just about high school anymore.”