The rumors were true - the Albertsons at TCU will be coming down to make way for a mixed-use development featuring the first urban-styled grocery store in Fort Worth. The new development, on the northwest corner of University & Devitt and just south of the Bank of America at University & Berry, will be five stories tall and feature a ground floor consisting of a 50,000 square foot urban Kroger store and another 4,300 square foot retail space, a 584 space parking garage in back, 38 new on-street parking spaces, and 164 residences on the upper floors.
Below are a couple of closer looks at the site plans of the first floor and upper floors. Click any of the renderings for a bigger view!
Did Kroger buy/lease the site? Sounds like Albertsons is leaving the DFW market after all.
Ryan Place,
A local developer owns the property and Kroger is leasing space in the new building from them.
You know, the GrandMarc across the street has an interesting arrangement with TCU… so that it’s essentially student housing.
I wonder if this Kroger+Residences building will end up being another place to party off-campus - but near campus.
This sounds great! A real European style housing and shopping development.
How exciting for the Fort-I’ve been to similar developments in Spain and they’re great for one stop shopping. Hopefully Fort Worth will take to this type of development so that we see more of it. Makes me sad I don’t live on Greene street anymore though.
Has anyone heard when this will occur?
Does anyone know who the developer is on this project - or the architect?
I’m hearing Savannah Developers. If you’ll notice, they now have an office just south of Albertson’s across Berry.
I suppose what I meant in my earlier post was… does anyone know if this’ll be aimed at students or can anyone rent/buy?
I think the student housing options are already overdone in this area. For starters, TCU’s added quite a few new dorms and is updating the rest. The GrandMarc can’t fill up (or keep its residents happy, it seems… student publications are constantly littered with ads with people looking to sublet a unit in that building)
With a handful of new TCU-student housing projects (off-campus) on the horizon, can we really expect them to fill up? First and second year students have to live on campus anyway.
Anyone know who the architect is?
Perhaps, it would bring TCU alumni (and friends of TCU) closer to campus, that is, relocating from elsewhere?
I am in favor of Kroger over Albertson, but I am not sure of having another high rise just one block away from an old established neighborhood. Another entry is very true, the Grand Marc has yet to reach 80% cap.
K has better produce, too.
maybe it’s because Grand Marc doesn’t have any windows in their living rooms!
I would think that TCU could support quite a bit more multifamily units in the immediate neighborhood. The new buildings will liklely cannibalize from apartment complexes farther from campus where some students still live (Hulen/Stonegate, Bryant Irvin, and on River Park). When we see the residential population grow right around campus we can expect a greater amount of student-targeted retail (coffee shops, etc), and pedestrian and bicycle activity, which will be great for student life. By the way, TCU continues to grow its student body steadily - they are at about 9,000 total now.
Can someone offer proof of the substantive source of this information and confirmation thereof. According to RumorFighter, nothing but Blue Sky.
Well, Jon, the plans have been drawn up by Humphreys & Partners Architects of Dallas for local developers Savannah Builders (who have several projects going on in the TCU area - two under construction are the Cantey Place Townhomes and the Skyrock condos). They have been submitted to the city, I believe. These renderings are less than a month old.
Things could always change, but thus far it seems on the level.
Is this some way of suggesting I’m making this up, or something? This comes to me from a trustworthy source. They might even be public record now that they’ve been sent to the city.
I’m not sure why “RumorFighter” feels the need to suggest I’m pulling this out of thin air, but to me this all seems pretty reliable.
This sounds like great news for the TCU area. It will help to improve the appearance of the area quite a bit. I would love to see more retail and food options to give the area more of a “college town” type feel.
Kevin,
Is it possible to get your email? I have a few more questions I wanted to ask you.
TCU’s newspaper reports on the story…
http://tinyurl.com/5kxzp9
I am not surprised that the neighborhood association is against the development, but it’s an incredibly short-sighted opposition in my opinion. What’s there now is a typical suburban grocery store that is 100% oriented towards car traffic. A grocer on the ground floor of an urban structure would encourage more pedestrian and bike traffic to the store and might just entice people who would otherwise have driven.
Sometimes, neighborhood associations don’t recognize a good thing even as it’s staring them in the face.
Why would a neighborhood association be opposed to an urban grocery store? That just sounds insane? I’d love to have an urban grocery store in my neighborhood (which is Fairmount, by the way).
Aside from the architecture, what else defines a grocery store as “urban”?
I’ve shopped at a few European grocers - but they were small, independent shops. I have a hard time conceptualizing a large American chain modifying its usual layout.
I’m guessing there would probably be a somewhat smaller selection (and maybe higher prices).
But does “urban” necessarily equal that Whole Foods-y “natural” and organic option?
JP,
“Urban” simply means the design of the structure and its relationship to the street. Nothing more implied.
An urban grocer is no different than an urban department store, or an urban cafe, or an urban anything. All it means is that the building comes right up to the sidewalk, features parking on-street and/or hidden to the rear, features “permeable” facades on the ground level giving pedestrians both something to enjoy as they pass by and eyes watching the street from within for safety, that sort of thing. It just means that the building is oriented to human scale, not to cars as the current Albertsons is.
It’s about the physical form of the building. I am just particularly enthused in this case because the ground floor programming is a grocer. Grocers in this area have been reluctant to do anything beyond the typical big concrete tilt-wall box behind a parking lot that typifies suburbia, even in urban locations such as this one. That Kroger seems willing to move into a space whose nature (while it is hardly “strange” and is backed up by thousands of years of human habitation) is so unlike the prevailing attitudes in this city is to be commended, and that’s one thing I’m excited about. I can’t tell you how many times I have brought up wanting a grocer in an urban building like this only to be shouted down by some more abrasive commenters that “no grocery store would ever do that in Fort Worth” and that it “doesn’t work.” Which is nonsense, of course, but 50+ years of ingrained development patterns are hard to erase at times, even if the alternative has been around far, far longer.
I am of the opinion that ground-floor programming isn’t as important as the building’s physical form. As long as that is good and urban, the ground-floor programming can change but the quality of the urban fabric remains more or less constant. I’m just glad in this case to see a grocer coming into an urban structure in Fort Worth.
There’s nothing at all about “urban” that should dictate the content of the store. I would be happy with an organic grocer, or with a Kroger. There is room for all kinds of places in true urbanity.
Thank you, Kevin.
As far as you know, is this the only urban grocery store in the works in Fort Worth?
Also, can you explain why some might have a negative reaction to this development?
From The Skiff newspaper article:
“The density would just be horrendous,” [a resident] said.
I’d heard similar complaints during the recent “Let’s Talk Fort Worth” forum about making the city “too dense”.
While I’m certainly in favor of a more “human scale” environment, it’d be nice to know the opposition’s viewpoint in greater detail.
I would love to see a grocery store in downtown Forth Worth. It wouuld be convenient for those of us who live downtown. I hate going to Walmart or Target, if I had store that was comparable downtown, I would rather go there. I hope that make it very urban and downtown chic.
JP,
About opposition to density - that’s one heck of a question. :) It would probably require more time to bang out a full answer. Needless to say, I don’t feel that a five-story building located just off one of the busiest intersections in urban Fort Worth is too dense at all.
There are your typical NIMBYs - which stands for “Not In My Back Yard.” They are opposed to virtually any new development in or near their neighborhood, despite the fact that the neighborhood in this case is not a single-use walled subdivision somewhere in Burleson, but an already urban-styled neighborhood in the heart of a mixed-use area just starting to get back on its feet after having been mutilated by car-oriented development.
There are people who think that “urban” means “forcing everybody to live in skyscrapers,” which I’ve pointed out time and time again on this site is simply false.
There’s a lot more to the subject, but that’ll require more time. Perhaps I’ll make it into a full post.
One thing I’d like to point out is that there *are* good and bad kinds of densities, but the simple fact that this building will be five stories does not automatically make it “bad density.” Design matters. Context matters. I’d ask the neighborhood if they *really* prefer an ugly barren parking lot behind an ugly windowless big box store over a nice new building with big friendly windows on the ground floor.
But yeah…bad densities. Obviously, it’d be terrible to build a thirty story skyscraper on Magnolia, for example. But there are tons of points between “nothing” and “massive skyscraper” that are perfectly compatible with the neighborhood.
I think when many people hear the word “density”, they really think of congestion, particularly traffic congestion. It is essential to distinguish between well designed dense environments and those that were not designed for density yet became very busy and therefore congested.
Kevin,
Please note that Savannah Developers is actually only the builder of Cantey Place, not part of the development group. They are part of the development group for Skyrock