Tag: 76104 community redevelopment

A group that bought the dilapidated R. Vickery School on East Vickery Boulevard to bolster the area held a community meeting Tuesday night to gathe input on applying for a grant to clean up the property.

The meeting was held at Community Christian Church at 1800 E. Vickery Blvd. by The Beta Tau Lambda chapter and its nonprofit Livingston Community Development Foundation.

The nonprofit will submit an application to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Brownfields Cleanup Grant Program to support their efforts to remediate the R. Vickery School, which was opened in 1910. The program provides grants and technical assistance to communities, states, tribes and others to assess, safely clean up and sustainably reuse contaminated properties.

The program will help remove accumulated debris, illegally dumped materials, and hazardous substances from the site to eliminate environmental and public health risks. Their goal is to restore the property — which was designed with meticulous detail — to a clean and stable condition suitable for future redevelopment and community use, according to SaJade Miller, President of Livingston Community Development Foundation.

“What we’re trying to do is we want to renovate this,” Miller said. “We want to restore its luster, its shine, its zeal, and most importantly, its impact in this community.”

There were about 10 attendees who had questions about gentrification, what the function of the building will be and how the community could help. There were suggestions on what many of them would like to have in the building such as providing mental health services, job placement, educational programming and financial literacy classes.

The organization also has ideas such as their “Alpha Academy” or mentoring program, a commercial kitchen that can be rented out by the community and after-school or summer programs for youth.

They hope to collaborate with other nonprofits, churches, and organizations to bring more resources and opportunities to the area.

There were three environmental investigations that found damaged, non-friable asbestos materials, lead-containing paint, substantial trash and debris on the interior and exterior of the site and human and animal waste.

The organization will remove all carcinogens within the building and maintain the site for future use. They will have to hire separate lead and asbestos abatement contractors to remove harmful building materials, as well as engineering and construction contractors to design and implement building renovations. It will cost them approximately $600,000 in abatement costs and $15 million in renovation costs, totalling approximately $15.6 million.

The R. Vickery School was built in 1910 by Richard Vickery and was shuttered in 1985. It later had multiple uses, including as a nightclub that closed in 2004. It was then used by a photo ID and laminating service until the city of Fort Worth seized the property in 2007 in a tax foreclosure. It has since been abandoned, used as a homeless camp, and had half a dozen fires last year.

The school landed on Historic Fort Worth’s 2024 Most Endangered Places List, which aims to draw attention to the need to preserve historic places through restoration or preservation.

The City Council agreed during a December 2024 meeting to sell the R. Vickery School property for $1 and about $186,000 in back taxes to the nonprofit. They officially became the property owners in November.

The Vickery school property is in the 76104 ZIP code, which in 2019 had the lowest life expectancy in the state, according to a study by UT Southwestern Medical Center. Residents in the ZIP code struggle with access to health care, a lack of transportation, and access to healthy food, among other things.