Where to live in Fort Worth

Where the neighborhoods come from. The City of Fort Worth publishes no single layer of neighborhoods it draws itself. What it does keep at neighborhood size is a set of layers, and each guide here takes its boundary from the first of them that fits. A City district that carries the neighborhood's name comes first: one of the 14 historic districts on the City's map, as for Fairmount; the Stop Six overlay, a zoning district the City approved in 2019; or a public improvement district, as for downtown and Heritage. Where the name belongs to a redevelopment organization, the boundary is the area the City maps for it: Near Southside, Inc. for the Near Southside, and the Cultural District Alliance for the Cultural District. Everywhere else it is the area a neighborhood association or homeowners association covers on the City's map of the organizations registered with it, 320 of them in September 2026. Where two or three associations share a name, as in Wedgwood, Candleridge and Polytechnic Heights, the guide takes them together, and where a historic district holds most but not nearly all of an association's residents, as in Mistletoe Heights, the association's area is the boundary and the district is named inside it. Each guide names which boundary it uses and what the name covers, and its population is the 2020 census count of the blocks inside it. Only the City of Fort Worth is covered. Westover Hills, Westworth Village, River Oaks, Benbrook, Haltom City, Richland Hills, Forest Hill, Edgecliff Village, Lake Worth, Saginaw, Watauga, Keller, Sansom Park, Blue Mound, Everman and White Settlement are separate cities with their own councils and tax rates, and Edgecliff Village sits entirely inside Fort Worth; none of them is here. Neither is the City's extraterritorial jurisdiction, the unincorporated land within five miles of the limits, nor the areas the City has annexed only for limited purposes, where it applies some of its ordinances but collects no property tax. And a Fort Worth mailing address is not proof of a City of Fort Worth address: the appraisal district's notice of appraised value for a property, which lists the taxing units in which it is taxable, is the one to read.

The five areas are ours. The City does publish divisions, and none of them is a way to choose where to live. Its ten City Council districts, numbered 2 to 11, are electoral, and the mayor, elected at large, votes on the council besides. The planning sectors its map layers carry, from Far North to Southside, are drawn for land-use policy. And the registered organizations are the right size for a guide and far too uneven for a grouping: they run from under an acre to more than 6,700 acres, and on our count of the 2020 census blocks they take in 551,238 of the city's 918,770 residents, about three in five. The grouping here uses the names residents use instead, and which neighborhood lands in which area is our judgment.

What is not here. Inside the limits this selection still leaves real places out. The East Side has only two guides for now, Polytechnic Heights and Stop Six; Handley, Oakhurst and Woodhaven, each a neighborhood association on the City's map, are the next to be written there. Rosemont and Carter Park have association areas of their own and Morningside a historic district, and Walsh Ranch and Chisholm Trail Ranch are homeowners associations on the city's edge; they were left out to keep the first set to a size that could be finished, and they come as the guides do. Some names people use have no residential line of their own. Almost nobody lives inside any City boundary drawn around the Stockyards, which sit beside the Northside and Diamond Hill guides. Alliance has no residential boundary at all, and Heritage, east of Alliance Town Center, stands for it; Eagle Mountain is a lake outside the city and a school district, and Lake Country stands for that corner. The City's Magnolia urban village is split between the Near Southside and Fairmount, and Rivercrest Drive falls inside Monticello.