Live in Stop Six

Stop Six was the sixth stop on the Northern Texas Traction Company's interurban between Fort Worth and Dallas, and the name outlasted the line. Around 1896 Amanda Davis, the first African American to live there, bought an acre and built a cabin. Its school, begun as the Prairie Chapel Colored School, moved in 1925 into a building paid for by the school district, the residents and the Rosenwald Foundation, and that building has been the Stop Six Heritage Center since 2008. Dunbar High School on Ramey Avenue is the neighborhood's best-known institution: Robert Hughes coached its boys' basketball team from 1973 to 2005 on the way to more wins than any other boys' high school coach.

This guide takes the City's Stop Six overlay as its boundary, a line the City drew for the neighborhood itself: about 3,000 acres between Miller Avenue and Loop 820, from the Union Pacific railroad south to Wilbarger Street, wider than the neighborhood Wikipedia describes. The 2020 census counted 18,440 residents inside it, up from 16,968 in 2010, and owners lived in 54% of the 5,952 occupied homes.

The overlay is a rulebook for new houses, not for the ones already standing. The City Council adopted it on 10 September 2019, ordinance 23811, after the Zoning Commission voted 9-0, to extend design standards it had tied to its Neighborhood Empowerment Zone incentives to every new house, incentive or not. The staff report sets them out: at least 70% of every side must be masonry (brick, stone, cast stone, patterned precast concrete, cement board siding or brick panels); a two-car garage, set at or behind the front wall if it faces the street; a porch or stoop facing the street, with porches at least six feet deep and allowed ten feet into the front yard; a front door that faces the street and is recessed no more than six feet; at least one window of eight square feet on every side and sixteen on the front; and no chain-link or wire fence along a street. The report says the overlay has no effect on existing land use. The codified Section 4.408 would not open here, so confirm the wording with the City.

Inside it, one district asks more. The City's Historic Carver Heights district, about 260 acres with 2,168 residents and Martin Luther King Park, needs a certificate of appropriateness before any exterior alteration, new building or demolition. Meanwhile the old Cavile Place public housing is being rebuilt: a $35 million HUD grant awarded in 2020 is paying for more than 1,000 mixed-income homes in six phases, and the last, Bivens Place, was named in March 2026.

The price is a ZIP price, and the ground is a gas field. Zillow's typical value for 76119, where 47% of the residents live, was $197,421 in August 2026, down 2.0% on the year; 76105, with the reference point, was $166,865. Both run well beyond the overlay. On the six Fort Worth ISD units, 2.18908 per $100 at 2025 rates, a homestead at the 76119 value owes about $2,472 a year, about $4,322 without the exemption, and a homestead at the city's $327,000 median about $5,044; the arithmetic is on the Fort Worth page. The City's layer puts 17 producing gas wells inside the overlay on two pad sites, the nearest about 250 m from the reference point. FEMA's 2009 map puts 5.6% of the overlay in the 1% annual chance zone along Wildcat Branch and the streams it maps toward Village Creek, and the City's advisory high-water areas cover 13.4%.