Fresh Eyes on the Future of Rural Texas

When the City of New Fairview, Texas (population: 1,682) was ready to assess the future of their rural community, they needed a tailored plan addressing the specific challenges and concerns they faced. They also knew that the traditional planning approach would be a big expense for the community — yet would still lack the attention to local detail to move them forward. 

Comprehensive plans tend to duplicate conventional and non-specific "solutions," with little concentration on  unique local conditions and values, often resulting in Planning Paralysis. For that reason, most tend to sit on the shelf, without much relevance to leaders or residents. 

Typical planning processes would have automatically left New Fairview with the “conventional suburban” development pattern seen throughout DFW — unable to intentionally shape their own destiny.

The approach taken by this class explores more creative scenarios, which may allow them to maintain and enhance much of their rural character while still emerging with more housing options, a greater variety of economic opportunities, and an identity that they can be proud of. 

In that spirit, New Fairview brought on UNT’s PA program, ASH+LIME and Antero Group to direct the students in creating a meaningful Comprehensive Plan for their city.

Thus far, several factors distinguish our process from more typical planning approaches. These include

1 — A strong foundation in financial assessment, with a focus on understanding current and projected budgets. 

This allows the students to create various scenarios, and project the financial impact of each.

2 — Being deeply rooted in unique conditions and community desires, with in-depth assessment of local assets and challenges. 

Creating a narrative to illustrate how community surveys + background research informed their solutions development. 

3 — Using “niche” concepts to address many of the challenges identified in early surveys, in implementable ways. 

Example: an “agri-tourism” strategy, which would allow them to leverage and reinforce their rural character to support economic development.

At its core, the project is focused not only on the top-down expertise of the planners, but on providing the community with tools and resources it needs to invent its future – while working within existing constraints and limitations. Pushing Past Planning Paralysis requires a more engaged approach — assessing the tradeoffs between different sets of decisions, experimenting with space activation, and leveraging the expertise of the community — to create useful and transformative change.

It is hoped that this experience will help jumpstart the students' professional development, while mentoring them to take an active, results-oriented approach for communities. This course is a prototype for creating actionable planning services for a variety of towns and cities. UNT aspires to use it as a pilot for similar planning efforts in the future. 

Every community, of every type and size, deserves an adaptive, resilient, and localized approach that deeply engages with both their place and the people who live there. ASH+LIME, Antero Group, and UNT are proud to support the City of New Fairview — and to help guide the next generation of innovative public administration.