Happy Baggett, the developer who led a partnership that brought major mixed-use development to Southeast Fort Worth for the first time in decades and spent the last months of his life raising money for early childhood learning centers, died overnight of cancer, his family said Wednesday. He was 67.
Mr. Baggett announced through his social media seven months ago that he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, had about six months to live, and planned to spend his remaining days with friends and family. Mr. Baggett chaired a major October event to raise money for early childhood learning centers built and run by Child Care Associates of Fort Worth.
Mr. Baggett kept up a rigorous schedule almost until he died, giving media interviews about Child Care Associates, showing up regularly for afternoon happy hours at the Grace restaurant in downtown Fort Worth, where he was an investor, and maintaining a pace even after he initiated hospice care. Indeed, a few weeks before he died, Mr. Baggett attended Fort Worth’s Margarita Ball, which serves children’s charities, telling friends on his social media that it was likely his final public appearance. “I am not a victim,” he told friends repeatedly after his diagnosis, speaking of a life filled with God’s grace.
Mr. Baggett, who had done deals in Dallas early on in his career, had migrated to the west and done deals in Trophy Club and the Alliance corridor when in 2008 he represented a group of partners – led by Lockard, of Waterloo, Iowa - that purchased the giant Masonic Home tract at U.S. 287 and East Berry Street.
The first major development in decades in Southeast Fort Worth, it created a critical landing spot for a Walmart-anchored shopping center in a food and retail desert; market-rate and affordable-rent apartments; Uplift charter school in a zone marked by poverty and low-performing public schools; YMCA branch and Cook Children’s clinic in an area marked, among other things, by high infant mortality; and headquarters campus for ACH Child and Family Services, which runs critical foster and family support programs. The partnership recruited the highly regarded Columbia Residential, known for its Purpose Built Communities vision, to take over the residential portion of the community.
Mr. Baggett cultivated strong relationships with neighborhood leaders and public officials in advancing the development. But in one remarkable clash, Mr. Baggett, in recruiting the YMCA of Metropolitan Fort Worth to relocate its aging McDonald branch to Renaissance Square, organized a group that offered to buy the old branch and convert the challenging hillside site to apartments. The Y would use the proceeds to purchase a discounted lot in Renaissance, and launch a fundraising campaign to build a new branch. Mr. Baggett, in conversations with neighborhood leaders, secured the support of the leadership in all but one of the surrounding neighborhoods.
But Mr. Baggett lost a key City Council vote after the pastor at a church across from the McDonald Y organized throngs of church members to protest the apartment development. City Council member Kelly Allen Gray, whose district includes Renaissance Square, sided with the pastor, questioning whether the neighborhood leaders represented the sentiments of their constituents. The lost vote pushed the Y years off of its schedule. Mr. Baggett and neighborhood leaders questioned whether the church protestors lived in the city council district. Mr. Baggett, denied the opportunity to speak at the council meeting because there was no record he registered, threatened to pull his partners out of future Fort Worth deals. “They can kiss my ass goodbye,” Mr. Baggett, furious, told a reporter after the vote.
“Other than the bishop, I’ve never had a single person out of neighborhoods vote against me at anything that came through the council,” Mr. Baggett told Fort Worth Magazine in an August interview. “Never had a single person send a letter. Never had a single person voice anything to me, other than 100% support for 12 years on everything I’ve asked for.”
Mr. Baggett kept his partners in Renaissance Square and pursued other big deals in Fort Worth. He said he patched his high-profile personal conflict with Gray. “We’re dear friends now,” he told a reporter years later.
In the August interview, he confirmed publicly he had organized a group of investors that several years ago offered to buy the vacant and deterioriating T&P Warehouse, considered a linchpin to the revitalization of the Lancaster Street corridor downtown. Mr. Baggett said in the interview his partners exited those conversations three years ago; the building still sits idle.
“She’s not going to do anything, I think, until she passes away, and her son can sell it, if she doesn’t restrict him,” Mr. Baggett told the magazine of the T&P’s owner, a Dallas investor.
Mr. Baggett grew up in Odessa and attributes his philanthropic interests in children to his good experiences in the Odessa public schools, saying old Odessa money ensured all children had an equal shot at a strong education. An elementary school teacher exposed him to music, and Mr. Baggett later sang in choir with the Gatlin Brothers, who grew up in Odessa. Singing in a church choir with his then-wife also eventually turned out to be a key entry point for Mr. Baggett in the Dallas business community, where he began his career after moving there with his family as a young man.
In Fort Worth, Mr. Baggett was invited to weigh in on urban development issues ranging from housing to transportation as his influence grew. He was named to a seat on the Tarrant Transit Alliance board, despite his strong skepticism of public transit.
Assuming competing opportunity costs, he wanted to focus on building roads or next-generation technologies like driverless, rather than buses, he said. “I’ve never been on a bus in my life,” Mr. Baggett said in the interview. Asked in the interview for his perspective on one major potential transit project in Fort Worth, Mr. Baggett responded, "you know how many roads I can build for that? Kiss my butt."
Child Care Associates in October gave Mr. Baggett a leadership award after he kept his promise to chair the fundraiser. The Happy Fund at Child Care Associates has a $12 million goal, and the money will go toward improvements at existing Child Care Associates early learning centers, and the construction of new ones. With third-grade literacy rates at a low 30 percent in the Fort Worth public schools, community leaders have keyed on the issue as a critical workforce and economic development problem the community must face up to.
“I have had a fabulous life,” Mr. Baggett, who packed in time this summer with his twin 47-year-old children and four grandchildren and planning his funeral at Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, told well-wishers in his Facebook post announcing his diagnosis. “I’m doing great. I’ll be spending what time I have left continuing to be the same Hap Baggett that I’ve always been. I love you all and want to share the joy, happiness, and laughter that has been my last 67 years!”