Thirty-five years after starting AllianceTexas, the 27,000-acre development that defines the far north side of Fort Worth, Ross Perot Jr. has only one regret. “I’d buy a lot more land,” he said. Visiting Alliance today, it’s hard to visualize what this vast corridor along Interstate 35W looked like before the landscape was filled with thousands of homes, massive industrial warehouses, sprawling corporate campuses, a bustling industrial airport and, yes, Fort Worth’s first H-E-B. When Perot started buying up property in the 1980s, most of the land was farms, ranches or empty prairie.
Over the years, Alliance has become a regional powerhouse for economic development, attracting hundreds of businesses. At least 575 companies operate here, many of them familiar household names like Amazon, Walmart and LG Electronics. Hillwood, the Perot-owned development company, estimates the project has had a $119.8 billion economic impact on North Texas since its inception.
But Alliance’s success wasn’t always certain. “Fort Worth could be mortgaging its future for a lemon,” the Star-Telegram wrote in April 1989, nine months before the opening of the development’s cornerstone, Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport, funded mostly by the FAA. “The federal government might have spent $31 million on one of the finest parking lots to ever grace a cow pasture.”
Perot was in his 20s when he began buying land for Alliance. For the son of Texas businessman and one-time presidential candidate, H. Ross Perot Sr., the development grew into a legacy-defining project. Today, Perot Jr. is the chairman of Hillwood, which develops properties across the globe.
Willed into existence by Perot, Alliance’s growth has been shepherded by Hillwood’s president, Mike Berry. After 35 years, it’s clear their gamble on once-rural property has paid off. “We thought we had a lot of land when we got started,” Perot said, “but Mike and I sit around now and go, ‘Why didn’t we buy all this land next to us?’ It is so hard to do when we had thousands of acres of land and no one’s showing up, but man, I wish I’d bought more.” Perhaps even more remarkable than Alliance’s success is that it’s nowhere close to finished — only about two-thirds of it has been developed.
‘Eagles don’t flock’
Decorated with modern, bright white paneling and dark wood, the lobby of Hillwood’s downtown Fort Worth office feels like stepping onto a perfectly staged movie set. Four backlit photos of Alliance and other Hillwood properties adorn the left wall, each displayed like a trophy. Above a pair of matching gray chairs by the glass entry doors is a quote from Ross Perot Sr. emblazoned on the wall: “Eagles don’t flock, you have to find them one at a time.” Next to it hangs a photo of father and son.
Perot bought the property that would become Alliance in 1985.
At the time, similar land around Dallas was significantly more expensive. Perot said many families that sold him their ranches were the first generation to do so, unlike in Dallas, where property had been bought and sold dozens of times. Perot Field — then called Fort Worth Alliance Airport — opened on Dec. 14, 1989, with a celebrating crowd of 300 to watch an American Airlines Boeing 757 be the first to land on the freshly paved runway. Perot, an avid aviator himself, rode in the cockpit.
Confronted by a need for more airport capacity in the Metroplex, the Federal Aviation Administration asked Perot to donate land for an airport. He agreed, but his aviation contacts told him what the region really needed was an industrial airport, not general aviation. U.S. House Speaker Jim Wright of Fort Worth pushed federal dollars for the project through Congress.
The late 1980s were tough times in Texas, where an oil bust had devastated the economy. Perot said he couldn’t get any aviation clients. That changed on June 7, 1989, when American Airlines Chairman Robert Crandall announced in City Hall that the carrier would invest over $400 million in a maintenance facility at the new airport, creating 4,500 jobs. It was such big news that NBC 5 preempted its morning soap opera “Generations” to broadcast the event live.
The Star-Telegram reported that Crandall’s announcement “virtually assured the success of Ross Perot Jr.’s grand vision to build the United States’ first airport dedicated to industrial use.”
At the time, Perot predicted that 20,000 to 30,000 people could be working at the airport in 20 or 30 years. It wasn’t meant to be with American; the carrier closed the maintenance center in 2012. But the overall Alliance development kickstarted by the airline has created over 66,000 direct jobs since then, according to Hillwood. Mike Berry — Perot’s longtime partner who is now president of Hillwood — said he was brought onto the Alliance project at its start to be a dealmaker and attract companies. He said people thought Alliance was a crazy idea at first. Many didn’t understand the opportunities that access to an industrial airport would provide. “We had to sell our ass off every day,” Berry said. “Still do, but it was different back then.”
BNSF Railway opened an intermodal hub a few miles away from the airport in 1994, changing plans for Alliance. Transport became the name of the game.
“Before Santa Fe came in, we really had no idea what we could do,” Berry told the Star-Telegram in April 1996. Perot Field and BNSF’s rail hub laid the groundwork for the development’s future role as a key mobility hub and inland port. The airport alone moved 2.5 billion pounds of cargo in 2023. The airport, railroad and access to Interstate 35 are all within a roughly two mile radius of each other. In 1994, FedEx broke ground on a $300 million sorting hub at the airport that officials expected to employ at least 600 workers.
Once major brands began making deals with Hillwood for industrial space and warehouses in Alliance, development snowballed. As the number of people working in Alliance grew, Hillwood expanded into home building. Over 14,600 homes have been built in Alliance since 1990.
‘A very unique perspective’
While luck might’ve helped, Alliance’s success is no accident. Perot and Berry have aggressively pursued new deals for decades, and the Alliance team prides itself on finding creative solutions for clients’ needs. Today, Hillwood has expanded into multi-family housing and has built retail properties, including a shopping center home to Tarrant County’s first H-E-B, to support the burgeoning population.
The company offers Alliance clients myriad services that cater to almost every need a business could have. That includes maintenance, such as landscaping and property management, and core components of new developments, like organizing public-private partnerships and building entertainment complexes. The company offers its expertise on foreign trade zones, workforce development and oil and gas.
Over the decades, Alliance has weathered just about every economic storm, from the Great Recession to the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’ve seen over this whole time, every possible recession, real estate cycle, pandemic, great financial crash,” Berry said. “I mean, almost any movie you want to see, we’ve seen the movie, and I think that gives you a very unique perspective.” Berry said one deal he wished had worked out was with Intel. The computer part maker explored building a manufacturing facility in Alliance in the mid-1990s, but the U.S. semiconductor market tanked, forcing it to halt plans in 1998. “Many deals have challenges,” Berry said. When asked about his dream deal for Alliance, Berry said he always hoped to bring a four-year university to the development. He said Hillwood explored deals, but nothing ever solidified. Tarrant County College operates a technical program at Perot Field. “It’s like building the city. You know, we ought to have every little bit of everything, quite frankly. We’re set up for everything,” Berry said.
