Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Area ranks high
List calls region among best to live
Northwest Arkansas has ranked among the country’s top five metropolitan areas to live in for the third year in a row, according to U.S. News & World Report.
Rankings released today put Fayetteville and the surrounding cities at No. 5 out of the country’s 125 biggest metros, behind cities such as Austin, Texas, and Denver but ahead of Minneapolis, Seattle and Dallas. The region placed high thanks to its quality of life, healthy job market and strong population growth based on data from the U.S. Census, polling company Gallup and other sources, according to the report.
The fifth-place slot is hardly surprising, given years of national lists from U.S. News and other outlets praising Northwest Arkansas as among the best for affordability, minority-owned businesses and mountain biking, among other things. But the annual reminder doesn’t hurt, said Steve Cox, senior vice president of economic development at the Rogers-Lowell Area Chamber of Commerce.
“Everyone says their community is the best, but we actually have some facts to support it,” he said, pointing to development of Rogers’s downtown and Pinnacle Hills area as examples of the boost that can come from such positive attention. “National companies, people around the world are taking notice of Northwest Arkansas.”
The area also ranked fifth last year and third in 2016. Its strongest showings in the ranking index this time around were in the areas of cost of living and net migration. Northwest Arkansas, home to more than half a million people, was the 14th-fastest growing metro area in the country from mid-2016 to mid-2017, based on Census estimates out last month.
Charlie Alison, a local history enthusiast and editor for
University of Arkansas public relations, moved to Fayetteville in second grade and remembers college friends would shop in Tulsa, Okla., and take jobs in Dallas or Kansas City, Mo.
“I remember looking around at friends leaving, going, ‘Should I be going somewhere?’” he said. But at a high school reunion a few years back, many of those college friends had moved back, including one who had worked at Harvard University for two decades. Other friends wish they could do the same.
“They realized Fayetteville
and this whole region was booming,” Alison said. “If it were the same town, it would probably be really boring. But it’s a place that has kept changing all of my life.”
The U.S. News report used public safety measures, unemployment statistics, the media group’s own hospital and high school quality scores and other data sources to compute its overall scores. Northwest Arkansas’s unemployment has been below 3 percent for months. It’s also home to seven of the top 10 high schools in the state, as ranked by U.S. News last year.
Northwest Arkansas’s lowest score in the rankings was for what U.S. News called desirability, based on a survey of a couple thousand internet
users asking whether they’d want to live in a given place. The area’s desirability score was the same as Little Rock, which got an overall rank of 65th best place to live.
The report and others like it refer to Northwest Arkansas collectively by the name Fayetteville — U.S. News saw it as the most widely known city in the area, public relations coordinator Anna Beth Jager said Monday.
Springdale Mayor Doug Sprouse said he was used to the naming pattern but added every city contributes to the region’s well-being, echoing officials from multiple cities. He touted Springdale’s low unemployment and affordable homes, its diversity and amenities, and the fact it hosts one of the state’s leading
employers, Tyson Foods.
“That’s the thing, almost anything I say about Springdale could be said about the whole region,” Sprouse said. He added the region needs to continue welcoming people from around the country and world and keep the economic engine running — don’t take the high rank for granted, in other words. Other officials agreed.
“It is a sign that we’re doing a lot of the right things,” but also a challenge to keep doing so, said Karen Minkel, home region program director for the Walton Family Foundation.
Challenges come from growing and being a desirable location. Area nonprofit groups and advocacy organizations have pointed out
housing costs remain a burden for lower-income families despite the affordable reputation, and hundreds of people are homeless on a given day around Benton and Washington counties. Respondents in the Walton foundation’s regular regional quality-of-life survey often decry the lack of robust public transit as well.
Northwest Arkansas has the opportunity to learn from bigger and more established cities that often also score highly on national rankings, Minkel said. When foundation members and local officials travel to other cities, she said, “we always ask them, ‘What do you wish you tackled 10 years earlier?’”
The foundation and Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission have partnered for an ongoing series on improving mobility and transportation in a growing region, bringing in several outside specialists in transit and planning to speak with local leaders. The foundation and University of Arkansas are also working on a project to ease the development of affordable housing with the input of national experts.
“We’re incredibly fortunate to have a region that has a lot of different partners working diligently on quality-of-life issues and approaching it with a sense of urgency and possibility,” Minkel said.