Getting crunchier

Housing crisis demands changes in NWA

Discussions and decisions of planning commissions around Northwest Arkansas draw attention a lot more than they used to, or they should.

Decisions about which commercial and residential projects are approved or rejected have always been of great importance. But the housing crunch in Northwest Arkansas has intensified and planners articulate more and more that today’s development is insufficient to match demand for housing. Every regulatory decision has greater potential to either help or to hurt.

When the experts say Northwest Arkansas’ larger cities need to develop in ways they historically haven’t — with more density, primarily, and less car-centric sprawl — we believe them. Projections have the region growing to beyond 1 million residents by the time this year’s high school graduates hit their early 40s. Don’t be fooled, folks: That’s not as long as it sounds.

“We’re running into a problem where we’re not being paid enough to be able to afford to live in the homes that are provided for us here,” said Chloe Hutson, a Realtor at Collective Real Estate Partners. She spoke of her experiences during a panel discussion Wednesday at the Fayetteville Public Library. “I can’t afford to buy a house here, and that’s what I do day in and day out.”

It’s hard to get any business leader to accept that the solution to housing affordability is higher wages. Certainly, it’s believable that Northwest Arkansas won’t dig itself out of an affordability crunch through pay raises, which themselves can raise the cost of living in the region as those business costs trickle through the economy.

Public policy, though, can influence housing costs, which are indeed excruciatingly high. Hutson said the average price of a house in Benton County hovers around $450,000, which she said would require a mortgage of $3,000 a month. To avoid meeting the definition of cost-burdened, a household income would need be about $9,000 a month.

The day before, the private Northwest Arkansas Council business leadership group released research showing housing affordability to be, by far, the lowest-rated aspect of quality of life in the region. Decisions made in the next few years will determine what kind of future the region will have, according to the council’s president, Nelson Peacock. We read that to mean either a positive experience or a negative one for many of the region’s residents and future transplants.

Architect Alli Thurmond Quinlan of Fayetteville, a former planning commissioner invited to speak to the council, said the region’s leaders have not changed decades-old zoning laws that heavily favor larger three-and four-bedroom, single-family homes although that’s not what is in demand. Nearly three-quarters of the region’s properties are zoned for single-family housing, she said. The region needs big houses, she said, but the more affordable kinds of housing needs to be bolstered, not discouraged.

“We have failed,” she said. “What we’ve tried is not working.”

But changes to zoning aren’t necessarily that easy to get passed. In city hall chambers around the region, we regularly see clashes between what the experts say is needed and what the people already living in Northwest Arkansas communities are comfortable with. Resistance to denser development remains, at least to the extent that many people don’t want to see it in their existing traditional neighborhoods. The political challenge, and it’s not inconsequential, is to find the balance between the needs or wants of existing residents who can be quite protective of the status quo and the housing to meet demands of residents who don’t yet own homes.

It’s not just the tension between having and not having enough places for people to live, although that is a major concern. People in many cases are struggling to move from renting to the more community-enhancing status of home ownership. There is nothing wrong with renting or the vast majority of renters. But home ownership tends to deliver a more stable and thriving community, whether it’s in terms of social and political involvement, economic impact, volunteerism and schools.

It should be a community concern when the costs of housing turn renting into a necessity as opposed to a choice. Ownership that seems out of reach for too many residents has a corrosive effect on community spirit.

Beyond that, though, local advocates say a quarter or more of renters in the region are burdened by using a third or more of their monthly income on rent. The high demand and short supply drive rental rates higher.

The answer is more housing and a change in attitudes about higher densities.

It’s great to see projects with some promise, whether it’s creating new regulations in Bentonville to allow for cottage courts types of developments or Fayetteville’s program of offering off-the-shelf home designs that, if followed, will give builders a streamlined path of approvals for smaller, more affordable houses in the downtown area.

What leaders are searching for is a way to address future needs without dramatically changing the nature of Northwest Arkansas communities that make the region such a popular place to live today. It’s a high-wire balancing act.

Failure to make changes, though, threaten to make Northwest Arkansas choke on its growth.