Learning from mistakes

NWA can learn from others, avoid costly paths Guest writer

The Washington-Willow neighborhood in Fayetteville is one of just a handful of historic neighborhoods in Northwest Arkansas. It’s laid out on a typical gridded street pattern with a variety of single-family home sizes ranging from small bungalows to large mansion-style homes. It has a neighborhood school (Washington Elementary), an accountant’s office, boutique clothing store and antique furniture store. It’s within walking distance of the Fayetteville Square and the University of Arkansas, and has a food truck “yacht club” that popped up just across College Avenue. It was mostly insulated from the housing downturn and home values have since soared.

A couple of Saturdays ago, residents in the neighborhood organized a “progressive dinner party” with five host homes. About 50 people showed up for the event, ranging from young married couples with no kids to retirees. There was a young couple, both architects, who moved back to Arkansas after having lived in Seattle, Wash., for a decade. Another couple who lived in New York, then Los Angeles, before deciding to move to Fayetteville on a whim so he could do his screenwriting in peace. Another couple attended who found their way to Fayetteville from San Francisco to work with a Wal-Mart vendor. Stories like this repeated themselves throughout the night and are repeating throughout the region.

Northwest Arkansas is in a period of rapid population growth, adding approximately 30 new people every day. This growth is expected to continue well into the future, largely due to the employment opportunities that exist here, low cost of living, great schools and access to a plethora of amenities like Crystal Bridges, Kessler Mountain, Arvest Ballpark, the Arkansas Music Pavilion, Fisher’s Ford … the list goes on and on.

How does Northwest Arkansas absorb this population growth while maintaining the quality of life that makes it so great in the first place? This is something a generation of American cities before us have wrestled with, places like Austin, Dallas, Denver and Seattle. The best part is Northwest Arkansas has an incredible opportunity to learn from their successes and and avoid their mistakes.

The Urban Land Institute of Northwest Arkansas is a tool that can be used for just that. The institute is the largest network of real estate professionals in the world with a mission to provide leadership in the responsible use of land and in creating and sustaining thriving communities worldwide. It disseminates research and best practices gleaned from communities around the world. The Northwest Arkansas chapter was formed in 2016, and thanks to a grant from the Walton Family Foundation, took a delegation of about 25 elected officials and non-profit leaders to the Urban Land Institute’s fall meeting to begin to better understand the challenges that lie ahead.

The overarching themes from the conference are reflected in the aforementioned Washington-Willow neighborhood. Thriving communities have diversity in employment, people, transportation, amenities and housing. This diversity creates resilience during the ebbs and flows of history that is required to maintain a high quality of life and maximize economic potential. The conference also shared cautionary tales, such as the costs of public infrastructure investments in the form of roads, schools, water and sewer infrastructure that subsidized sprawl. These decisions had long-lasting effects on many of the cities represented, boxing them into a homogenized transportation system centered around the automobile. Those cities are now trying to revive what was lost by reinvesting in their urban cores.

Mike Malone, former executive director of the Northwest Arkansas Council, echoed these sentiments a couple of weeks ago at a Urban Land Institute NWA event at The Record in Bentonville, saying that providing transportation options (walking, biking, bus and auto) along with continued redevelopment of our downtowns are the most critical and immediate steps we can take as a region to retain and enhance the region’s quality of life.

Urban Land Institute NWA is committed to pursuing these goals by convening the private and public sector to help move the needle in this direction. It provides a unique forum for real estate developers, urban planners, non-profit leaders, designers, elected officials and academics from across the region. Our first-year programs include panel discussions around land-use topics, tours of upand-coming developments like the 8th Street Market in Bentonville and Uptown in Fayetteville, and an upcoming peer city trip to Austin, Texas.

By studying the successes of thriving neighborhoods and learning from the mistakes that hinder others, this regional, multidisciplinary group has the potential to shape the growth of Northwest Arkansas for the better at this vital moment in our region’s history.

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