Room for more

Density must be part of everyday decisions

It’s not unusual for this newspaper to report on the challenges of housing costs in Northwest Arkansas. The price of having a roof over one’s head continues to rise precipitously, whether you’re talking rent or purchase prices. The situation is a real quandary: Higher prices are a godsend for property owners who might want to put their homes on the market. Those who don’t own already, though, can see the possibility of housing stability move farther and farther away.

A couple of weeks ago, reporter Doug Thompson detailed how one organization that studied apartment and house rentals found that residential rents in Arkansas had grown seven times faster than the national average. Much of that number undoubtedly came from the northwest corner, where analysts suggest higher home prices and mortgages are convincing more people to keep renting. That, in turn, increases demand within the rental market, and you know what that does. Rental rates go up, up and up.

“As more people every day call Northwest Arkansas home, and we don’t have housing to meet that demand, the market is going to respond with higher rents,” said Duke McLarty, executive director of the Northwest Arkansas workforce housing center at the Northwest Arkansas Council, a nonprofit that evaluates trends in the region. “More housing is the answer. We just need more of it, and we needed it yesterday.”

In Bentonville, a recent study by builders, city government and housing experts estimated a little more than half of the city’s residents would have difficulty paying for a place to live if they were moving into Bentonville today. Rental occupancy rates continue to be near 100%.

We took notice the other day when Fayetteville Planning Commission Chairwoman Sarah Sparkman offered her thoughts on a proposed housing development that elicited opposition from neighbors. Sparkman said much of the opposition seemed focused on preventing any development of the wooded area. “Our densely wooded paradise could be transformed into a dense development,” one neighbor suggested.

Uh, yeah. Some of that’s got to happen if the region’s housing crunch will ever be relieved. And Sparkman spelled that out.

“We need more housing in Fayetteville, and we cannot achieve it just by cramming it all into downtown and way off the dead end of Wedington,” Sparkman said.

Density — the number of people packed into a specific space — matters a great deal. So does a desire to avoid sprawl by building up, maximizing the use of existing infrastructure.

It’s not just major studies where this idea needs to be heard. It’s in relatively small decisions made every week by planning commissions and city councils.