Housing headaches

Region faces trouble as growth continues

Early last week, the news side of this operation delivered a three-part series exploring the building crisis — a crisis that is building, so to speak — when it comes to housing in Northwest Arkansas and the shrinking capacity for many residents to even hope to afford home ownership.

The crisis isn’t just about ownership, either. The housing crunch, as more and more people move into Northwest Arkansas, continues to put more and more pressure on rental rates, too. If you had any doubt that housing affordability and availability will continue to be a challenge in the years ahead, note one of the other stories appearing in the news pages last week: Northwest Arkansas became the nation’s 100th largest metropolitan area, according to the business and regional advocacy group known as the Northwest Arkansas Council.

The council said the latest estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau showed the federally designated metropolitan statistical area, or MSA, saw its population reach 576,403. The MSA consists of Benton, Madison and Washington counties.

What happens when people can’t find a place where they can afford to live? The region’s vaunted quality of life begins to erode for the less affluent, people like the wait staffs at restaurants, cashiers and stockers at local grocers, drivers who deliver food to your door steps, etc. — you know, just the folks everyone in Northwest Arkansas relies on. People have to bring aboard roommates simply to afford the monthly rent, or they have to relocate into smaller units, if those are even affordable or available.

And on the lower end of the spectrum, people are pushed into homelessness, which may not always mean sleeping on the streets. It might instead mean relying on the kindness of friends or family who do have homes, which in turn means homelessness is just a broken relationship from happening.

The housing crunch affects everyone trying to make their lives in the region. Take, for example, the resignation of Fayetteville City Council member Sonia Harvey last week. In her letter to the mayor, Harvey had this to say:

“Regrettably, the sale of our current leased home has presented a series of challenges over the past few months,” Harvey wrote. “Despite our diligent efforts to find a new residence within Ward 1, we were confronted with significantly higher rental prices and a lack of desired amenities. Consequently, we broadened our search to areas outside the ward, eventually finding a home that met our criteria.”

If you don’t live in the ward you represent, you can’t remain in the position residents elected you to, so Harvey was forced to give up her position of leadership.

Now, we won’t overplay Harvey’s situation. She also acknowledged a desire to spend more time with her young daughter and to reevaluate her professional life. Like most life decisions, hers was complicated. But that’s not at all unlike the decisions of renters and potential home buyers across Northwest Arkansas. They’ve got a lot of things going on in their lives, too, and want to provide the best living circumstance possible for their families. That means having a roof over their heads without being forced to compromise their own quality of life.

Harvey said late last week one house in Ward 1 her family tried to lease was priced 40% higher now than it was in 2019. Inquiries about purchasing the leased home they were living in brought a price of $400,000 for 1,600 square feet. When it went on the market listed at $420,000, she said, the home sold the next day.

She’s but one example of how housing and rental prices are outpacing residents’ capacity to insulate themselves from economic realities of a booming region where not enough low- and moderate-income, or workforce, housing exists.

Last week’s series on the housing crunch focused a great deal on possible solutions:

• The promotion of higher housing densities in the larger cities, moving Northwest Arkansas away from traditional single-family housing.

“Whether people like it or not, we’re going to see more and more compact housing types, like duplexes, quads, townhomes, clustered housing, and more apartments and condominiums,” said John McCurdy, community development director in Rogers.

• Creation of a regional housing trust fund that could be used to subsidize construction costs for new and renovated housing. The trust fund could be started by private entities, but a housing report from the Walton Family Foundation suggests an ongoing source of money would be necessary. That means taxpayer support or developer fees, the latter of which seems suspicious because any fee charged to developers trickles through to the price of new housing. The former likely leaves many people in Northwest Arkansas a little squeamish, too.

Imagine using taxpayer dollars to subsidize private developers so they won’t charge as much for housing. Sounds like an economic safety net for the developers that intends a trickle-down effect on homebuyers or renters. But some officials say such a use of tax dollars would reflect buyin from local governments and communities serious about solving the region’s housing affordability crisis.

Harvey said last week the housing affordability crisis is a national one that needs a federal action plan.

• Private-public partnerships are attempting to ease the worst of the housing crunch in Northwest Arkansas, in many cases relying on tax credits, waived developer fees or infrastructure spending by cities that reduce costs for housing projects. While a feasible path for promoting some affordable housing, it’s challenging to imagine this is a solution to the overall crisis as long as 36 people a day, on average, are moving to the region.

So what now? If nothing else, last week’s stories reflected the multifaceted aspects of potential solutions, some of which, quite honestly, may not be politically popular.

The other question is this: By changing the approach to housing in Northwest Arkansas, does the region lose some of the qualities that have made it such a desirable place to live and work? That, too, is a long-term risk.

What everyone knows, or should, by now is that the presence of affordable housing is as fundamental a community issue as the availability of water and sewer services or the curbside pickup of trash. Solutions will be hard to come by and politically disruptive, but nobody can afford to ignore the issue.

As we’ve noted before, such problems are easier to deal with in a growing economy like Northwest Arkansas. But forgive us if we occasionally wish that the influx of people could slow down just a bit, giving the region a chance to catch its breath and regroup.

For better or worse, it doesn’t seem the region will get much of a chance to do that.