To address challenges created by Northwest Arkansas’ unprecedented growth, community leaders announced plans Tuesday to collaborate on the development of a regional growth strategy.
Finding solutions to byproducts of the region’s expansion, such as a lack of affordable housing and increased traffic congestion, was the focus of the NWA Council’s spring meeting Tuesday in Bentonville.
Northwest Arkansas is the 18th fastest-growing metro in the U.S. with an estimated 36 people added to the population every day. That growth shows no signs of slowing, with the region’s current population of approximately 576,000 projected to reach 1 million by 2050, according to council officials.
“We’re really going to have to have a regionalized approach to a lot of this or we’re going eat up all the land we love so much,” said NWA Council President and CEO Nelson Peacock.
Outdoor recreation is an important aspect of quality of life for Northwest Arkansas residents, according to research findings released by the council this week. Eighty-three percent of those surveyed rated the region’s quality of life as good or excellent. The aspects of quality of life that received the most favorable ratings included outdoor recreation, safety and clean drinking water.
In terms of challenges, 71% of respondents said a shortage of affordable housing is the biggest issue, followed by traffic congestion (64%) and the destruction of green space (40%).
At Tuesday’s meeting, Fayetteville-based architect and landscape architect Alli Quinlan said the housing challenge isn’t just population growth, but population relocation. For the first time, more people are living in urban areas than rural ones. Construction of lower-density developments to accommodate that urban growth often leads to “eating up some of our most beautiful and productive land with sprawl,” she said.
Housing is a complicated issue, and no one thing is going to fix it, Quinlan said, so officials have to try new things and make adjustments in response to what happens as new tools are rolled out.
Adjusting zoning regulations to allow for higher-density developments could be one piece of the puzzle, Quinlan said. Additionally, thinking more regionally will be important, especially when it comes to water and sewer infrastructure in Northwest Arkansas, which straddles six different watersheds, she said. Infill growth is often limited by the sizes and conditions of water and sewer lines that connect them to the system, she noted.
“So what is the city in charge of? Not how many people it lets move here, but where they go and at what density and what their housing looks like via zoning ordinances, which in most municipalities are not coordinated to utility system designs and expansion plans,” she said. “And in our region we are not calibrating these things between municipalities either.”
In addition to policy changes and alignments, Quinlan said rethinking the strategy for building developments to accommodate growth will also require public education and “winning some hearts and minds.” Public advocacy work will be critical to making policy changes happen, she said.
“What we have done has not been enough…We have to work together, we have to work regionally and we have to not be afraid to make mistakes as we go,” Quinlan said.
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The NWA Council launched a workforce housing center in March 2021 with the goal of providing housing solutions for the region’s critical workforce. Last summer, council officials announced the center’s first attainable housing investment, a 77-unit mixed-income apartment project in downtown Springdale that would include 30 units permanently reserved for households earning below the region’s area median income.
Officials hosted a groundbreaking ceremony for the project in March.
Northwest Arkansas project aims to provide affordable housing for area’s workers
Peacock told the Advocate Tuesday that policy changes will ultimately have to come from elected officials, but he hopes the NWA Council can play a facilitating role in helping municipalities communicate and collaborate.
In the coming months, Peacock said the council will convene more meetings to identify priorities as well as where regional collaborations would make sense. From those conversations, Peacock said they’ll identify the top issues that have the best chance of making an impact, and he hopes to roll out the regional growth strategy in the next six to nine months.
After housing, Peacock anticipates looking at traffic and transportation. He said the council wants to work with the Arkansas Department of Transportation on ways to expedite some of the area’s big highway projects because “we’re under an inflationary time period, so every year we delay means it’s that much more expensive to get done.”
Although Northwest Arkansas has its challenges, Peacock said it’s important to continue growing because the region needs to diversify its economy. The area has long relied on a handful of employers, but developing a diversity of employment helps create a more robust economy, he said.
“For us it’s not trying to slow things down, it’s how do we accommodate, how do we preserve the character of this region, and a lot of that is what we talked about, housing and transit, because the character is not the buildings,” Peacock said. “The character’s the people that live here…the decisions we make over the next two to five years will determine the next 20 in many ways, so we need to get busy.”
