BENTONVILLE — Traditional subdivisions of three- or four-bedroom homes on large lots are too big for the typical household in Northwest Arkansas and inflict increasing costs on all resident ratepayers and taxpayers, the Northwest Arkansas Council heard Tuesday.
The region’s household size is down to 2.64 people per dwelling and dropping, architect Alli Thurman-Quinlan of Fayetteville told the council’s spring meeting. Yet city zoning laws throughout the region practically require building large homes, she said. Those laws suited growth in the 1960s and ’70s but no longer fit, she said.
“We have failed,” Thurman-Quinlan said. “What we’ve tried is not working.”
Figures show 72% of the region’s land available for residential building is zoned for single-family homes, she said.
The council invited Thurman-Quinlan, a former Fayetteville Planning Commission member, to speak after public opinion research commissioned by the council. The research showed housing affordability to be by far the lowest-rated aspect of quality of life in the region.
The council is a group of business and community leaders who address regional issues. About 180 members and guests attended Tuesday’s meeting at The Record event center in downtown Bentonville.
Building homes bigger than what purchasers want stretches city infrastructures and services such as streets, wastewater, police and fire protection. The fewer dwellings per mile of street, the fewer taxpayers bear the cost of those services. Those costs include maintenance costs, she said.
“Our infrastructure growth is faster than our population growth,” and the population is booming, Thurman-Quinlan said. The population of Benton and Washington counties is projected to reach 1 million people by 2050, regional planners say.
One group particularly hard-hit by the lack of housing options is women age 50 and older who are widowed or divorced and living alone, Thurman-Quinlan said in an interview after the meeting. Their children have moved away, leaving them in large houses to maintain and clean. They have large amounts of equity in the home but do not want to leave their neighborhood, and their neighborhoods do not offer other housing options, she said.
“We need big houses, and we’re not going to stop building big houses, but we need other kinds of housing too,” Thurman-Quinlan said. “We need housing where people can downsize after their kids leave home and not leave their neighborhood, and some family with kids can buy their house.”
Nelson Peacock, council president, and chairman Todd Simpson both told the crowd in their remarks the region needs to prepare for the expected growth, which will add more than 400,000 people to the region by 2050.
“The decisions we make today, in this two to three years, are going to tell us what kind of future we’re going to have,” Peacock told the group.
The council will support a multi-city regional growth strategy, Peacock said. In particular, the region’s cities need to coordinate and plan their infrastructure growth, particularly regarding wastewater treatment, Thurman-Quinlan had said earlier in her remarks.
Absorbing 400,000 new residents while maintaining the things about Northwest Arkansas that people like — such as outdoor recreation and green space — is a challenge, Nelson said. The region’s leaders need to find things they can cooperate on in those areas too, he said.
The region’s population growth will eat up 8.2 square miles of land a year if zoning laws do not change, Thurman-Quinlan said.
“We’re not going to stop growing after 2050,” she said.
State Rep. Delia Haak, R-Gentry, is a council member who represents a district in western Benton County, away from the region’s main growth corridor around Interstate 49 and U.S. 71. Smaller communities where the growth could go do not have the number of ratepayers they need to be able to finance the big infrastructure projects the larger cities do have, she said. If they could afford those projects it would take more of the strain of building more infrastructure off the largest cities, she said.
Ana Hurley of Fayetteville, big view director for Circles NWA, said she was “thrilled” to hear the council is wanting to tackle these issues. The Circles nonprofit is an anti-poverty group. The biggest challenges faced by people in poverty or of limited means in the region is housing costs — and the problem is rapidly spreading upward on the income scale, she said.
“If nurses, teachers and firefighters can’t find a place to live, they’re not going to move here,” Hurley said. “That affects the whole community. This is a problem for everyone. It is raising the cost of everything, for everyone.
“We’re used to being one of the lowest populated places in the country with low housing prices,” Hurley said of Arkansas. “We don’t have the zoning or permitting in place for anything else but what we’ve been building.”
As important as affordability are renters’ rights, Hurley said. Arkansas ranks last in the nation on protections for renters, she said. Making housing affordable will not solve the region’s housing problems without some minimum standards for livability, she said.
“You can still be evicted for nothing,” she said.
Public opinion research commissioned by the council: