JamesE

I can understand that. Fayetteville still has a whole lot to offer, however, despite the stupidity of our city government. Rogers feels very suburban and artifical to me; even the Pinnacle area is really just higher density suburban blandness. I thought I would love living in Benton county a few years back, and I absolutely hated it once I moved there; to each his own, I suppose. I know plenty of people who likewise really like Benton county and don't much care for Fayetteville and its neighbors. Fayetteville offers the only true urban experience in NWA, which is why it's so frustrating seeing the city council doing much to prevent the very sort of development that once helped to make Fayetteville what it is today. The Sarah Marsh-types pander to people who want the city to stay exactly as it is, nevermind it is change that made what it is in the first place. And nevermind Sarah Marsh herself is pro-smart development, even if she does have a very bizarre and self-destructive way of showing it. And you're right; 20 years ago, developers would have had to suck it up, pass their expenses along to the customer, and conform to whatever restrictions the city imposed. Now days, they and their customers have the option to go elsewhere and that's exactly what they'll do, at least until the politics finally swings back in favor of growth & development.

Many of them already are. My builder, who recently has done a lot a high-quality infill work in Fayetteville, now flatly refuses to have anything to do with the city due to previous city council decisions. He's turned his attention to Bentonville. This is a guy who builds LEED homes, who advocates for zero lot housing (which mitigates spawl) and who rehabilitates deteriorated neighborhoods: exactly the sort of developer the Fayetteville city council says it wants and are tacitly relying upon to implement the Fayetteville 2030 plan, which of course envisions significant infill in these exact neighborhoods. I know he plans to come back if/when the city council grows a brain, but after yesterday, that could be a very long wait. As for folks like Specialized, I imagine they'll try to force the city council to honor their existing building permits and then focus future development in lower density out on Weddington. The demand is certainly there for student housing, the UofA isn't building it themselves, and if we can't do it right by building density in urban areas then it'll get built somewhere else (where it will add to sprawl).

Correct. But it's Marsh who said "let's make Fayetteville eat a big pile of dog poop" in the first place while telling the City council that it's only warm chocolate, not dog poop, knowing full-well most of them are too lazy and stupid to know the difference. Lionel Jordan, Adella Gray and the rest of that sorry lot didn't think dog poop would taste good until after Sarah Marsh suggested it. And once they started licking their chops planning to eat that big pile of dog poop, naively thinking it to be warm chocolate, she didn't do nearly enough to stop it. All of them need to be voted out; the complete lack of leadership and vision displayed by the city council here is astounding.

Marsh owns this, despite her belated attempts to divert the trainwreck she put into motion. We can only hope the damage will be undone sooner rather than later, very likely by new council members and only after many missed opportunities finally jolt the remaining members back into reality. Nothing exposes cynicism and poor leadership quite like voting against one's own proposal - and then blaming the very same people who objected to the ordinance from the begining for it having passed, as Marsh did this morning on the Fayetteville Flyer. Her argument seems to be this would have wound up being a very good and beneficial ordinance if only those who opposed her would have negiotiated nicely with her gun pointed at their heads (or at the very least, their business plans), helping her to craft something far more sensible and less destructive than what she had actually demanded, in the brief time before her foolish collegues took her threat seriously and actually pulled the trigger - which they did. And now it's the hostages' own fault he got shot. Pure foolishness.

With a shotgun.

Yup. Marsh & Petty were trying to extort the city into compromising on something they thought would wind up being only slightly tedious to developers and instead they got the ball rolling on an ordinance that evectively submits the Fayetteville 2030 Plan to seppuku when it comes to downtown in-fill - and to top it off, Marsh & Petty had the audacity to blame developers for this colossal trainwreck they put into motion. As you said, our city is being run by utter morons - two camps of morons, in fact: cynical morons with negiotiation skills and plain stupid morons with no vision for the future of our city. The only remaining questions in my mind are how long is it going to take for this insanity to get repealed and how much damage will be done in the interim.

I'd have to say either Bentonville or Rogers. Fayetteville can't seem to make up its mind if it wants to grow or to stagnate, to spawl or to develop density. Fayetteville has the greatest land area, the region's only true downtown and has excellent room for growth west & east, but it has no cohesive plan to develop it, it has hamstrung its own 2030 plan for in-fill due to allowing NIMBYs far too much say in city planning and has very poor civic leadership. Springdale is poised for a lot of growth around the new Don Tyson interchange and the future 412 bypass, but also seems to lack leadership and has by far the most stagnate downtown of the four major cities. Bentonville is getting the most new cultural institutions, has a thriving downtown but seems hampered by being relatively landlocked. Rogers seems to have the right mix of land, leadership and vision for the time being - which as a Fayettevillian, I'm loath to admit.

And if Sarah Marsh has her way, that'll be the only skyline we'll have for a long while...

Good point - lots of university towns have very similar buildings adjacent to campus. The anti-development types will complain no matter what is built,

Even Portland OR isn't hip (or dumb) enough to limit buildings to less than 100' in downtown.

Good point - I read a while back that Washington Regional couldn't have been build as-is had this ordinance had been in place back when it was built due to the residential requirement, and Washington Regional doesn't exactly loom over uptown. With required setbacks and height limits, it won't be possible to squeeze enough squarefootage out of high value parcels to make them cost effective for development, which would tend to leave derelict but valuble real estate such as the former Mountain Inn site vacant for a long time yet to come.

Agreed. It's impractical idealists like her who make sprawl inevitable: green, urbanist developers who try to do things the right way get treated like heretics merely for insuring that their developments have the density required to make a profit.

Agreed on all points; I also strongly dislike the individual to which you are referring. It seems to me there are two types of urbanists in Fayetteville: pragmatists, who want dense, sustainable, economically viable, environmentally-friendly, multi-use development. And then there are the "idealists" who seem to oppose all dense development (while paradoxically, simultaneously claiming to oppose sprawl), who advocate mass transit while encouraging low-density development patterns that ensure mass transit won't work and who propose or advocate such onerous requirements that urban redevelopment and in-fill is no longer cost-effective in comparison to greenbelt (i.e. "sprawl") development out in the periphery. Well-designed, attractive, LEED-certified five story buildings downtown (exactly where they belong) are hardly a problem, but this councilwoman in particular panders to the NIMBYs who go out of their way to make it a problem. A lot of area NIMBYs complain constantly about developments such as Sterling Frisco, nevermind that it's the very high value of the land plus the current, idiotic downtown height restrictions, advocated by such "idealists," that lead to the supposedly hulking profile of this particular development in the first place. This could have been a slender highrise with setbacks, merging with the streetscape, but the height limit prevented it. As is, I love the design, even if it is massive. If these new ideas go into effect, then it becomes uneconomical to build. No one will buy land that they can't profitabily build upon, and then the area slumlords who have put nothing into their properties since the 60's will continue to own deteriorating properties in increasingly blighted neighborhoods. But at least then, the NIMBYS will be happy.

It looks nice - my wife & I sat outside at Arsaga's the other day and noticed how nice it looks from Dickson St. I think they've replaced damaged brick as they went; there were several big pallets of brick in the parking lot when they started. I'd like to see Hillcrest stay where it is, but add a liner building on one or both sides to tie it back into the streetscape.

No one here is making comments that are hostile towards the homeless - it's a simple statement of fact that with increased economic activity, there's going to be friction that is going to have to be addressed. The issue isn't homeless people in general, but rather the "long-term homeless," many of whom have mental health and/or substance abuse problems, living in shanties near public parks and growing residential areas. I know many of these individuals because I've put in a lot of volunteer time in area shelters; and I know my neighbors, many of them young parents, some of them long-term residents, and I know their concerns. The Walker Park community has always had a very uneasy relationship with the unsupervised homeless camps in the area - which, let's be honest, are trespassing on private & public land - but in the past the city largely could and did ignore the issue. The relationship between homeless camps, which are very unwelcome to local residents, and shelters which serve a legitimate community need, is that the camps spring up around the shelters. Regarding homeless shelters, as property values go up, rent goes up. That's simple economic reality. Shelters who own their own land, as the Salvation Army presumably does, will likely get a lucrative offer in the future which will enable them to build a better facility; the Fayetteville 2030 plan invisions a redeveloped Southgate shopping center. If/when that happens, that corner will become prime real estate. Shelters that rent will invariably move where the rent is lower as leases expire. It's a simple statement of fact and it's exactly what has happened in other communities where there has been determined urban renewal, something the city promotes every bit as much as residents, property owners and developers; make of that what you will.

That surprised me too. I'm glad to see Fayetteville is investing in Fayetteville, despite the WAC's tone-deaf "leadership." I'm looking forward to seeing what the Community Design Center comes up with for West Avenue next spring; along with the new parking deck, this area is going to be very nice.

I figured probably not - homeless shelters will go where ever they're needed, however. One doesn't see homeless shelters uptown because they aren't needed there; the same happened a decade ago on Dickson and now the same development/redevelopment trend is moving south of MLK. Poverty isn't driven away by gentrification, however; it just relocates somewhere else.

Uptown is high-cost. The homeless shelters are mostly on the southside of town because that's where the cheapest real estate in the city has been for many years. Now that this is changing, I imagine we'll see these locations gradually become too valuble for non-profit work and these centers will relocate to lower-cost areas, perhaps further south or west. For a while, there as a de facto homeless shelter in the railroad depot on Dickson; now that area has several nice restaurants.

For years, the largest camp was in the Walker Park woods near the present senior center; I believe that one has been mostly cleared out. There's also a homeless camp behind the Salvation Army building; a number of homeless people seem to live in or near the Tanglewood floodplane on Frisco Trail. I often find empty vodka bottles and encounter homeless people (a couple of them like petting my dogs and they've told me before that they're homeless) spending their time on the park benches near the Mill district; I assume they camp nearby.

Good point regarding the homicide rate. TRB does raise a valid point, however. The city is in-filling and redeveloping the area south of MLK and is trying to spur redevelopment along S School to Cato Springs. The U of A's new Arts & Design district will act as the southern bookend of the city's cultural arts district, raising real estate values. Many new high rent student developments have gone in already just south of MKLK and higher-end housing (some would call it hipster gentrification) is being built in and near the Mill District. For example five $420K+ houses plus a luxury duplex are going up now adjacent to Green House Grille; new $200k+ townhouses are being built accross the street and MLK is getting about five new high end (275k+) zero lot homes. Skiles Architects has projects going up to the east of Walker Park, very near where the homeless camps have been for as long as I can remember, and I expect those are going to start at around $250k+. The new trails that are going in now will spur further redevelopment. Things are eventually going to come to a head there - Fayetteville's most recent murder did take place about a block from here. The homeless camps will either be tamed or redevelopment will grind to a halt. In my opinion, there's enough momentum now that eventually the homeless camps will be forced to move elsewhere.

I don't know anything specific, but my guess is to look at where Fayetteville's future trails are planned. Any city-owned property, particuarlly existing parks, through those areas will likely see improvements soon after the trail goes in with new parks being developed concurent with new subdivisions. Town Branch trail, for example is going to go through Greathouse Park and Walker Park; Frisco is extending accross to Walker Park. Eventually, Town Branch trail will connect up with the proposed regional park. Longer range plans call fro extending the trails out to Lake Sequoyah; I imagine that will look a lot like the Lake Fayetteville park area does now in another decade or two.