The Impact of New Urbanism in Northwest Arkansas:
CNU is proud to present this article as the first of a 5-part series documenting the impact of New Urbanist principles, as presented at CNU34.Northwest Arkansas. Over five articles, we reflect on key reforms including public infrastructure investments, parking and traffic, and context-sensitive density—issues that are critical to the healthy growth of neighborhoods, cities, and towns across Northwest Arkansas, and in so many rapidly growing places across the country. This series serves as a lasting resource to those who may not have been able to attend CNU 34, and demonstrates CNU's commitment to ensuring that Northwest Arkansas has a future built on New Urbanism long after this year's transformative Congress. This series will be available for download as a complete Report on CNU 34.Northwest Arkansas following publication. ~ Mallory Baches, CNU President
Will Northwest Arkansas continue to support more low-density, automobile-oriented development, or will it focus growth in compact urban centers? That’s the multibillion-dollar question the region faces as it invests in infrastructure to meet emerging needs. The public needs to pay for new infrastructure that supports growth, but that growth must also generate enough tax revenue to pay for itself in the long run. How and where Northwest Arkansas funds tax-supported infrastructure— including streets, sewerage, water lines, stormwater systems, and transit—will shape the region’s fiscal and social health for decades to come.
The Northwest Arkansas Council commissioned the national consulting firm Urban3 to study the average return on investment (ROI) of various development forms as part of the recent Growing Home NWA1 regional growth strategy. Based on data presented by Urban3 at CNU 34, different urban development conditions yield different returns on investment (ROI). Downtowns yield 530 percent ROI; commercial corridors yield 415 percent; walkable neighborhoods yield 150 percent; and suburban residential areas yield 30 percent. Below the 100 percent level, growth doesn’t pay for itself.
Downtowns and walkable neighborhoods are categorized as “focused growth.” They are mixed-use, compact places with connected street networks and small blocks. Many were built before 1950, because that is how the region grew historically. Many of the region’s downtowns and neighborhoods have been revitalized in recent years. Some New Urbanist places are being built on a similar, mixed-use, walkable model.
Fiscally, walkable places perform better than the combination of commercial corridors and low-density suburban residential areas that have dominated planning and development in the region over the last half-century. Across Northwest Arkansas, focused growth development yields an overall annual surplus of $340 million, versus a $20 million annual surplus under current trends, Urban3 calculates. In other words, if new growth took the form of downtowns and walkable neighborhoods, the annual revenue surplus would increase by 17-fold. Note that these are averages—some downtowns and walkable neighborhoods could perform much better if they are revitalized. Also note that the current $20 million surplus for conventional development assumes that cities are adequately maintaining public infrastructure now, but many of these costs are actually being deferred to future generations.
The infrastructure that supports downtowns and walkable neighborhoods, as opposed to sprawl, tends toward three characteristics. The streets are connected; growth is focused in specific types of places; and design is based on the rural-to-urban Transect.
Connected streets
Connected street design is critical to health, safety, and quality of life, and is the foundation of mixed-use development, walkability, and the restoration of existing urban centers and towns. “A connected network provides equivalent or greater capacity at a fraction of the cost,” according to a report from a workshop on legislation and growth at CNU 34. “The fiscal cost of disconnected street patterns is not abstract. Every disconnected residential street is a permanent public maintenance liability with no through-traffic function, no emergency-routing function, and no transit potential, generating a per-household cost burden the public absorbs in perpetuity. Per-household infrastructure costs in disconnected patterns can run several multiples higher than in connected ones, and the differential compounds with each maintenance cycle.”
An analysis in Growing Home NWA shows that connected street networks are prevalent in the historic cities of Bentonville, Rogers, Springdale, Fayetteville, and Siloam Springs. In the last half-century, development has spread across large portions of the region, but connected streets have not been provided. Connecting more streets is an infrastructure challenge.
Place types
Relative to focusing growth in place types, downtowns and walkable neighborhoods can be built or revitalized through infill development, suburban retrofit, and new development that is walkable and compact. The region’s largest cities, Bentonville, Rogers, Springdale, and Fayetteville, have successfully promoted infill in their downtowns. This revitalization has been supported by investments in the public realm—traffic calming, pedestrian infrastructure like crossings and sidewalks, landscaping, and public spaces. The term for this is “people-centered infrastructure.” With the exception of Fayetteville, which has the University of Arkansas, the other downtowns were lifeless 15-20 years ago. Now they are active 18 hours a day, and much of the credit goes to public realm investments that have spurred private investment in housing and businesses.
Infill can also be effective for historic main streets in the suburban and rural parts of NWA, such as Cave Springs. The Cave Springs plan2, completed as part of a CNU 34 Legacy Project, proposes revitalizing a Main Street surrounded by housing within a walkable neighborhood. The Arkansas DOT is building a short bypass of Route 112, with roundabouts, to route commuter traffic around the center. “The Cave Springs Main Street work, made possible only when ArDOT agreed to a bypass and ceded control of the corridor through Mayor Noblett’s leadership, is the model of what regional cooperation can deliver for a smaller community,” according to the legislative workshop report mentioned above. The bypass was planned as an alternative to the original ArDOT proposal to widen Main Street to four lanes, which would have caused great damage to downtown. A 2024 ULI Northwest Arkansas plan, which the CNU plan built upon, recommended treating the bypass as a parkway without commercial development—keeping the businesses along the existing Main Street. The Cave Springs Legacy Project was led by Michael Watkins Architect.
La Plaza District3 in Rogers, the subject of another CNU Legacy Project, demonstrates the potential of suburban retrofit in the region. The commercial district around the intersection of 8th and Walnut streets looks like most other suburban retail areas, with big-box stores, strip malls, and large parking lots surrounding wide arterial roads. The project, led by Arup, shows how a new connected street network through the District could transform the area into a mixed-use, walkable urban center connected to the City’s existing downtown, less than a mile to the east. The key is to make people-centered infrastructure investments that break the superblocks into smaller blocks, connected by human-scaled streets and public spaces.
Walmart’s new Home Office4 in Bentonville also demonstrates the potential to retrofit a suburban area into a walkable place, with a new mixed-use main street running through the campus. The Razorback Greenway, NWA’s most consequential regional investment in recent years, also runs through the middle of the Home Office. The Greenway is a 40-mile bike-ped trail that connects seven cities, including the four largest in the region.
The Greenway has the potential5 to reshape growth in the region. Completed in 2015, the trail was funded by a $15 million federal grant, matched by local dollars from the Walton Family Foundation. The Greenway started as a recreational trail, but it has become an amenity for adjacent development. A multijurisdictional corridor plan shows how a large portion of future regional growth could occur within walking or biking distance of the Greenway.
The trickiest challenge NWA faces may be in reforming greenfield growth. The region’s norm remains low-density suburban development, which has been the prevailing pattern for half a century or more. This pattern is enabled by zoning and infrastructure investments and is not inevitable—rather, it is a choice that is not fiscally sustainable. As Urban3 reports in the recent Growing Home NWA regional plan, low-density residential subdivisions pay for only 30 percent of their costs. Walkable neighborhoods, on the other hand, are five times as financially productive. NWA needs more of those if new growth is to pay for itself.
Where growth is located is a critical issue. Growing Home NWA identifies 22 existing centers in the region, most of which need new investment and have the capacity to grow substantially. The regional plan identified 21 additional centers that could be developed. These centers could accommodate the vast majority of the region’s growth in coming decades, offering a wide variety of living options. They could pay for themselves over time, but they need public planning and infrastructure investment. Urban centers have the added benefit of supporting efficient public transit—providing mobility options and reducing future traffic congestion.
Water and sewer capacity is a pressing issue. Some cities, like Bentonville and Prairie Grove, have sewer moratoriums because they are reaching limits to capacity. In rural areas, people can build houses with septic systems and wells, but most of the region's growth is hooked up to public wastewater systems. For growth to occur, the region needs to expand water and sewer capacity. Investing in this capacity makes sense if the growth can pay for itself in the long run. That would occur to the greatest degree if expanded water and sewer lines serve walkable, compact development.
Transect-based design
The third characteristic of fiscally responsible infrastructure relates to design, guided by the rural-to-urban Transect. Transect principles provide a way to organize investments in mixed-use neighborhoods and downtowns. People need varied living environments, and Transect-based growth can deliver them. The Transect organizes the built environment from rural to urban. The design of streets and pathways in rural, suburban, walkable neighborhood, main street, or downtown contexts differs widely. The same principle applies to public spaces and landscaping in these place types. The Transect enables more sustainable, economically resilient places and ensures that communities get the most from retrofit dollars. The rural-to-urban Transect can be applied across the region as a common regulatory language to coordinate vision and policy across multiple municipalities. The overarching focus of CNU 34 was on how to apply the Transect as a regional tool to respond to growth pressures in a sustainable, people-centered way.
Two efforts are underway to apply the Transect in this way: the aforementioned NWA Regional Growth Strategy and the Razorback Greenway. Also, two of the region’s most important cities, Bentonville and Rogers, already have Transect-based codes. “These were precursor/enablers for our transect-based approach with the Greenway plan,” says Matthew Petty, who is a project planner for the Greenway plan.
In the next 25 years, the NWA region is set to nearly double its population. It is not unlike many rapidly growing regions in the US. Today, infrastructure and transportation systems are already failing, and housing is out of reach for many households. Discussions of affordable housing often focus on external funding sources to subsidize living spaces. Less attention, however, is paid to public investments, where conventional engineering approaches and planning practices can increase development costs in hidden ways. Employing compact, walkable site and infrastructure design can decrease costs and increase the affordability and durability of a housing development. Design elements such as parking, stormwater management, grading, utility and easement locations, zoning, and entitlement requirements make a huge difference in costs over the lifecycle of a development.
Infrastructure that supports walkability positively influences community economic performance, public health, and neighborhood vitality across diverse urban contexts. To gain community buy-in, effective communication strategies must convey the value of walkable urbanism to skeptical stakeholders and the public. With the region’s substantial growth pressures, NWA needs a way to manage growth at the regional level, grounded in values that have broad public support. Values include being fiscally responsible, preserving the long-term character of NWA communities and the surrounding countryside, and providing opportunities for the people who already live here. Beyond values, people need models of compact growth to see how it looks and functions—including the revitalization of historic places, the retrofit of suburban corridors, and New Urbanist greenfield development. Experiencing the positive aspects of people-centered, compact growth builds support for investing in the infrastructure that enables it.
To address these issues, the region has to break down professional silos that govern various parts of the built environment. The Regional Growth Strategy seeks to apply cross-disciplinary problem-solving, such as connecting impervious surface and stormwater management needs with active transportation, natural lands preservation, and water quality in regional wastewater treatment.
Strategies can align public policy, zoning, and investment priorities to support financially resilient, place-based outcomes that strengthen the region. The economic performance of mixed-use, walkable urbanism compares favorably with that of conventional suburban development. Infrastructure investments will have long-term viability if they support downtowns and walkable neighborhoods. So, it’s not just whether there are infrastructure investments, but how they are designed and organized. To build livable and cost-effective communities, streets should be well-connected, growth should be focused in walkable neighborhoods and mixed-use centers, and design should be based on a regional understanding of the rural-to-urban Transect.
References
1Growing Home NWA website, www.growinghomenwa.com, 2026
2Steuteville, Robert, “Reclaiming a Main Street as a walkable center for growth,” Public Square, May 12, 2026
3Steuteville, Robert, “District transformation starts with streets, blocks,” Public Square, April 8, 2026
4Steuteville, Robert, “New Walmart headquarters embedded in urban fabric,” Public Square, March 19, 2026
5Steuteville, Robert, “Organizing regional growth around a bike-ped trail,” Public Square, May 6, 2026