Little Rock Northwest Arkansas is a curious contradiction. Fifty years ago, it was an outlier in the state. Sure, the big university was in Fayetteville up there, but to get there meant leaving the interstate near Fort Smith and hoping you weren’t caught on the pig trails going north behind an 18-wheeler with feathers flying from hundreds of chicken coops, one on top of another. The Ozarks were something special. The Buffalo and other rivers were a gift. There was Eureka Springs for the hippies, artists, and Gerald L. K. Smith’s Christ of the Ozarks, the residue of his far right empire. It was Lil’ Abner country from the comic strips. It was home of the only Republican Congressional district almost anywhere in the Old South and one of the fewest Union counties in the Civil War.
That was then. Now for some years Northwest Arkansas has been one of the fastest growing areas in the country. Some demographers say there will be a million people living up there in those hills in about another decade. This is the economic engine of the state now. Where once upon a time maybe the plant in Rogers that made BBs for Daisey air rifles was one of the only manufacturing operations in the area, now the world comes to Walmart in Bentonville, where they are building a billion-dollar headquarters. In no small way, this area was supersized by Sam Walton. Tyson now runs the chicken operations. JB Hunt and other trucking companies built its own set of billionaires hauling freight in and out of these operations. Where the area was a lily-white southern outlier, a small town like Springdale exploded to almost 100,000 with one-third Hispanic population. Now a piece of interstate running up from near Fort Smith makes Fayetteville, Bentonville, Springdale, and Rogers seem like links in a chain making one city with some greenery in-between. We’ve applied for radio stations in many of these cities now.
I thought about all of this as I was talking to Billy Cook on Wade’s World. Billy is an organizer for Arkansas Community Organizations, the successor to Arkansas ACORN, and his main work is organizing the Arkansas Renters’ Union and its chapters in Fayetteville with members here and there from Fort Smith throughout the corridor. Arkansas historically has had the worst tenant protections in the country, so he has a tough assignment. Until a couple of years ago there was no “warrant of habitability,” which is the bare minimum guarantee a landlord gives a tenant that the apartment is sort of a healthy and safe place to live. Cook said that what the legislature did is not much, but was better than the nothing that came before.
Northwest Arkansas may have jobs these days, but affordable housing is an issue given what Walmart, Tyson, and other big operations pay as they set the area wage standard, even as Arkansas has one of the highest minimum wages in the region for workers now. Rents have grown to $800 to $900 a month, which isn’t New York City or New Orleans prices, but is still very dear in the area, and that’s if you can find a place. Housing development has exploded to attract executives coming in, but not for the working families already there.
One of the big victories that the Renters Union won in Fayetteville that made a difference there centered on transparency. When a family was fortunate enough to get off the waiting list and get a Section 8 voucher to subsidize their rent, many times they would still be out of luck finding a landlord who would accept the voucher before it expired. This is an issue everywhere in America of course, but what ARU won from the city was an ordinance that forced landlords to publicize whether they would accept section 8, so that tenants finally had a leg up in racing the clock to find something to rent.
You can’t duplicate a Walmart demographic mini-miracle in every hardscrabble part of the country, but passing transparency ordinances to help lower income tenants find affordable and safe housing in their communities seems like something that could be done everywhere, and worth following the Renters’ Union’s lead.
