Of My City

I usually write about big cities elsewhere, but it is time to point out some interesting changes right here in Fayetteville (pop. 70,000). The changes reflect a combination of good ideas about place and community with an active sense of preservation and history.

I'm impressed by the city's walkability and the growing network of urban trails (which will eventually stretch for 130 miles); the fantastic public library; the decent selection of non-chain restaurants, coffeeshops, bars, and other businesses; the 4-days-a-week farmers market; the pretty downtown neighborhoods; and the reawakened arts and music scene. There are new hyperlocal info and networking websites that add to the general sense of community. Summers are pretty awful but they are worse in other parts of the South. The scent of honeysuckle, the green glow of fireflies, and the other seasons help make up for the sweaty months.

Public transportation (which needs to be improved) is provided by the University of Arkansas and by Ozark Regional Transit. Light rail is on the planning table. Fayetteville strikes me as more progressive than any other place in Arkansas. Higher building density and curbing of sprawl are priority goals for the city government, which has made impressive efforts to include residents in information-gathering and decision-making efforts. The new mayor is a blue-collar liberal with green ideas and a sense of place. He also keeps an active and informative Facebook page.

It would be nice to have more of a few things: non-local live music, bookstores, Indian restaurants, arthouse movie theaters, for instance; but this wish list reflects only my own lifestyle, which happens to be unaffected by things like the available variety of churches or the quality of schools.

Some people, however, pay attention to a longer list of quality-of-life criteria than I do, and they've been noticing a lot of positive things about Fayetteville and Northwest Arkansas lately:

The city was ranked 6th overall in the "Small Cities" category of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Smarter Cities project. Fayetteville even tops the "Environmental Standards and Participation" category but ranks 305th in the "Standard of Living" category, probably due to low wages, high poverty, and low rate of homeownership.

For efforts to preserve and promote its heritage, Fayetteville has just been designated a Preserve America Community.

And in its June "Best and Worst Cities for Recession Recovery" feature, Forbes magazine ranked the Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers area second highest on the quick rebound list. At 6.1 percent (DoL, June 2009), unemployment around here is still low (as are wages). The big employers (Walmart, Tyson, J.B. Hunt) are doing fairly well, and the housing bubble wasn't as extreme as elsewhere. It's not a bad place to ride out the recession.

Downtown Fayetteville construction: Sabine Schmidt