Yesterday in downtown Fayetteville, local officials, planners and residents packed into a meeting room at the Fayetteville Public Library to look at Northwest Arkansas from an unusual angle: as a 3D map of cash flow.
The Northwest Arkansas Council and Groundwork invited urban planner and data analyst Joe Minicozzi to show what this growing region looks like when you stack every parcel by how much money it brings in, and how much it costs per acre.
OAL’s Jack Travis attended the event and brings us this report.
Joe Minicozzi is the founder and principal of the urban planning consulting firm Urban3. He called yesterday’s analysis a kind of financial CAT scan for cities. He depicted land values as physical peaks throughout his slide deck.
A few downtown blocks in places like Bentonville or Siloam Springs rise on his screen like brightly colored mountain ranges, while subdivisions and large shopping centers sink into a flat plain.
He told the crowd he wasn’t there to critique architecture or taste. He was there to talk about math. Minicozzi and his team use Dollar General stores as a common yardstick across the region.
“Think of this like your Big Mac Index. We can compare everybody to a Dollar General, which is kind of scary.”
He says on average, a Dollar General in Northwest Arkansas produces about $700,000 of taxable value per acre. That becomes the baseline. Then his model starts piling other parcels next to it.
Some of the most productive properties in the region are not high-rise towers. According to his data, they are tight clusters of townhouses and older Main Street buildings a block or two from downtowns in cities such as Bentonville, Fayetteville and Siloam Springs. In those places, it is common to see $10 million or more in value per acre. One Bentonville block hits $15 million an acre; another, he says, reaches about $20 million.
“You don’t have to have a big building to have potency, and you can do that in your own town or village, too.”
By comparison, the Northwest Arkansas Mall comes out at about $400,000 an acre on his charts, which is less productive than that average Dollar General. He says a modest two-story building in Springdale produces about four times the tax value per acre of the regional shopping center.
Standing before a slide that contrasted a shopping center in Rogers called Pleasant Crossing Commons with downtown Bentonville, Minicozzi asked the room to look at how much land each one consumes when you put them at the same scale.
“It’s kind of phenomenal. When you’re out in the suburban environment, you don’t realize as you drive through a parking lot this is the land area size of downtown Bentonville. But we’re conditioned to not have that going off in our brain. Now there’s choices that happen here, and there’s also results in the data.
“This is about total sales of $4 million. This little two-block area has $3.3 million. The sales tax revenue per acre, however, is 131 to 38. This is the total property taxes per acre. So which one is giving you more money, the blue or the red?”
He told the audience that the point isn’t that one place is “good” and another “bad”; it’s that the choices communities make about land use come with trade-offs. He says dense blocks of small parcels are like salad on a plate, and large, low-yield properties are like pizza.
“It’s good to eat pizza, but I get more benefit out of the salad.”
His analysis also digs into history. Many financially productive buildings in Northwest Arkansas were built in downtowns in the late 1800s or early 1900s. One 1881 building he highlighted started life as a barbershop and now generates roughly $10.8 million an acre in taxable value. Another early 20th-century structure produces about $4 million an acre.
“They didn’t think about this as a 10-year investment. They didn’t think about flipping this building. This is a building that was parked and built into your community. It started as a barbershop, and it still has a life. It has come back multiple times. It hasn’t always been awesome, but it’s not like that strip mall that just dies and sits there.”
The data also reveals how different Northwest Arkansas cities approach density. Using charts that track population against land area, Minicozzi showed that Centerton is relatively dense.
“Centerton is really dense, and for some reason by comparison Siloam Springs is not as dense, but it’s more productive, right? And they’re about the same population. And then here’s the bigs — Bentonville, Springdale, Fayetteville and Rogers — to the right. Rogers is the most dense and pretty productive. Fayetteville is coming in behind them, and down to Springdale and then Bentonville. But Bentonville, it’s an inverse relationship.
“They’ve made choices to not be dense and not have a downtown, and they’re paying for it. So they just don’t harvest what Springdale’s harvest is, what our harvest is.
“And then throwing in Centerton is super dense and not as productive. So Centerton has all the ills of density. They have the traffic and everything else, and they have none of the gains of the density that they could have had, but they’re building it.”
On his screen, Centerton appears as what he called “shag carpet”: a relatively even field of single-use development with one standout house as its most potent building. A place like Siloam Springs, by contrast, shows an “egg yolk and egg white” pattern, with a more concentrated downtown core surrounded by lower-value neighborhoods.
Then he flips from revenue to cost.
He says local budgets often treat pipes and roads as “assets,” the way a city might account for a computer or a vehicle. Minicozzi urged elected officials and finance staff in the room to see those roads instead as long-term liabilities that must be rebuilt every few decades.
“When I build your roads and give them to you, it’s a long-term relationship for you with that road. It’s a forever relationship. Every 10 years you’re going to be doing a resurfacing or a millage. You have to pay for that, the same way I have to brush my teeth every single day. And then every 50 years you do a reconstruction. If you’re not following that schedule, you actually get into your root canals, where it gets more expensive.”
By Urban3’s estimate, the region’s cities collectively owe hundreds of millions of dollars a year to keep up the local roads they already have. He says low-density places like Bella Vista bought more lane miles per resident than denser peers and now face liabilities closer to those of much larger cities such as Rogers or Springdale.
Minicozzi says that local leaders have power. Small decisions can tilt the balance toward more sustainable revenue.
He pointed to city rules that require large parking lots for big-box stores. On one slide, he showed a hypothetical store worth about $25 million on a tight site, which translated to roughly $1 million of value per acre. Add more land for parking at the city’s request, and the value per acre drops to about $700,000, even though the building itself has not changed.
“If we do the opposite and say we’ll let you do as much parking as you want, it’s not going to be on us. We’re not going to decide that. We don’t have a parking requirement. And they do a smaller parking area, then you actually gain value.”
So what does all of this mean? Basically, Minicozzi says that dense, traditional mixed-use patterns tend to generate more property value per acre while using less infrastructure, compared to sprawling, single-use suburban patterns.
Throughout the presentation, he returned to the idea that readily accessible data should help people see their communities more clearly, make thoughtful decisions and recognize the potential long-term costs of low-density development.
“Small buildings, super potent. Don’t worry about thinking big. You can do little, small, incremental changes. This building’s like about 10 parking spaces. It’s not big. So do little things. Look at this data. Let this data inform you. Have conversations with your friends about it. This is the reality of how you function. Use it like a CAT scan. Just make decisions.”
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