Student housing continues to be a critical part of the broader conversation around housing in the city of Fayetteville, home to the state’s flagship university and over 34,000 students, as of Fall 2025.
Fayetteville Mayor Molly Rawn began her State of the City Address this past month, talking about the city’s housing efforts during her first year in office. She addressed student housing specifically -
“Residents want to know that as Fayetteville grows, the people who live and work here full time aren't being pushed aside. So we updated how we approach large student housing developments, requiring special permits so that we can better align growth with livability. That wasn't about stopping or halting development, but rather about making sure that we have the type of growth that works for the whole community.”
Mayor Rawn is referring to a specific private dormitory ordinance, which requires any developer that submits an application for purpose-built student housing to gain a conditional use permit, which gives the planning committee and city council another opportunity to review the development.
Chief Housing Officer Marlee Stark, hired last year by Mayor Rawn, says this ordinance was in response to a growing number of development proposals for student-focused housing, which raised concerns of residential displacement.
“Which is obviously not an outcome that we want to see in our city. We want more housing options for more people, but we don't want one person's housing option to sort of come at the expense of another person.”
Stark began working for the city in economic development in 2023. That work spanned from workforce growth to housing affordability, which included aiding the long-range planning committee with their housing needs assessment.
She says that research gave her a leg up in her new role as chief housing officer, but students were a specific kind of renter in the market that she wanted to engage with more.
“Students in particular are kind of this interesting subpopulation that I'd like to focus more on. We've had some information about enrollment numbers. We've started, in the second assessment year, we kind of did a deeper dive on the student rental market. I think we'll continue to include that in our analysis. But also I think we've tried to do a better job of hearing from student renters, and it's kind of a subpopulation of our cost-burden renters.”
Stark says part of that work to engage included attending an event held by the student organization Zero Hour Arkansas in October of last year, which called for the University of Arkansas to declare a student housing crisis. Zero Hour Arkansas is a social justice and environmentally minded student-led organization at the UofA. The petition was distributed with flyers around campus and through social media. Stark agrees that kind of community engagement is really helpful.
“Students aren't monolithic, right? We've got a pretty diverse set of students in our population in Fayetteville, so that includes lower income residents, older non-traditional students, international students. Students who are supporting families or balancing work and school if they're in grad school. So really, I think trying to challenge the community to think about students and their housing needs as a more complex set of housing needs as opposed to just one.”
Abigail Harmon is a student at the University of Arkansas and the current president of Zero Hour Arkansas. She says the goal of the petition was to utilize the power students have.
“We as students have institutional power, and the university is perpetuating these issues. So we're in a special position to hopefully be able to do something about this issue that's not only affecting campus but affecting Fayetteville and broader NWA as well. It's very obvious how difficult it is to find an affordable living place. And that makes everything here difficult. It's hard to find a parking spot. It's hard to even find community because it's just so overcrowded.”
Harmon says another goal behind petitioning students to declare a housing crisis was to have more transparency and dialogue with university administration.
“To allow student voices in decision making, because there is none of that, and students are significantly struggling on campus and they are not getting the experience that they're entitled to with all the money that we pay. And we're also advocates for our community because it's hard to get them to care about us, let alone people that don't attend the school. So there's a lot of things that I'm hoping to come from this. But first, it's kind of creating a better relationship between students and decision makers so that we can advocate and not every decision is made by administration and people that aren't directly affected or working with people that are being affected.”
On the university side, there have been efforts to mitigate the effects of increased enrollment for students. Since reaching record-breaking enrollment, the University has signed master leases with four off-campus apartment complexes near the main campus, including the Atmosphere, Marshall, Cardinal and Locale. A master lease signifies that while the university does not technically own the property, it leases out all of the units to university students. University housing also plans to build two more on-campus dormitories, the first expected to be completed in 2028, the next by 2030. The university also recently acquired Dunn Avenue Apartments and Flats on the Hill for graduate student use under a master lease.
Marlee Stark says the city and university have made great strides this past year in having an open dialogue about housing, and that it is vital that the institutions communicate their needs.
“I find that very encouraging, and I'm excited to kind of see can do together to increase housing capacity, not only on campus because that's obviously the domain of the university, but also what the city can do to support additional housing choice for students, because I think we know when we can kind of help increase options that make sense for students that are sort of on or nearby campus, we also know that that has downstream benefits for families and workers in our community who have lived in Fayetteville for a number of years. I think every subpopulation in Fayetteville has housing choices. That's always going to be important to us, just thinking about housing choice.”
She says in the broader context, we shouldn’t consider current enrollment rates at the University of Arkansas as the sole reason why there’s a lack of housing to go around.
“We have, by and large, we've made some, I think, important changes this year and sort of at the margins over the last few years of revisiting our zoning code, which in a lot of ways hasn't really changed since the 1970s, right? So that zoning code has been in place in one way or another, when our university was still really small relative to what enrollment looks like now. So I think some of the outcomes that we see around housing, around affordability, around availability and kind of choice is really a function of decisions that were made decades ago. It's not just student enrollment.
“I think our community as a whole has really grown pretty rapidly. If we have someone who's a student right now who's facing a challenge, getting them additional housing options, like that's really important for them. As a student renter, if we want them to stick around and start their careers or start a family, if that's something they're interested in doing, we want them to be long term Fayetteville residents. We've also got to give them housing if they want to stick around in Fayetteville because it's a community that they love.”
Raegan Sikes is a University of Arkansas graduate and has lived in Fayetteville since 2017. She is also a current resident of Flats on The Hill, but she's being told she needs to move because the complex is being converted to graduate student housing for the University of Arkansas.
“I got an email one morning saying that we had to be out in May, and I was kind of blindsided. And only after that did we find that there were already listings for our units with photos and prices and everything on the university housing website.”
She says that with rising rent costs in Fayetteville, she might have to move out of the city.
“Which I really don't want to do, but that's really the only… I can't find anything that I can live at alone for less than 1100 dollars, which before this place I was splitting with another person. So I'm already trying to adjust financially to the current rent I'm paying at this ‘affordable’ place, and now I… Prices are only going up, so I don't know where I'm going to go.”
Sikes says the university has a responsibility to the city to aid in the housing crisis.
“And we need housing that non-students can live in, that means housing that's not split into four rooms that has to be split between four people. That's not suitable for people with families or just working individuals. And as it gets harder to find, people have to move further and further away from the businesses that they are serving. And it makes it far more difficult to keep a job because that's wear and tear on your vehicle. Some people don't have vehicles, including current residents at Flats on Hill, so they are going to risk losing their jobs just because they can't get to them. A lot of them rely on the university's transit to get places they need to go, they won't have access to that as they're pushed out. And so there's a real link between what the university is doing, saying they're doing it for the students, but then completely neglecting the needs of the surrounding city, the surrounding community.”
Representatives from the University of Arkansas Division of Student Affairs, in response to questions regarding the selection of Flats on the Hill for graduate student use, say the university is aware of concerns regarding the current tenants of Flats On The Hill, and, quote:
“The university is not involved in current individual tenant leasing decisions and does not manage the property. We recognize that housing transitions can be difficult, and we encourage tenants to continue engaging directly with the property owner regarding their specific situations…
“The university has long sought ways to better support graduate students, who have consistently identified housing affordability and availability as ongoing challenges. This opportunity is intended to help address those concerns by offering a more predictable, all-inclusive, and affordable housing option.”
Chief Housing Officer of Fayetteville, Marlee Stark, says the conversation will continue on housing for all kinds of renters in the city, but the focus is always on more.
“I try to go back to, I think, just increasing the amount of housing we have in Fayetteville is going to be beneficial for student renters. It's going to be beneficial for residents who have rented here for a number of years, and it's going to be beneficial for people who aren't even born yet, right? In the same way that choices we made in the seventies sort of affect us today, I think choices that we make in 2025 or 2026 are going to impact people decades from now, too.”
Ozarks at Large will continue to cover housing in Fayetteville and northwest Arkansas. You can find past reporting at our website.
The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
