Boomtown, U.S.A.
In Arkansas, a new economy--and an unlikely Xanadu
BENTONVILLE, ARK.--Sam Walton would not recognize the place. The famously unassuming Wal-Mart founder spurned foreign cars for his red Ford pickup, and he expected his employees to shun a "big showy lifestyle." But today in Mr. Sam's parking lot at Wal-Mart headquarters here, Mercedes Kompressor convertibles shine in the sun alongside BMW M3s. Not far away, Wal-Mart's chief executive and senior vice president live in splendor at Pinnacle, the area's first gated community and its most exclusive country club. Their neighbor, Red Hudson, a retired multimillionaire meatpacker, has built a 17,784-square-foot mansion there--complete with Italian marble and Minnesota stone--for a much-gossiped-about $10 million. Across the new Interstate 540 from Pinnacle, trucking titan J. B. Hunt is trying to erect his own Xanadu, with a dozen deluxe office and condominium towers, a hospital, and, in a first for the region, a skyline. "Everything's a poppin'," says the 74-year-old Hunt as he tools around the site in his tan GMC Sierra truck. "In the next five years, the weeds will be a city."
Much of the country might dismiss Arkansas as an Al Capp caricature, native son Bill Clinton notwithstanding. Even locals joke that the state motto should be changed to "Arkansas: Literacy ain't everything." But that old stereotype no longer fits the state's bustling northwest shoulder. This is a 21st-century boomtown, a monument to the postindustrial service economy, and, surprisingly, the nation's sixth-fastest-growing metropolitan area. There are new roads, new schools, new homes, and, by the tens of thousands, new residents.
More than 310,000 people live here on 1,800 square miles of the Ozark Plateau. In Benton County alone, the population rose 57.3 percent in the past 10 years. Some worry that such explosive growth will run roughshod over the natural pleasures of lush forests, pristine lakes, and limestone bluffs and the go-slow quality of life that has been the region's lure; others see rainbows in the nouveau-riche way of life.
"Privatopias." There's an almost numbing sameness to much of the new development, that Suburban States of America quality of strip malls (with trite names like Beau Terre) and subdivisions (like Pleasant Acres) galore. Residents are also getting their first taste of rush-hour traffic. "You can barely move," grumbles Samantha Hamilton. The furious commercial construction along local highways is rapidly blurring the borders between towns. "It's going to be like the metroplex in Fort Worth," says Kathie Henson, a Benton County planning assistant. "It all just blends together. You don't know when they stop and when they start."
Historically, there has been little to suggest the region would be a magnet for much of anything. In the early 1900s, its bountiful apple orchards provided much of its economic base, until an unrelenting dry spell in the 1930s wiped out the business, and many Arkies fled. Today, the area has become a draw even for refugees from sunny California. Yet, as contractors pound out all of the wrinkles and reshape them into one homogenous, commercial whole, the Golden State emigrants might have trouble distinguishing their new home from any other suburban American enclave. "Privatopias" of subdivisions around cul-de-sacs sans sidewalks, look-alike homes, and three-car garages may appeal to some, but others consider them charmless clusters. "We're making all the mistakes every other place makes as it develops," says Bill Schwab, a University of Arkansas sociologist. He worries, too, about a widening gulf between the haves and have-nots.
advertisement
