Northwest Arkansas has become the pinnacle of modern work and play, with visitors traveling from across the globe. With the combination of increased tourism and slews of new residents every day, what will be left for Ozark natives?
By Emma Dannenfelser
With the tourism boom and increasing emphasis on outdoor recreation in the last 20 years, concerns have been raised that burgeoning rates and impending over-development will eventually force lower-income Northwest Arkansas residents out of the Ozark region that has been their home for generations.
Jared Phillips, a history professor at the University of Arkansas, explained that organizations like the Walton Family Foundation are following the template of the “absentee landlord” mentality by coming into the region and seeing potential for an extractive economy of some sort.
“To have a tourism economy, you have to have affluence,” Phillips said. “Poor folk don’t do these things, as a general rule. At least not in the way we see it being done right now.”
Northwest Arkansas saw the change when the early 2000s endured a shift from a primarily agricultural economy to an outdoor recreation and “experience”-based economy. Unfortunately, what historically happens in many situations is that national “fads” and trends will shift and leave behind an economic wreckage for locals, Phillips said.
“You can see that in the legacy of the damming towns and the mining towns. Just the archeology of disaster, you can see it going through that arch,” Phillips said.
One of the main consequences of the recreation economy is that it fundamentally does not address the poverty throughout the community. Instead, it leads to rising costs in housing and food that will eventually drive away Arkansas natives who can no longer afford the Northwest Arkansas area.
Phillips used popular Colorado tourism destinations, such as Pagosa Springs and Durango, as examples of tourism driving housing prices through the roof and eradicating families that had been there for generations from the region.
While many housing studies do suggest that tourism can cause poverty levels to shrink, it’s usually not because poverty is “fixed” but actually because low-income residents are forced to leave, Phillips explained.
Phillips is a proud Northwest Arkansas native whose family has called the Ozarks home for generations and his fierce loyalty and dedication to the community is a clear reflection of that. For some, like Phillips, who wear the age-old Ozark “hillbilly” nickname like a badge of honor, organizations like the Walton Family Foundation, and others that aim to reshape the economy and culture of the area, are met with caution.
Phillips said he hopes that these organizations will focus on Northwest Arkansas natives even as hoards move to the area from across the globe. Arkansas has undeniably unique employment statistics, with only 4.4% of Arkansans unemployed yet 60% qualifying as what Phillips called “ALICE,” which stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained and Employed; this shows that an emphasis on providing affordable housing and striving to eradicate food scarcity should be considered.
Northwest Arkansas is home to some of the largest and most influential, powerful companies in the world, Tyson Foods and Walmart. According to an article by Olivia Paschal, a historian, writer and Arkansas native, these larger-than-life companies have a disproportionate impact on the economics and politics of the region.
Arkansas is ranked seventh highest for poverty rates across the U.S, according to the Citizens Guide to Understanding Arkansas Economic Data, and Arkansas Business News reports that Walmart and Tyson currently hold the second and third spots for top Arkansas employers. Because of this, a huge portion of Northwest Arkansas residents work for these companies, many times for far-less than a fair wage, creating a cycle of poverty for some that elevates those at the helm.
Many of these workers who are making below a living wage are facing sky-rocketing housing and general cost-of- living prices due to large companies outsourcing corporate and tech employees, thus driving up prices, Paschal said.
“We have a lot of folks in Northwest Arkansas that are making below living wage, such as workers on poultry processing lines, new immigrants or people who work at the various manufacturing factories we still have here, and we want to keep them housed, right? But, where are those folks supposed to live?”, Paschal said. “A lot of them used to live in downtown Springdale, but now it’s also being developed for Tyson’s new headquarters. Figuring out where these people are supposed to live should be a priority.”
The Northwest Arkansas Council is one organization that is striving to solve this issue. The Council, with the support of the Walton Family Foundation, has promoted more affordable housing for teachers, firefighters, healthcare workers and any other residents who need more affordable options in order to be able to stay in Northwest Arkansas for work.
The funding behind these developments, including the hyper-focus on tourism, is particularly narrow, coming in huge doses from the top companies in the area, which means the control they have seems even more severe, Paschal explained.
In the case of Walmart’s very own Walton family, who combined have a networth of $247 billion as of 2020, one of the primary means that their power and influence in the community is retained is through their philanthropic organization, The Walton Family Foundation, Paschal said. The Walton Family Foundation works on three main areas including K-12 education improvement, protecting rivers, oceans and the communities they support as well as investing in their home region of Northwest Arkansas.
Many programs funded by the Foundation are beneficial for all members of the Northwest Arkansas community, with an array of initiatives focusing on access to nature in Arkansas. “These elements to the Foundation’s work are really good, because a lot of these kinds of organizations don’t have access to other funders,” Paschal said.
One organization funded by the Foundation is the Northwest Arkansas Land Trust, an organization that strives to buy back land in order to preserve it and remove some of the developmental stressors from the region, while protecting the immense natural beauty and diversity that makes Northwest Arkansas so unique.
The Greenway Trail system that the Walton family largely funded throughout Northwest Arkansas is one excellent example of something funded by the Foundation that provides accessibility to nature and can be enjoyed and utilized by a vast array of Northwest Arkansas residents, Phillips said.
However, not every initiative funded by the Foundation is as accessible as the Greenway Trails. In 2019, the Foundation invested $30 million into mountain bike trails in Northwest Arkansas. According to Phillips, that $30 million could have eradicated food scarcity in at least two counties within Northwest Arkansas for several years.
“Thirty-million dollars not spent on recreation that only a very small portion of the population can access, would have radically altered, for the better, life for thousands of families in these counties,” Phillips said.
The effects of tourism are not only applicable for the economy and lower-income residents in the Ozarks, it is also impacting the very landscape that beckons visitors every year. The negative effects of tourism can not only impact natural resources, such as the Buffalo River, but also can completely change the structures of the surrounding community, Missouri State University professor, Bernard Kitheka, said.
Construction and development alone are detrimental to the environment since concrete is known to produce significant amounts of heat-trapping greenhouse gasses. MIT’s Climate Portal reported that as of 2016, concrete alone made up 7% of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.
“Bentonville, it’s beginning to get too constructed. The more you pave the community, build walls and the more you construct it, the more you change the structure of the community and people begin to become subjects and objects,” Kitheka said. “Instead they should be able to just enjoy these beautiful, forested and peaceful areas where you can raise kids in a way that is connected to nature. But now, it is just more construction, more cars and more parking lots.”
In cities where ecotourism is highly focused on, the residents are often the ones who suffer instead of benefit. Even though the nature attractions bring in business and money, residents are forced to endure excess waste, traffic and crime due to the influx of visitors who have their own customs and ways of living, Kitheka said.
The increase in development has severely impacted many of the rivers in Northwest Arkansas, said Kitheka. Runoff of chemicals, waste left by visitors and overall mistreatment of trails or nature attractions have all contributed to rivers turning green, fish dying and diverse ecosystems breaking down, Kitheka said.
Before Northwest Arkansas became the sexy, sleek and modern metropolitan experiment that it is known for today, there was art, culture, work and families who proudly loved and built the region for generations upon generations.
“In an interview, Alice Walton said that ‘before she brought Crystal Bridges to Northwest Arkansas there was no culture here.’ Frankly, that’s bullshit.” Phillips said. “That erases the legacy of not just my family, but it erases the legacy of millions of families who have lived and worked and died and cried, got married and painted and written and done all kinds of stuff here. They built lives of beauty here.”