By Isabella LaRue
To Fayetteville resident Emma Claire Nelson, home is everything. When her home is stable, she feels it, too. When her home is filled with pieces of her life, such as her art, posters, plants, and two cats, she feels comfortable and one with the space she has chosen for herself. When her apartment, Flats on Hill, was bought out from under her by the University of Arkansas, awaiting to be bulldozed and replaced with student housing with no date in sight, she did not believe it.
Erica McIntosh, Nelson’s roommate, was told by an old friend that their month-to-month apartment was marked as “sold” on the online realty application Zillow with no prior notice in December 2024. This was her sixth move in five years in the fast-growing city, and it felt like the city only wanted to spit her out.
Living there had been a dream for both Nelson and McIntosh. Nelson said it should be a historic site with the way it was built because of its unique build with an emphasis on organic material, tree shading, and a flat roof, culture poured out from every orifice in a neighborhood surrounded by cookie-cutter complexes, like Atmosphere apartments and The Cardinal. Flats on Hill are all steel and brick with sliding doors and vast windows for every room. Small rocks lined the outdoor area, with wooden railings against scenic pathways.
The two cried for hours upon learning their dream home was taken from them without so much as an email or letter in their mailbox. Nelson mourned the home she fell in love with alongside her friend, but what scared her more was the ultimate question of where they were supposed to go next. She was unsure if she could continue to be tossed around from place to place for another five years.
The city of Fayetteville is the second-fastest-growing city in Arkansas, largely due to the University of Arkansas at the epicenter of the bustling town. The City Council voted unanimously in April 2024 to declare a housing crisis in Fayetteville, Arkansas. It reflects a larger issue of the country having an across-the-board emergency for homeowners and renters. This is telling of the hundreds of people in the city with a lack of renters’ rights.
Additionally, across the country, 70% of all extremely low-income families pay more than half their income on rent, and only 1 in 4 impoverished families who need assistance for housing receive it, leaving over 580,000 Americans homeless any night. It is a nuanced issue and the key to eradicating generational poverty, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
As a solution to citizens feeling unheard amidst this evolving crisis, former Mayor Jordan created a housing crisis task force, a collaborative committee to recommend ways to approach the housing insecurity problems and increase the housing supply in June 2024. The group meets publicly on the third Wednesday of every month to hear the community’s concerns and questions.
Bo Diamond, task force member and managing partner and co-founder of real estate firm Caisson Capital Partners, is intent on making more affordable housing through his role in the task force and his real estate position, specifically for essential workers. Diamond said the issue begins with the unique situation Fayetteville finds itself in, which is one so largely based around a hefty university. The problem lies in balancing the needs of the political and social interactions of student housing and the other real estate markets that exist within the city, so to him, fighting against the development is not an effective solution.
Fayetteville’s housing report from 2023 highlights the demand in the city for a place to live and how staggering it is, especially when it comes to the average rental costs and the monthly income for citizens of the growing city. Of the 18,535 households in Fayetteville earning less than $50,000 yearly, 72.8% are financially burdened by housing costs. To fully relieve these financially burdened households, Fayetteville will need to build 6,000 housing units below $875 per month and almost 5,500 new units below $500 per month. Consistently, from 2019 to 2023, the number of new housing units, from single-family to multi-family, has never exceeded 1,400.
“I think that many people who have been here for longer see Fayetteville as something completely and separately separate from Springdale and Rogers and Bentonville, and I think that’s also shortsighted,” Diamond said. “We have to work within the broader context of Northwest Arkansas.”
Diamond discussed that the task force is in the process of brainstorming and trying to work within the city’s system to reach members of the city council to make them palatable. He agrees that they do not have that much power, but as group of professionals who are in the space, they understand the problem well. Unfortunately, they are without the ability of a politician. Nelson and McIntosh’s lease was supposed to end in July 2025, but they only found out about this student housing project in January, after a year of it already being in the works. It cost $3,400 total to break their lease and move out for the two of them, which meant they both needed to come up with $1,700 each, fast.
Nelson did not have this kind of money, nor the time to figure out how to get it or find new housing. She works five days a week at two jobs, a restaurant and a boutique, and is a part-time graphic design student on the other two days at the university. The panic set in, and she was forced to seek outside financial help as the reality of the situation began to settle: come up with the money or stay in the complex set for demolition.
“I feel like I work an adequate amount, enough to have like… some money, but I just don’t,” Nelson said while folding her arms across her chest and adjusting the towel wrapped around her short, blonde hair, looking askance. “I can’t possibly afford what people are asking.”
Nelson went to her family, who had limited financial means, for money. Her parents help with her rent and car payments as needed, but with four children, their money is spread thin.
To take care of the rest, Nelson reached out for a grant from FayIRA, Fayetteville Independent Restaurant Alliance, an organization that provides financial relief for hospitality workers across the city.
Emily Tripplet, a friend of Nelson’s and a longtime member of FayIRA, is an Arkansas native and a bartender at “Fayetteville Taco and Tamale” who moved to Fayetteville in 2016 with her own share of housing problems and abrupt relocations. While living here, she has seen her apartment situation and the city she’s called home for nine years now go from bad to worse, as well as watching her friends and family around her struggle with issues of rising rent and predatory landlords.
“They want those people that have unmaxed-outable gold American Express cards because those people are more likely to pay it than me, a bartender, like what name do I have?” Tripplet said. “What accolades do I have?”
Tripplet lives with her boyfriend, Charlie Jones, a musician, in a unique situation where they do house and yard work for the older couple. The landlords pay them hourly for it and knock off the money from their rent, making it more affordable for the working couple. Even with this better home, she is still in a precarious situation with older landlords.
“So the odds of them giving it over to God knows who is really scary, but I just pray that they hold onto it as long as they can,” she said with a frown.
Despite the development of the housing crisis task force, the locals have grown restless at the city’s reaction to the insecurities. Many have banded together to give monetary support through FayIRA, people like Nelson, and the community-based organizations to bring some recognition and pool together resources to fight it, like the Arkansas Renters Union has done more than the city.
The rise of these associations proves the camaraderie in the area amidst widespread financial turmoil for the Fayetteville population and also the gravity of how no one seems to be on their side.
Arkansas Renters United is a statewide organization with the mission to give renters in the area a voice and fight for fair landlord-tenant laws to give renters protections. The state has no laws to protect renters, so this group meets to rectify these issues through community mobilization and speaking out against abusive landlords. The activism group is led by Billy Cook, who has run for State Representative of District 19, a known public servant and community organizer intent on fighting for renters and representing an economy for working people, not the wealthy few.
Cook spoke at length during the Arkansas Renter’s United meeting, getting everyone up to speed on the gathering’s proceedings of future events and what their group means to accomplish. Cook gave the floor to the members surrounding him, who ranged from a man in old-fashioned suspenders who had been homeless for years from a housing crisis to an elderly landlord to young environmental activists in the area. Anyone renting in the state is eligible to join the group and attend the meetings for the non-profit. Nothing in the space was ultimately one-sided, and it only solidified how complex the issue of housing is, with no simple solution.
Yannik Dwyer, a prominent member of the ARU and freelance landscaper, has come to realize that there is no real leadership in her eyes.
Dwyer discussed how the city of Fayetteville spends exuberant amounts of money but rarely on affordable housing for the community. The city of Fayetteville spent $17 million on a parking garage and over $30 million on the new Ramble Arts program, a new gathering and space in downtown Fayetteville. The money is funneled into enterprises focused on attracting new people to the city, not taking care of the thousands who already reside here in unsafe or insecure housing.
Between 2019 and 2024, the City of Fayetteville granted around $1.5 million in financial support to non-profit organizations that focus on sheltering the city’s unhoused population and $1.63 million in Arkansas Rescue Plan Act funding to nonprofits geared toward at-risk individuals in the city. The 71B Rezoning project is a plan to increase the amount of affordable housing in the 71B corridor, and in fall 2023, the city passed the project, which said they would consider rezoning property along the city’s central corridor.
Dwyer spoke at length about the housing crisis, starting with the complaints from the citizens about homelessness in the area. Dwyer said he hears talk about it, framed as a huge crisis, and yet, none of the housing crisis task forces’ 25 action points were that the city should build housing.
Dwyer ascribes the issue to the lack of affordable housing in the city, not to just build general housing. The housing she sees is primarily luxury and too expensive for the average citizen to afford, so it creates an influx of buying property out from under people to develop costly student housing and not to the benefit of the community, which Nelson fell victim to herself.
Over the last 20 years, growth in Fayetteville’s median house cost has outpaced the increase in median household income. Median house value grew by 275% while median household income increased only 64%. The average salary of Fayetteville residents is $57,176. Of the nearly 18,582 Fayetteville households making less than $50,000 annually in 2023, about 15,000 or 79.7% were cost-burdened by housing costs, which is an increase from 72.8% in 2022. In this group, six times the number of cost-burdened households lived in rental housing than in owner-occupied housing, according to the 2025 Fayetteville Housing Assessment by the City of Fayetteville.
“You need to show leadership,” Dwyer declared. “Nobody else will do it for you.”
Nelson is trying to do just that, but moving from home to home with little to no permanence has taken a toll on her mental and physical health. Nelson suffers from the autoimmune disorder, Ulcerative Colitis, which is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) that causes abnormal reactions in a person’s immune system and ulcers on the inner lining of the large intestine.
She often deals with extreme nausea, abdominal pain, diarrhea, and fatigue. It is hard for her to develop an appetite and keep down food or water, so she drops weight rapidly and dangerously. She dropped down to 112 pounds from 130 in less than a month. As a result, Nelson frequently visits the hospital because of malnutrition. Every year, she has had to move; she’s worked two jobs at the same time out of necessity, which poses a struggle amidst her bouts of pain and health scares, taking a toll on her body from the stress and physical labor that it takes to relocate.
Nelson has moved all of her things by herself on multiple occasions, with the added challenge of pets, wondering where they were going to go in the meantime. Every eight weeks, Nelson must get infusions to remain healthy, and whenever she does not receive these treatments regularly, she gets very sick and needs immediate hospitalization.
“In a world of chaos, my home is my safe space,” Nelson yawned, evidently tired from a day of moving. She looked around at the boxes on the floor, apologizing for the mess on the floor.
“My home has no longer become my safe space… It’s become a monetary advantage for strangers in Texas,” Nelson said.
Carter Rideout, another Arkansas native and full-time worker at a local thrift store, “Cheap Thrills,” believes the same thing since coming to Fayetteville in September 2022.
Rideout lived with their sister and their sister’s fiancé when they first moved here for around six months while looking for a place of their own because of how limited their options were. The place Rideout finally found felt too good to be true, just under $800 for a two-bedroom townhouse by themself. The owner, to them, felt “sleazy,” never really fixing anything in their place that was broken, despite saying he would.
A little over a year went by when the owner sold the homes to a corporate property management company that raised Rideout’s rent almost immediately. The only thing protecting Rideout’s financial security was the fact that their apartment was not yet renovated, keeping the company from raising the rent an exorbitant amount. The company wreaked havoc on the property before selling the complex to another corporate real estate entity that still owns the row of homes.
Longtime owners were being evicted from their houses, treated as expendable, and tossed out without a second thought. A neighbor two townhouses down from Rideout knocked on their home one night, having never spoken to Rideout before. The neighbor informed Rideout about a note he saw on his door, telling him that he needed to move out by the end of the month because the new owners had sold his unit without telling him. The stranger simply wanted to let Rideout know in case the same thing happened to them, a courtesy that the realty corporation did not want to extend.
At the end of January, Rideout came home from work on the very same note, and they had to vacate the unit by the end of February. A practice Rideout described as “Morally just? No, but legal, perhaps.”
“I love my space so much…” Rideout said. “My home base is so important to me. So, it’s sad that it felt too good to be true and that it was kind of ripped out from under me.”
As Nelson sat there in her new home, arms wrapped around herself comfortably in her pajamas and skincare, she concluded that despite finding a new place, she still was not secure.
Nelson and McIntosh’s new home was a “dream come true,” but it came with its downsides. A common thread with her various residences is that compromises always had to be made. The house does not have a washer, dryer, dishwasher, or garbage disposal, not even an oven.
When it came to her housing situation, everything else in her life was constantly affected, from her work to her well-being to her performance in school. She works for two local businesses, one of which is currently closed and set to reopen later in the month, which puts a strain on her to make sure the small businesses run smoothly. When Nelson is worried about money and affording rent, other responsibilities fall to the wayside. With no work, she struggles to afford rent and when she’s working both jobs, she doesn’t have time to tend to her commitments. Nelson also faces the challenge of school on top of every commitment, and it has caused her grades to slip, her grades suddenly dropping from an A to a C and tanking all at once.
“When I move, something has to give, and it’s usually something crucial,” she said grimly. “I really can’t afford to f— up, but it happens anyway.”
Nelson’s story, along with many of her friends and colleagues, still exists in a precarious situation, all of whom exist in fear of whether they will be blindsided once again by a corporation or landlord who controls their home and their fates. With organizations such as Arkansas Renter’s United uplifting the community and FayIRA supporting its workers, the crisis seems less daunting for the people in their spheres.