Bentonville booms: City leads nation in cranes per capita

Cushman & Wakefield/Sage Partners’ latest quarterly report on Northwest Arkansas’ commercial real estate market is full of remarkable statistics about the region’s health and growth, but this may be the most notable.

Bentonville has more construction cranes per capita than any other city in the country.

Ethan Fowler, an analyst at Sage Partners and one of the report’s authors, says there are nine construction cranes in Bentonville (Pop: 57,868). That comes to a “cranes per capita” of one for every 6,429 residents.

According to the latest RLB Crane Index data, here’s how that compares to other markets using the same metric based on the city’s population, not its metro population.

• Boston: 1 : 32,738
• Los Angeles: 1 : 226,411
• Denver: 1 : 29,644
• Chicago: 1 : 299,666
• New York City: 1 : 1,058,000

RLB Crane Index is published biannually. It tracks the number of operating tower cranes in 14 major cities across the U.S. and Canada. In a note to the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal, Fowler said all of Bentonville’s cranes are considered tower cranes, citing Mazzella Cos., a large manufacturer of overhead lifting and rigging products, as a source.

Wrap your head around this: Bentonville currently has more cranes than New York City (8). Six are at the Walmart Inc. future home office construction site in Bentonville. Others are at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (expansion), Alice L. Walton School of Medicine and a downtown hotel project.