Urbanists make financial case for walkability

From May 12-16, the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) held its 34th annual gathering in Northwest Arkansas (NWA), drawing roughly 1,400 architects, planners, developers, and officials from across the country and locally.

It was the first time the Congress had ever come to Arkansas, and the first time it ran in two host cities at once, Bentonville and Fayetteville. That format was deliberate. It mirrors the region we live in: a connected set of small cities rather than one core. CNU did not pick this place by accident, and it was a great opportunity to have other professionals offer suggestions on our development pattern as well as learn from it. The last day of the conference was also open to the general public.

As a land broker, I’m focused on what changes the value of urban land for my landowner and developer clients. What struck me about CNU34 was how much of the program made a financial argument rather than an aesthetic one. Another pleasant surprise was how realistic the attendees were about how to implement new urbanist concepts.

The United States has an overabundance of suburban and rural development patterns. The urbanists I met proposed adding more urban environments as an option that may not be available in most places and converting some non-performing suburban areas to be more urban.

A session titled The Economics of Urbanism 101: Form Follows Finance and another called PLACES That Create Value walked through why mixed-use urbanism tends to outperform its comparable parts as an investment. A session led by the consulting firm Urban3 showed that walkable, mixed-use blocks generate dramatically more tax revenue per acre than the suburban patterns they replace. Joe Minicozzi made the same point on closing day using regional data. Many sessions demonstrated the same conclusion: form follows finance.

Another common theme was addressing housing affordability through zoning reform. Form-based codes reduce barriers to more dense housing. Rogers implemented a form-based code in 2024, and Bentonville followed in May 2026. A form-based code regulates the building’s physical form: height, setbacks, where the door faces, how the ground floor meets the sidewalk. It says nothing about what’s allowed to happen inside. The result is that a single zone can hold housing, retail or office in the same building, if the building fits the form. Traditional zoning does the opposite: It sorts uses into separate districts and is largely silent on what gets built. Both cities retained some legacy zoning classifications, like industrial, for areas where residential uses don’t belong.

One session walked through Dallas allowing multifamily up to eight units under the residential building code rather than the commercial one, which lowers the cost of missing middle housing. In Arkansas, this kind of reform would need to happen at the state level rather than city by city.

The case for walkable, mixed-use urbanism is moving from a taste argument to an underwriting argument. It makes sense to develop land where infrastructure already exists, where the trail network already reaches, and where people who want to live close to amenities can afford to live. This isn’t an argument for developing every parcel as urban. It’s an argument for concentrating growth where infrastructure and amenities already exist.

Editor’s note: Dan Smith is a commercial land broker with Colliers Arkansas in Northwest Arkansas, specializing in urban land and development sites across Benton and Washington counties. The opinions expressed are those of the author.