Fayetteville, Arkansas, is growing fast, and housing is getting harder to build. Clark Eckels and Nathan McCloskey of Fayetteville Strong talk about Rethink the Lot, a tactical urbanism pop-up that turned downtown parking spaces into small-scale housing people could walk through. The housing and parking debate can easily get stuck in zoning language, council meetings, and abstract trade-offs, but this project gave people a physical way to understand what those rules mean on the ground. Clark and Nathan explain what residents worry about, why parking minimums matter, and what changed when people stood inside a home where a car would usually sit.
Hi everybody, welcome to another episode of The Bottom Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany Owens Reed. If you are interested in the housing conversation, then you know our version of the chicken-and-egg question. There are a couple versions of it.
Do you fix parking before you fix housing? Do you fix housing before you fix parking? Do you fix housing before you fix transit, or do you fix transit before you fix housing? I don't have the answers to these questions, and I'm sorry to disappoint you if you were coming to this episode for that. But it's a really interesting conversation, because those things are connected. In lots of towns, when you're trying to think creatively about housing reform, you have to start thinking about these issues, challenges, and trade-offs. It can be dry.
You're talking about policy, words on a page that will need to be rewritten at some point, and meetings where you're listening to board members talk. All of that is important because you're working through important topics, transitions, and trade-offs. You're trying to think about the future of your town and how to make it a more affordable, more agile place. But sometimes you can also have a little bit of fun with it, and this is where tactical urbanism can help. Tactical urbanism doesn't work for every issue or every town, but when you find a scenario where it can work, and where the city is on board, it can be a really exciting way to shake up a conversation and let people use their imagination in a way they can't while sitting in a boardroom at a long conference table, thinking about how to word a policy change.
Our guests today have been doing this in Fayetteville, Arkansas, bringing tactical urbanism to the housing conversation and helping people experience that conversation in a new way, using their bodies and an actual space. They're going to tell you all about what they've been doing. I'm joined today by the guys behind Rethink the Lot. If you were at the National Gathering, you probably saw their pop-up.
I'm not sure what they prefer to call it. Maybe a pop-up, a demonstration, a tactical urbanist intervention. There are a couple of ways we can describe it, but what they are doing is taking some parking spaces in their town and putting up a quick-build mock-up of incremental housing. It helps people see that when we keep prioritizing parking, there is housing we could have instead if we found a more creative way to go about this. I'm really excited to bring their story to you.
I'm joined today by Clark Eckels. He is a Fayetteville native and a lead organizer of the Local Conversation group Fayetteville Strong. In his day job, he works with international students at the University of Arkansas, many of whom face serious challenges with housing affordability and lack of access to transportation. He has a front seat to this challenge for the population of students he works with. He's passionate about making Fayetteville a safer, more connected place for his three-year-old daughter to grow up.
That is a massive summary, and he's going to unpack it and tell us more of his story in the show. I'm also joined by Nathan McCloskey. He moved to Fayetteville three years ago with a longstanding interest in placemaking and transportation. He co-leads Fayetteville Strong, helping with tactical projects, learning with and from advocates, and helping organize community events.
For him, placemaking is about building the kind of city where neighbors can actually come together and make something special. Clark and Nathan, welcome to The Bottom Up Revolution podcast. I'm excited to give you guys a chance to tell your story and tell us more about this tactical intervention that you came up with. Welcome.
Thank you for joining me today.
Thanks for having us on. We're excited to be here.
Thanks for having us.
All right, I gave our listeners a little sneak preview into you guys as people and a little bit of your story, but I'd really love to kick this off by hearing more about your backgrounds. I don't think both of you are Fayetteville natives, if I'm correct, so I would love to hear how you came to Fayetteville. Tell me a little bit about your background and what got you interested in urbanism, placemaking, Strong Towns, and all of that. Nathan, can I start with you?
Sure, happy to. I did not grow up in Fayetteville. I grew up in a rural part of Oklahoma called Big Cabin, Oklahoma, and I left that to go to college. While I was in college, I first got the opportunity to see what it was like to be in an environment where you're close to people, it's walkable, and you can interact with them. I have been chasing that high ever since. After college, I moved to the Fayetteville area and saw that it was a little bit less walkable than a college campus and a little bit harder to spend time with people and naturally run into them. I started to try to answer that question of why and how we can solve that, and that's how I got involved with Fayetteville Strong.
I like that phrase, chasing that high, because it's real. I have been living in a non-walkable city for about six years, and I don't think I go a single day without thinking about walkability. It's always there in the back of my head. I think I've said this on another episode. They say some men think about the fall of the Roman Empire every day.
I think about being in a walkable city every single day. Clark, tell us a little bit about your story.
I actually am a Fayetteville native, born and raised, so I grew up here. I went to the university, and until I was around 22, Fayetteville was the place that I knew the best. Of course, I had been around and visited a few places, but I didn't really know any other way of life. We do have some good urbanism and some good things here, but it wasn't until I moved to Bilbao, Spain, to teach English that I was truly introduced to really high-quality urbanism, walkable streets, and world-class transportation. I got very spoiled on those things and came back to the U.S. very frustrated with the state of the built environment, but without any of the words to understand that feeling or why things are the way they are. I sat with that angst for quite some time. I also lived for a time in Austin, Texas, so I've seen what can go wrong when a region manages its growth through suburban sprawl. I love Fayetteville and Northwest Arkansas, and I really don't want to see those things happen here. I hope to use those experiences to help Fayetteville and our region be the best version of itself.
Clark, I'm going to volley this one to you. Tell us a bit about Fayetteville. Maybe I've been there a long time ago, but for someone who's never been to Fayetteville, tell us about it. Maybe you can tell us a little bit more about the Strong Towns group, but I want to know more about the town, what you were seeing, and how that helped you see that these were things you could start talking about through a Strong Towns group.
Fayetteville is located in Northwest Arkansas. We're the second-largest city in Arkansas, with about 100,000 people. We're home to the University of Arkansas, so we're a college town, and the university has about 34,000 students. We're unique as a region because we're more polycentric. Think of a big metro area with four big cities: Fayetteville, Springdale, Rogers, and Bentonville, each with their own character, along with lots of surrounding communities. Those are the big four, and they are laid out in a north-south development pattern along a former passenger rail corridor and Interstate 49.
Our group was the founding of our group, also coincided with the Strong Towns video about Fayetteville, which some of your listeners may have seen before. I'm not sure, if that was the inception or if it really helped get the get people excited about these issues, but Strong Towns did a video about parking minimums in Fayetteville, and which the city of Fayetteville repealed commercial parking minimums in 2015 and so for us, that was a big introduction to Strong Towns ideas, and, start getting a lot of people excited.
Tell me a bit more about the group itself. So many of the Local Conversation groups are organized differently. What did you all find that works for you in terms of how you organize? Were there certain issues that kept coming to the surface? I know some people start off as book groups, but I would love to hear more about that.
Our group was founded by Delaney Bartlett. She started the group out of a desire to improve her place. She, like me, is a Fayetteville native and cares a lot about making this community the best it can be, and making it a safe, equitable place where people can stay and thrive.
I'd say since the very beginning of our group standing, and I've been around since very nearly the beginning of the group, and then Nathan and I stepped in to co-lead in January 25
Okay, Nathan, I'd love for you to dive a little bit deeper for us and tell us more about the housing challenges. What are you all seeing? How does this housing challenge - I know is it's something that cities all over the country are experiencing right now, but what does it look like in Fayetteville specifically?
Yeah, I'd be happy to. Around 2024 the city of Fayetteville announced a housing crisis due to the rapid growth, and in part that is caused by the rapid growth, but it's also not helped by our policies and our regulations, which may make housing difficult to build, for especially for our small-scale developers. So that, and the university here, is the big things that lead to issues with our housing. The university has 36,000 attendees and instead of building enough student housing for them to be able to live on campus and thrive there, they're being pushed out into the city and competing for access to housing with the longstanding residents that we have here for a place that has 60% renters that left, put it in an unsustainable pattern of where we can't build enough housing, and while the housing that is being built is targeted towards that student demographic.
Interesting.
I'll add that this rapid growth at the university, corresponding with the rapid growth of the city, has displaced a lot of long-term affordable housing through some of these larger developments. Those feelings of gentrification, along with NIMBYism, have created an anti-growth atmosphere for some people. But I think most people are engaged and understand that we need more housing. It's a matter of figuring out how we do that for everyone in a way that keeps the character of the city and doesn't displace long-term residents, while also understanding that students need a place to live as well. It's about balancing those needs and encouraging development that's flexible, that doesn't appeal only to students or only to non-students, but can adapt to all life stages.
As part of the growth challenge, do students want to stay in Fayetteville after they graduate? Is there a good job market there? I'm also in a college town, and I think a lot of college towns probably struggle with that. We attract the students, and in some cases we need to provide housing for them, but then we also have to think about what happens after they graduate.
We do have a lot of students stay. We have pretty large corporations, including Walmart, Tyson, JB Hunt, and others, so we have some big job providers that a lot of students do stay for. I think one of the challenges has been the private dormitory model, where these large developments rent by the bedroom: four-bedroom, four-bath units. That really appeals only to a certain rental criteria and doesn't necessarily work as well for a family.
Nathan, I would love to know what it is like in the Local Conversation group as you talk about housing. What are some of the core insights or thoughts that have come up that you would say are unique to Fayetteville? Then I'd love to start talking more about this tactical approach that you all have taken. We're going to talk about Rethink the Lot soon, but before we do that, I would love to give you guys a chance to talk about any other tactical interventions you have pulled off.
Sure, yeah, I think one of the things that has been interesting about our group as it relates to housing is engaging with different experts in it, I know I don't come from the background of working in the built environment, so it's been really interesting to learn the different ways our city officials and developers approach different matters of policy and how they try and bridge the gap of meeting a need while also not adding in some weird loopholes where it works for one form of developer, but then it actually harms someone else, so that's been really cool to see. Then, for our tactical urbanism projects, I would say we typically focus on street calming or traffic improvement. We've done several projects that target increasing safety in these underserved areas of our city, and then lately, what we've been focusing more on is we've partnered with Northwest Arkansas Bench to build and deploy benches throughout all of the Northwest Arkansas region, and we even had some of the, some of the residents and volunteers come out and have a paint day, and paint each bench unique and interesting, so that it adds a little bit of flair to our local context.
Then, yeah, we've also something we're really proud of is the Rethink the Lot installation.
All right, let's talk about that. Clark, anything you want to add? I'd also love it if you could tell us about Rethink the Lot. Maybe you can share the story behind how that idea came together and describe it for our listeners.
This idea came about in the lead-up to Parking Day last September. If you're not familiar, Parking Day is connected to the Parking Reform Network and encourages people to set up parklets to let people experience ways that you can repurpose or adapt curbside parking. Strong Towns was partnering with the Parking Reform Network to get parking reform kits to all of its Local Conversations who were participating. We had never done much for Parking Day in the past, partially because other groups set up parklets, and we weren't trying to duplicate the work they were doing. But I was chatting with the founder of Fayetteville Strong, and she asked if we were going to do anything. In that moment, I thought, what if we could somehow tie Parking Day and parking reform with housing and help get conversations about that started? That was the simple idea.
It started very small. Our initial plan was maybe to get a couple parking spots, chalk some walls or other things out on the ground, and maybe put some furniture there. We floated the idea of renting canopy tents so it would feel a little more like a house. We realized that was going to be pretty expensive, and if we rented them, we would only have them that one time.
I was uncertain about it, but we had people with construction and building experience in the group who convinced us that it would be a good idea to frame up some structures and give people the chance to walk into them. Obviously, if you see a framed structure, it's clear to anyone walking by that it's a building of some kind. We ended up building two structures: a one-bedroom apartment and a studio apartment. We furnished them with some of our own furnishings and things we got from thrift stores. We wanted to invite people to step into them and understand how we use our land, how much space parking takes up, how much it costs, and how our city's residential parking minimums are a barrier to affordable housing. Our first installation coincided with the Fayetteville Farmers Market and Parking Day. Then we recently brought it back for CNU, which was also here in Fayetteville, our city's annual Strawberry Festival, and the Strong Towns National Gathering. We've had a chance to engage with neighbors, city staff, elected officials, and most recently Strong Towns advocates.
You mentioned regulation and policy around housing, the restrictive policies. Can you unpack that a little bit? Are there specific parking requirements for new housing that are a major obstacle? What does it look like in Fayetteville specifically?
Yeah, so I would say Fayetteville is known in the region to be relatively difficult to develop in, sometimes the smaller developers are going through the same regulatory process as the big out-of-state developers, and so the city actually put out a housing assessment recently, and it was showing that, the smaller scale developments are, much more likely to get, denied by city council, even against staff approval, and so I'd say generally, regulations, housing regulations, have been challenging. we have a really outdated zoning code, and, of course, residential parking minimums have been a big barrier as well. Like I mentioned, Fayetteville was a national leader in parking reform in 2015 when we ended commercial parking minimums, but we've actually moved backward on residential parking minimums since then.
When you say that these smaller projects are getting denied or are not getting approved, what's the story there? Is it a story of, well, we know that the bigger projects will provide volume or be easier to finance? Or is it more about unfamiliarity, or maybe fear around small projects because they're not as common?
I would say it's more of the NIMBY aspect of things, where people in theory say they support this type of development and want smaller developers and local developers. But when it comes to actually getting these things built, so much of it has to go before city council, so they are very susceptible to political pressure. If a lot of people come out to oppose a project, sometimes it might not make it through city council, even if it has staff approval. That can happen with different up-zones or variances, and that's been a big challenge for smaller projects.
Yeah.
I'd say Fayetteville has a really engaged, civically engaged population, and that's a good thing. We're all very aware of what's going on and want to be a part of it. But it also has its challenges because we spend a lot of time talking about things, and sometimes it's hard to get through the talking stage to the good outcome stage.
That's where I think this tactical intervention is so interesting, because when a person walks into a prototype like that, my theory is that it can help people move out of talking and into actually engaging with an idea. Nathan, can you, to the best of your ability, tell our listeners what the user experience is like when they step into this installation?
Sure. One of the things we tried to be intentional about when we were building this project was picking a good location. We built it just off the square, right in the center of the downtown area where you'd want good, dense housing, but it is in the middle of these two large public parking lots. I imagine what people would see is these two giant, wacky structures that are ramshackle from a distance, emerging out of a sea of cars. As you get closer, you can peer in and see the furniture, plants, and pictures all sitting on top of these parking spaces. You can see the striping running across the ground. For me, it brought home the difference between car scale and human scale. When I walked into the one-bedroom apartment, I was shocked by how roomy it was. I could totally envision myself living there.
There was a transit stop literally on the corner of the street that you could walk to and use whenever you needed to get anywhere. It was right next to downtown, where there's tons of great food, and it was across the street from a coffee shop.
Right across from City Hall, so
James, so you're never late for a city council meeting. We
Actually had priorities, yeah, actually at the Strong Towns National Gathering. We hosted a happy hour that coincided with quite a contentious city council meeting, and so there was a lot of people, waiting outside city hall to get in to speak on several issues, and so it was fun to be able to loop everybody in with some of the local news about what was going on.
I want to hear more about that. As you're talking to people who come to see this pop-up, this installation, what are the conversations like? What are you hearing? How do you navigate the conversations? Has anything been surprising, encouraging, or discouraging?
Clark, can you speak to that?
Overall, our conversations were overwhelmingly positive. I'm not going to say every single person who came up was suddenly bought into the idea of parking reform or repealing parking minimums. We definitely had those folks, but others were neutral, or maybe walked away with some things to think about, or were maybe a little more open to the idea. Most people were kind and thoughtful. We were also giving away donuts and bagels, and that always helps.
They better be nice to you. Yeah,
Definitely. Most recently, we took out some of our benches from our bus bench building and invited people to paint them with us. We tried to talk to people about what we were doing and why we were doing it. There were, of course, a few people who were upset with us for taking up parking spaces, but again, it was overwhelmingly positive.
We tried to focus on what the person we were talking to cared about.
I think that's wise. At the end of the day, these can be very emotional topics and containers for people's values, their sense of identity, their sense of place identity, what this means to them, and their sense of origin. This is right in front of them, they're scared for it to change, and seeing it in that personal way can help. Connecting with what they care about and helping them draw the connections is a wise way to go about it. Obviously, there are numbers, data, studies, the fiscal cliff, and all of that, and all of that is important. But cities are really personal to people when they are the places where they live. Neighborhoods are personal to people. Streets are personal. The more we can acknowledge and honor that personal component, and realize that when we talk about this change, it can strike people on a personal and emotional level, the better.
There is wisdom in being strategic about how you frame these issues relative to what people care about. One challenge is helping people understand what you're talking about, think about it from the perspective of what they care about, and see where it might feel more personal for them. It can also be tricky because people get stuck in their heads. They think, I don't understand how you build something without parking. Those things feel so connected. I get stuck here too, because I start thinking, would you put up free bikes for people? If you're doing an apartment, would you partner with microtransit or Zipcar and build a Zipcar lot a block away? I get stuck in the chicken-and-egg dilemma I mentioned at the beginning. How do you guys speak to that?
It's what I was mentioning at the beginning, that chicken and the egg, dilemma. Oh, what? How do you guys speak to that? Yeah, from both of you.
That's challenging, and I think that's one of the biggest pushbacks that we had with our project. Our first response was that we're not saying we should get rid of parking, or that we shouldn't allow parking to be built with housing. We're saying that the city's parking mandates are not really fitting with the needs of our community. If we were able to separate those housing and transportation costs, it would help people live downtown, right-size their lifestyle, and better meet the needs of the city. In most cases, and there is a lot of data about this with parking reform, a similar amount of parking is built when parking minimums are repealed. Over time, as places fill in and densify and transit improves, you start to see some of those improvements. But it's not as if we end parking minimums tomorrow and suddenly there's nowhere to park downtown, or someone can't live downtown without a parking spot. That's not the case.
We try to encourage people that this is not radical change. This makes the way for long-term incremental change.
As you were saying that, I was thinking that sometimes when people talk about parking and housing, they get so focused on possible outcomes, even though those outcomes might be one or two decades down the line. I think what we're trying to say is, yes, this will affect outcomes, but right now we're trying to fix the process and the rules of the game so we can have more flexibility as we decide what we want our future to be. We're not saying we know the outcome 100%. No skyscrapers for everybody, one for you, one for you, one for you, Oprah. But when people hear 'repeal parking minimums,' they think skyscraper immediately. It's not that we know the outcome. We need to liberate ourselves so we can pick the outcome we want.
Another thing that we did, and I think anyone doing this advocacy should do, is print off pictures of the GIS from downtown, starting in the 1950s through 1980. You can see that during the period of urban renewal, when parking minimums were established, there was an incredible hollowing out of our downtown. So much of our historic downtown was demolished. You can see that these parking lots that have been here for 50 years were once schools, businesses, and housing.
Was doing great. Yeah,
It's not even that this is sudden change. We want to be able to go back to the way things were, to this vibrant downtown. There have even been recent examples of historic buildings getting torn down because of parking minimums, so we have real examples to point to.
Nathan, I'd love to hear anything you'd like to add to that and how you were navigating these conversations around fears or anxieties, or the puzzles we get trapped in around these topics.
I feel like, at least in Fayetteville, the main fear or anxiety we hear is that people who aren't local to that suburb or neighborhood are going to come in, start parking on the street, and take up the parking that local residents need. Fayetteville already has a solution for that, which is a parking district where it is by-right for the residents. They can park on the street for free, but anyone else has to pay, and there are fines if they overpark or overstay their welcome. That gives local residents a measure they can take if they have issues with people taking up necessary parking. I almost feel like our neighborhood is a good example of what parking could look like, because a lot of our streets are pretty narrow, but they have enough parking for the residents in front of them. Then we have a small spillover lot for times when we have friends over, a small party, or a block party. There are plenty of ways you can address parking without requiring it to be built by the development.
I think that's the whole point of what you guys are trying to do. You're saying, let's liberate things so we can be creative about how to tackle this: how to supply the parking that's needed without supplying so much that it prevents the housing we need or the kinds of small businesses we love. You can't supply the right amount of anything if everybody is expected to get it for free. If there's no mechanism for determining what's actually needed, it's hard to know what's actually needed, especially if it's been free candy for everybody for almost 100 years.
Maybe there is a marketing challenge in the parking reform conversation. If you use the word repeal, it might make people feel like we're losing it all. But that doesn't really get to the robustness of what you guys are trying to do. It feels more like parking liberation, or designing the parking we want. Maybe it's parking calibration. Let's recalibrate our parking to fit what our town needs, rather than saying, we're going to take it away. I can see how that could stress people out. That's my unsolicited marketing advice.
One of the things we've talked about a few times in our Local Conversation is that there has to be a way to decouple the cost of parking from the cost of a house. Since my family only has one car, and we prioritize biking places when we can, I don't need the extra space. It is sitting there unused, but I'm still paying for it through my mortgage.
Nathan, thinking of alternate forms of transportation, what are you seeing? Do you see opportunities in Fayetteville for improved transit? I think that's another part of this. If people have options for getting around, maybe we can turn the volume down on the anxiety around losing parking. What opportunities do you see in your town for activating public transit in a more productive way, so that it can help alleviate some of those concerns?
One of the things that Fayetteville recently did was coordinate the regional ORT line, which is the Ozark Regional Transit service for all of Northwest Arkansas, with our local university transit, Razorback Transit. They matched their timing, and we were able to get one of our main corridors, College Avenue, to 30-minute intervals. If you miss a bus, you're waiting at most 30 minutes before the next bus. That feels like a huge step forward, where our transit starts to become reliable and you can start to use it at that scale.
Yeah, doubling the frequency.
Doubling the frequency from an hour wait, and so that's some of the things we'd love to see more of, is this having more ready access to our buses. Fayetteville has been really intentional and good about building out their bike infrastructure, I believe they add six miles of trail every year, so continuing to grow that and providing alternative ways to get around, where if you don't want to drive in a car, you don't have to.
Yeah, that definitely sounds like a positive trajectory there, Clark. Before we wrap up here, as you guys are looking at what's next for the group and looking at the impact of Rethink the Lot, like this tactical intervention, have you been able to gain any traction on the policy side, or have you seen an impact there? What do you hope? What are you guys hoping for?
I definitely think we've made an impact. It's not as if we've achieved our policy objective of repealing parking minimums at this time, but we've been really intentional with this project about engaging with the media, so we've done a lot of interviews with different media outlets. We also invited the mayor, city council, people running for council, and people running for other elected positions to come and engage with us at the installation. We've been thrilled to have the mayor come, and thrilled that most of city council has come and engaged with us. Even if they don't agree with us, or may agree in part but are not so sure, we've been thrilled that they're at least willing to come out, talk to us, and consider our ideas.
As I mentioned, last year the city council passed a more regressive ordinance in response to some of these feared outcomes and fear of spillover. That caused quite a few challenges and was a big inspiration for doing this project. But just last month, there was a city staff-led amendment that is going to undo some of the damage from that ordinance. It has passed the planning commission and should be going before city council in the near future. We look forward to supporting that. Of course, we'd love for it to go further, but any step in the right direction is great. This is an election year, so there might be changes on the council that make larger reforms more doable. This has been a first step for us into the issue of parking reform, and we look forward to pushing the issue in different ways to hopefully make more progress. We've been really thrilled.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but I'm about to run out of time here, and I want to give you guys a chance to offer one quick piece of advice to people who listen to this and want to do something tactical, but don't know how to talk about it in their city. If you had 15 seconds to give them a tip about trying tactical urbanism, getting permissions, getting the city on board, or getting started, what would you say?
Hopefully, your city has some sort of tactical urbanism program, administration, or staff member who would be excited. But it's really about doing. Our tactical urbanism projects have been quite large, but you can do pretty small interventions, and you don't always need permission. Getting permission and working with the city is ideal, especially if you want your interventions to be long-lasting, but get out and do something.
Nathan, what would you add to that?
Yeah, I would say to get out and do it, and have some plausible deniability.
Awesome. I'm going to ask you guys my last question. We have time for maybe one shout-out each.
Tell us a little bit about your neighborhood, and if there's one particular local business you like to recommend people check out, if they come to visit, this is your time to shop, make a shout out for them.
It's funny, because Clark and I actually live right across the street from each other.
There you go, so now you guys can fight over who gets to answer.
Don't bring that up. Yeah, and so it's really cool to see this him and some other people walking around our neighborhood that we have a neighbor called Pat and her dog Sugar that I see every morning and say hi to, and it's great to catch up with people around there, and if I had to recommend a local business, I would have to say, if you want the best cappuccino of your life, you have to go to Word Coffee, and not saying that because the owner is my neighbor.
Coming from Fayetteville, I'm always recommending places, and I can't recommend just one. I love Fossil Cove and Crisis Brewing. I usually recommend Hammontree’s, an artisanal grilled cheese spot, or Hugo’s, a burger place. For out-of-town visitors, we have a great library that has a coffee shop and a restaurant in it as well. You can't come to Northwest Arkansas without riding on the Greenway. It's a 40-mile-long spine from South Fayetteville all the way to Missouri through the big four cities, with lots of branches off to the side. It's great for recreation, and I also use it to ride to work, so it's great for transportation as well. If you come here, rent a bike and check it out.
I'm up to the challenge. Awesome. Thank you guys so much for taking time to share your story and share about Rethink the Lot with me. I really appreciate it, and I'm sure our audience is appreciative as well. Hopefully, we'll be able to put some photos up so our listeners can check it out and see what it looked like. I really appreciate it. I'm glad we were able to do this.
But yeah, I really appreciate it. Glad we were able to do this.
Yeah, thanks so much for having us on.
Thanks for having us.
To our listeners, thank you for joining me for another conversation. If there's someone in your community who you think I should have on the show, please let us know using the suggested guest form in the show notes. I'll be back soon with another conversation. In the meantime, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.