Molly Rawn Won. I Called Her a Challenger.

Molly Rawn is the mayor of Fayetteville. In this video I described her as "a competing mayor for Fayetteville," setting up a question about high-rises by referencing a debate between her and Mayor Jordan.

She won. The general election on November 5, 2024 went to a runoff — Jordan 46.92%, Rawn 36.92% — and in the December 3 runoff Rawn beat Jordan 5,411 to 5,149, a margin of 262 votes on much lower turnout. She took office January 1, 2025 as Fayetteville's 52nd mayor and its first female mayor, ending Lioneld Jordan's sixteen years across four terms.

So I was describing a race that had already been over for months, and the person I called a challenger was running the city.

The Costco: three theories, and a record that can't settle any of them

This was the first question, and I gave three explanations for why the Lowell Costco fell through. I labeled them as theories throughout — "here's what I heard," "that's my opinion," "I would assume," "my theory is" — and I want to keep that credit, because it's the right way to handle a story you've only heard secondhand.

But I should be clear about what the public record actually contains, which is almost nothing.

What's documented. Lowell's mayor announced the project in May 2023. Costco filed a large-scale development plan with the city on May 11, 2023 for a 161,000-square-foot warehouse at Concord Street and Pleasant Grove Road, and the zoning board approved related land development code items on May 15. Then on July 13, 2023, Hank Kelley — CEO of the brokerage on the deal — told the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal: "I can confirm the contract has been terminated but can't comment any further based upon our agreement with our client." Costco declined to comment.

That single sentence is the entirety of the on-record explanation. The landowner, Lyndy Lindsey, added: "They terminated the land contract but said they'll be back in the picture in Lowell in a year for a store." That was 2023. It hasn't happened, and I found no 2024, 2025 or 2026 reporting of a revived site anywhere in the region.

On my three theories specifically: I found no reporting supporting the road-improvement dispute, no reporting of a Rogers-versus-Lowell fight over traffic signals and tax revenue, and — this is the one that matters — no evidence whatsoever for Walton involvement. Nothing in Talk Business, the Democrat-Gazette, Arkansas Money & Politics, 5NEWS or the Fayetteville Flyer connects the Waltons, Walmart or Sam's Club to the termination. The only Walmart angle in any coverage is a headline noting Costco would have been moving into Sam's Club's backyard.

I rejected theory one on camera for a good reason and then offered two others with no more support than the one I'd rejected. Nothing in the record confirms or refutes any of them — that's the honest state of it. But I'd drop the Walton one anyway. Speculating that a named family quietly killed a project, with nothing behind it, is different in kind from speculating about a municipal cost dispute, and I framed it as the sort of thing an insider would know.

And my prediction rests on a mistake. I said "it's already been permitted... they already have the plans, a lot of the architectural stuff's already been done," and concluded Lowell was playing a waiting game. A development plan was filed, and zoning items were approved. It never reached construction permitting, and the land contract was terminated two months later. There's nothing sitting there ready to go.

One piece of context worth adding, since the Reddit thread raised it: Lowell would have been the second Costco in Arkansas. The state has exactly one, on Chenal Parkway in west Little Rock, opened July 21, 2021. The nearest others are Springfield and Tulsa.

The high-rise question — I cited a project that was already dead

I answered that Rogers is best positioned, and offered proof: "there have already been a 16 story permitted hotel going into Rogers that's going to happen. It's called The Dream Hotel."

It isn't going to happen. Beaty Capital Group announced it in March 2024 — 16 stories, 207 rooms, on the 1.57-acre former Ruth's Chris site at 3529 Pinnacle Hills Parkway, paired with a proposed 2,200-seat TempleLive venue. The venue was dropped in August 2024 over parking, cutting the estimate from about $150 million to $100 million. Then in December 2024, Hunt Ventures bought the land from Beaty, and the hotel will not be built.

I've corrected this elsewhere in this series and overstated it there, so let me be careful here: the documented rationale for Hunt's purchase was the parcel's adjacency to its own holdings — Hunt Tower is next door. Saying Hunt bought it specifically to prevent the hotel is my framing, not a quoted motive. What's certain is that the transaction ended the project.

On the underlying question, here's what the skyline actually looks like. The tallest building in Northwest Arkansas is Hunt Tower in Pinnacle Hills at 10 stories. Second is the Embassy Suites in Rogers at 9. Nothing above 10 stories is currently approved or under construction anywhere in the region. The tallest thing in the pipeline is Hotel Vin, a $72 million, 125-room Marriott Autograph hotel in Pinnacle Hills that broke ground in October 2024 — a mid-rise.

So my prediction of "a 20 to 25 story" building in three to four years describes something two to two and a half times taller than anything the region has ever built, with no filed application for anything close. That's a guess, and it should have sounded like one.

Where my reasoning holds up: Rogers really is the best-positioned candidate, and for close to the reasons I gave. Its Unified Development Code is form-based rather than use-based, with ministerial approval of compliant projects, no parking minimums, and — notably — no density management provisions of any kind. Mayor Greg Hines, whose name I got right, has publicly framed Rogers as becoming a "vertical city" under its Vision 100 plan and has said he wants Rogers to be the true downtown of Northwest Arkansas. I couldn't confirm the exact quote I attributed to him, but the substance is well supported.

Two things I couldn't verify. Mayor Jordan's "the taller the better" line doesn't appear in any indexed source. That doesn't mean he didn't say it — several 2024 Fayetteville candidate forums were broadcast but never transcribed — but I stated it as quotable and I can't back it.

And on Fayetteville: I said "they already have rules on the books of how high things can go." True in general — height standards live in the Unified Development Code, with exceptions and step-downs near single-family property. But I couldn't verify the per-district numbers, so I'm not going to give you any. If you're evaluating a specific parcel, that's a question for the city rather than for me.

On Bentonville, I was right. I said "they really want to mirror what Fayetteville is doing" and that high-rises there are a long way off. I found no tall-building or high-rise proposal in Bentonville at all. The significant downtown project there is a mixed-use development on Second Street whose own developers pitch it as balancing new construction with historic character — which is the posture I described.

Centerton traffic: right, and the fix has slipped

I said Highway 102 "gets jam-packed pretty quickly" and that "they've already designed a new road, they're going to expand it... but it's not fast enough. It should have been done probably a year or two ago, but they're just starting it I think next year."

Correct on the congestion — it's the explicit premise of the state's widening program, which has run public involvement meetings and prepared a formal environmental assessment.

What I ran together is two separate projects. The state's Highway 102 widening goes from four lanes to six between Highway 279 South and Highway 102B, adding raised medians, a roundabout, a signal and intersection work. Separately, the City of Centerton is expanding a 1.1-mile stretch of Highway 102B — Main Street — and adding sidewalks, with about $10 million set aside and total cost still undetermined.

On timing, "starting next year" was roughly right when I said it and has since gotten later. The state letting was pushed from April to May 2026 because of utility relocation and right-of-way acquisition. So as of now this is at or just past bid stage, with construction to follow award. My instinct that it's behind schedule was sound; it's slipped again since.

I'd also keep the caveat I volunteered — that coming from Chicago this reads as easy, and that it "is by no means Dallas, LA, Chicago, New York traffic." That's the right frame for someone deciding whether a commute is tolerable, and it's the kind of calibration a Reddit thread full of locals can't give a newcomer.

The cost to build — my most accurate number, and a comparison that doesn't work

Someone asked about building a 1,650-to-1,800-square-foot home. I said building runs "180 to 185" per square foot and buying new construction runs "200 to 225."

The $200-225 is the most accurate figure in the entire video. Per MLS data, new-construction price per square foot came in at $223 in Benton County and $210 in Washington County. That's dead on.

The $180-185 is defensible but low. Published Northwest Arkansas figures put hard construction cost at roughly $170 to $225 per square foot, with Bentonville custom builds running $170 to $250 — and the region described as the most expensive contractor market in Arkansas, 18 to 25% above the state average. So my number sits in the bottom third of the range, which makes it a plausible spec-grade figure rather than an average. I'd also flag that these figures come mostly from builder marketing pages and cost-estimator sites rather than trade data, so treat the whole range as indicative.

The Bella Vista lot number checks out. I said $25,000, maybe $30,000. Verified listings include a 0.32-acre lot at $25,000, with comparable platted lots running $19,000 to $24,000, and hundreds of land listings available. The reason is structural: Bella Vista was platted as a Cooper Communities recreational-lot development, creating far more small lots than were ever built on. Two things I didn't mention that matter — many carry POA assessments, and some have real buildability constraints from slope, access or utility hookup cost that don't show in the sticker price.

Now the part I got structurally wrong. I explained the gap between $180 and $225 as builder overhead — "builders have to do a lot more permitting, a lot more holding on to the loans."

Those are real costs. But $180 per square foot is a hard construction cost — sticks, labor, subs. It excludes land, site work, permits, construction-loan interest and the builder's fee. The $223 is a finished retail price. Those two numbers measure different things, so the space between them isn't a tally of the builder's overhead.

The national breakdown from the homebuilders' association puts construction at 64.4% of a new home's sale price, the finished lot at 13.7%, overhead at 5.7%, sales commission at 2.8%, financing at 1.5%, marketing at 0.8% — and average builder profit at 11.0%.

So a self-builder isn't pocketing a builder's margin. They're trading roughly 11% for construction risk, worse subcontractor pricing — a builder doing forty homes a year buys better than someone doing one — schedule risk, cost overruns, warranty exposure and about a year of their own unpaid project management. And they still pay the lot, the financing and the overhead.

On my bottom line — "most of the time it's just worth it to buy new construction" — I'm not going to restate that as advice, because the answer depends on things I know nothing about for any given reader: whether they already own land, whether they want a plan the market doesn't supply, whether they have trade relationships, and what their financing looks like. That's a conversation for a builder, a lender and, on the tax side, an accountant.

What I can offer is one piece of context I didn't have when I filmed. New-construction inventory has surged — up 31.3% in Benton County to 1,436 active listings and 20.6% in Washington County — while prices went flat to slightly negative. That's a materially different market from the one I was describing, and it's worth knowing before anyone runs either set of numbers.