Rogers Didn't Gain Land from Cave Springs. They Traded.

Rogers didn't gain land from Cave Springs. The two cities traded. In this video I said "Rogers did get some land from Bentonville just not too long — no, this from Cave Springs. So they just got some land from Cave Springs on the far west side of 49," and I caught the Bentonville slip myself mid-sentence. Good. The correction I didn't make is that it went both ways.

Rogers gave up the Scissortail neighborhood to Cave Springs. Cave Springs gave up its eastern fringe — roughly Stratsman Lane to Pleasant Grove — to Rogers. It was a simultaneous annexation-and-detachment agreement, and the point of it was to make Cave Springs contiguous again after Rogers territory had split the city in two.

Two other things I'd add. It wasn't "just" — the deal was negotiated in spring 2024, with the annexed Cave Springs land assigned to a Rogers ward that June. And it was genuinely contentious: packed council chambers, lawyers, an opposition petition, a Rogers mayoral candidate campaigning against it, and Scissortail residents raising fire coverage, school districting and a rushed process.

That last part matters because of something else I said in this video, which I'll get to.

The code itself

I said "there's like 100 and something pages document, I read most of it." For the record, the public draft runs 181 pages, and the adopted code is Chapter 14 of the Rogers Code of Ordinances — so that was accurate, and I'll just add the precise number.

On the old code, I said "a lot of the building codes were established 20 years ago... this 25, 20 year old code." I couldn't source that. The new code repeals prior zoning ordinances without naming a date, and I found no record of when Rogers last comprehensively revised. What is documented is that the 2024 comprehensive plan was described by the city's own community development director as Rogers' first-ever comprehensive growth plan, and that he inherited what he called a "sprawl projection map." So "old use-based code accumulated over decades" is fair. The specific 20-to-25 years is my characterization, not a fact.

Connectivity — right, and more specific than I described

I said multifamily developers "have to start developing connectivity to the other areas, meaning bigger sidewalks and bigger things of that nature."

That's correct and the actual text is worth reading, because it's much sharper than "bigger sidewalks." The transportation standards require each site to provide "transportation for vehicles, pedestrians, and bicycles in a connected network, extending the public street and trail network." Concretely:

• Streets must intersect other streets forming a connected network
• Street stubs abutting a site must be continued
• Stubs to adjacent undeveloped land at least every 660 feet
• Cul-de-sacs allowed only by exception under natural or highway constraints — and even then must carry a pedestrian walkway through to adjacent properties, streets and trails
• The pedestrian network "must connect to all adjacent streets, sidewalks, shared-use trails, pedestrian walkways, and transit stops"
• Crosswalks at each intersection quadrant, mid-block crossings where intersections are more than 500 feet apart
• The bicycle network "must connect to all adjacent bikeways, regional open space, existing trail networks, schools, and parks"

So my claim that new development, in my words, "need[s] to have connectivity with the eventual connection point to the Razorback Greenway" is right in substance. The code requires connection to existing trail networks generally rather than naming the Greenway.

One nuance I'd add: it's tiered by size. Sites under two acres only owe connections to abutting street stubs and adjoining parking lots. The full network requirement kicks in above that.

The Greenway: my numbers were right, my adjective wasn't

I said "the Razorback Greenway, 40 miles of uninterrupted pathway from Mount Kessler in Fayetteville all the way up to Bella Vista. One big pathway, non-stop."

Forty miles: correct. Both endpoints: correct. The southern terminus is Kessler Mountain Regional Park in south Fayetteville, and the northern end really is Bella Vista — the trail was extended along Little Sugar Creek to Mercy Way in July 2018. If you've heard the Greenway described as Fayetteville-to-Bentonville, that's the pre-2018 version.

"Uninterrupted" and "non-stop" are the errors. Every official description says "primarily off-road." There are on-street and shared-roadway segments and at-grade crossings. I couldn't find a published off-road versus on-street mileage split, so I won't guess at one — but if you're planning a ride based on my description, you will encounter traffic.

Shared spaces — I had this backwards in an interesting way

I said the code requires or "oftentimes push[es] towards shared spaces," and imagined dog parks, shared kitchens, game rooms — private amenities shared among residents instead of duplicated in every unit.

What the code actually requires is public parks, triggered by site size, regardless of housing type:

• Under 5 acres: none
• 5 to 30 acres: at least one park, minimum 4% of gross site area
• 30 to 60 acres: at least one park, minimum 6%
• Over 60 acres: two parks per 60 acres, minimum 6%

And the key line: "Parks must be available for public access." Within subdivisions they must be deed-restricted for public use and maintained by the HOA, with a playground within 800 feet of every lot in the walkable transects. Qualifying types are Green, Square, Plaza, Greenway, Pocket Park, Community Garden and Conservation Park.

There is no dog park category. No shared kitchens, no game rooms, nothing about private resident amenities. Open space beyond the requirement is explicitly at the applicant's discretion.

The closest thing to what I described is a form incentive: a building may exceed the maximum front setback where a forecourt is provided — capped at 1,600 square feet, no more than 40% of property width.

So I got the direction right and the object wrong. Rogers is pushing shared space. It's pushing publicly accessible shared space, and it's doing it by site acreage rather than by building type. A small multifamily site owes nothing at all.

That's a meaningfully different policy from the one I described, and arguably a more interesting one — the city isn't telling developers what amenities to give their tenants, it's telling them to give the public a park.

Orientation — correct, and it's the heart of the code

I said "they want the orientation, the direction of the building, to be specific," and that the goal is community-centric development rather than "cram all these townhouses together and then put a little dog park over there just to appease the city."

This is the part I read best. Building placement is the core mechanism of a form-based code, and Rogers went hard at it:

• Maximum front setbacks create a build-to area; buildings must sit between the minimum and maximum
• In the T5 and T6 transects, buildings must occupy 70% or more of the lot width within that area
• Lots must have a front or side property line along a public street, trail, or pedestrian walkway
• In T5/T6, an entrance at least every 60 feet of frontage
• Ground-floor glazing minimums of 15% to 25% by district
• Blank walls capped at 40 feet along front and side-street property lines
• Ground floor within the build-to area must contain "active interior space" at least 12 feet deep — retail display, dining, lobbies, common areas
• Where a building isn't in the build-to area, a streetscreen is required
• Parking generally goes behind buildings, with front parking allowed only in Highway Commercial and the mixed-use corridor and highway place types along existing arterials

The anti-appeasement instinct I described is exactly what a build-to line plus an entry-frequency rule plus a blank-wall cap does. You can't satisfy those by parking a token green rectangle at the edge of the site.

The comparables — all three are real, and I owe a correction elsewhere

I named Fayetteville's "South Yard" and Bentonville's "the Lumen and Crystal Flats." All three exist, all three are correctly placed:

• South Yard, Fayetteville — a roughly $63 million, 194,600-square-foot adaptive reuse of the former Farmers Cooperative site at 71B and MLK: 128 apartments, restaurants, entertainment, office and retail, a seven-story hotel and a new public park. It sits directly on the Razorback Greenway, which makes it a genuinely apt example for a connectivity argument — better than I knew when I cited it.
• Lumen, Bentonville — 252 units on 6.5 acres at 307 S. Walton Blvd, $51 million, five stories, ground-floor retail and restaurant. And, since I brought up dog parks: it has one.
• Crystal Flats, Bentonville — 622 units at 1401 NE John DeShields, built 2021, near Crystal Bridges and the Momentary. Pool, yoga studio, community kitchen — close to the shared-amenity model I was describing.

A correction to one of my own earlier corrections. In a post about the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine, I said I couldn't confirm a Bentonville complex called "Crystal Flats" and advised leaving it out rather than sending anyone looking. That was wrong. Crystal Flats is real and I've fixed that post. A failed search isn't the same as a thing not existing, and I stated it too confidently.

Predictability — the strongest thing I said, and it's on the record

I said the value of the new code is that "Rogers is no longer really just kind of doing random deals on the side to overpass the old laws... this way there's no wheeling and dealing behind the scenes."

The city's community development director, John McCurdy, says essentially the same thing in public. To the American Planning Association: "Now, any development request that's compliant with the development code is subject to administrative approval. So it doesn't go to the planning commission, it's not subjected to a public hearing. We treat it like a building permit. If you're compliant, it's approved. If you're not, then we can either talk about how to bring you into compliance, or if you want a variance, then that goes through a public process."

And writing for the Congress for the New Urbanism, he describes Rogers as having "replaced our use-based development code with a form-centric code that features ministerial approvals of compliant development, no parking minimums, complete street and public space requirements, no exclusionary zoning, and not a single mention of density management in any of its flavors."

So my read of the intent was right, and it came from the same place I said it did — I disclosed in the video that "I talked to a lot of developers that [said] we want to do business in Rogers but we just can't because of these different things." That's consistent with what the city says publicly about why it acted.

One caveat I'd add. It's by-right for compliant projects, not discretion-free. The code keeps escape hatches — warrants for things like cul-de-sacs, and committee discretion on alternative park types. The dealmaking hasn't vanished; it's been narrowed to the projects that don't comply.

Where I was too clean about it

The code passed the City Council unanimously on July 23, 2024 — after being tabled at the prior meeting, and under a headline noting it passed "despite some concerns."

And it hasn't been frictionless since:

• By April 2025 the city was proposing amendments to "work out kinks" in the code and eliminate confusion, citing resident and Planning Commissioner concerns, with a public hearing that May. Less than a year in, it needed fixing.
• That same month, Rogers residents spoke against a rezoning over traffic and loss of quiet, and objected to entertainment and event venues landing near residential areas. Form-based zoning didn't end neighborhood fights — it moved them onto the rezoning and variance track.
• The code deliberately "built a fence around existing legacy suburban neighborhoods to reduce the NIMBY effect," in McCurdy's words, preserving single-family neighborhoods while allowing accessory dwellings by right. That's a real design choice with a real cost: it limits how much missing-middle housing can actually get built where most of the land is.
• McCurdy himself concedes that "even a city that reforms its code cannot solve a regional problem by itself."

Which brings me back to the land swap. In the same video where I praised Rogers for ending backroom dealmaking, I described a boundary agreement that drew organized, angry, public opposition — and I described it as a simple gain of land. The loud fight in Rogers during this period wasn't about the code. It was about the map.

What I'd keep

The two-Rogers framing. "Rogers has this old brick downtown section near Lake Atalanta as well as Beaver Lake, then you have this kind of new boppin' modern style of Rogers on the far west side, mostly named as Pinnacle Hills. So you have these two conflicting things — not that anyone's better than the other — and they had to get good building codes together to help developers on both sides meet in the middle." That's a fair description of the problem a form-based code is designed to solve, and the "not that anyone's better than the other" is the right note.

Lake Atalanta, incidentally, is a 1936 WPA reservoir on Prairie Creek, just downhill and east of historic downtown — and it's spelled Atalanta, not Atlanta, which I suspect I've said wrong more than once.

The downtown housing-stock claim I can't back. I said there's "not a lot of new construction in that 49 to Lake Atalanta section — a lot of older homes there." I couldn't find year-built or new-construction data for downtown Rogers to support that. What's documented is the commercial stock: the Rogers Commercial Historic District is buildings from 1885 to 1943. That's a downtown-is-old fact, not a housing fact, and I shouldn't present my impression as the latter.

"It's not going to affect pricing in my opinion too much." Correctly flagged as opinion, and I'll leave it standing as one.

The closing line. "If there are investors coming in, we expect you to connect to all the trail systems, we expect you to start acting like you're part of Northwest Arkansas. You can't just throw up some random houses and condos and call it good." Having now read the connectivity and build-to sections, that's a pretty accurate summary of what the code actually says. I just described its contents more loosely than the document deserves.