4 Fun and Crazy Things Happening in Northwest Arkansas

Four stories from a year ago, checked against what actually happened. Every one of them had something to fix — a name, a year, a drive time. But one of them I got backwards rather than merely fuzzy, and it is the one about crime. So I am flagging that up front rather than burying it in section four.

1. XNA keeps setting records, and my own caveat was the right one

XNA closed 2025 with 2,524,256 passengers, an annual record and about 10 percent above 2024. It set a one-month record of roughly 118,000 in May and a single-day record of 6,443 on June 6.

That June date is the whole point, and I flagged it myself on camera: Walmart's Shareholders Week brings something like 15,000 associates into the region, and several of XNA's busiest days in the last seven years fall in that window. The airport and local coverage treat it as a known annual spike rather than a trend. Strip it out and the underlying growth is still there — enplanements passed the full 2024 record before November 2025 even closed. Airport officials have since said growth may slow from here.

The Salt Lake City nonstop I called "brand new" was: Delta started daily XNA-to-SLC service on February 13, 2025. The current nonstop list runs to about two dozen cities, including Atlanta, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, Nashville, New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Tampa and Washington.

One number to fix: I said people used to drive to Tulsa, "which is about 3 hours away." It is closer to two hours from Bentonville to Tulsa International, and about two hours and forty minutes from Fayetteville. That makes Tulsa a more realistic backup than I made it sound — which matters, because XNA fares run high and the drive is sometimes worth it.

2. Johnson's downtown district: right developer, wrong name, wrong year

I got the developer right. High Street Real Estate and Development, out of Fayetteville, is behind it, and the $55 million figure checks out.

What I called "the Johnson district" is actually The Warehouse District, the second phase of a 93-acre neighborhood called Johnson Square. Seven buildings on six acres: 66 apartments and roughly 79,000 to 81,000 square feet of retail, restaurant, office and medical space, southeast of Main Drive and Johnson Mill Boulevard.

My timeline was wrong. I said it would be "established by middle of next year," meaning mid-2026. It broke ground in May 2025 and is targeted for spring 2027. It is still under construction. If you were planning around walking to a coffee shop there next spring, add a year.

I hedged heavily on the restaurant tenants, and the hedge landed closer than it deserved to. Two are confirmed: A1A Table, a new concept from Table Restaurant Group, and Costa, a new concept from Juan Bahena, who owns Tula in downtown Fayetteville. So the Tula connection I half-remembered is real — it is Tula's owner opening something new, not Tula itself.

Hail Fellow Well Met, which I used as a landmark, is also real and worth naming properly: a coffee shop, restaurant and bottle shop in Johnson Square run by Andrea and John Allen, the same people behind Onyx Coffee, open since fall 2021. It is an existing business in the district, not part of the new phase.

Since I recorded this, Johnson Square added another project — The Morgan, announced in August 2026, a $7 million building with eight condominiums and restaurant space, named for Morgan Hooker, a co-founder of High Street who has since died.

3. The Single Parent Scholarship Fund's new headquarters is still being funded

The organization is the Single Parent Scholarship Fund of Northwest Arkansas, and it serves single-parent families across Benton, Carroll, Madison and Washington counties with scholarships plus wraparound support.

The new headquarters has a name: the Pat Walker Center for Success, at 806 Founders Park Drive in the Har-Ber Meadows area of Springdale. It is 13,000 square feet, roughly triple its current Bentonville office, funded by a $7.4 million capital campaign that opened with a $1.5 million lead gift from the Willard and Pat Walker Charitable Foundation.

It has not opened. As of May 2026 the campaign had raised $6.67 million of the $7.4 million, helped by a $1 million challenge grant from the Mabee Foundation. Construction had not started, and the target is 2027.

While I am correcting things: the land conservancy I gestured at is the Northwest Arkansas Land Trust, which has protected 9,655 acres across 52 properties, nine of them open preserves you can visit. That is a real number and I am glad to replace "hundreds and thousands of acres" with it.

And the highway I called "Springdale 249" is the Springdale Northern Bypass, Highway 612 — a roughly 21-mile, four-lane bypass costing close to $1 billion in total. Phase 1 opened in 2018. The Tontitown segment I was describing was aimed at mid-2026 and has slipped to early 2027 because of utility relocations. ARDOT's environmental study page, filed under the Highway 412 corridor the bypass serves, has the phase map.

4. The rankings were right. What I said about property crime was backwards.

The rankings I read out were accurate. SafeWise, using FBI data and rating cities by violent and property crime relative to population, put Cave Springs at number one for 2025, with Bella Vista fourth, Gentry fifth, Centerton seventh and Farmington eighth. In the 2026 list Centerton has climbed to fifth and the order below the top has shifted.

Here is what I got wrong. I said the same source showed a year-over-year decrease in property crime, and concluded "Arkansas is becoming less violent when it comes to property stuff." Arkansas's overall crime rate did fall about 12 percent from 2023 to 2024, and violent crime fell about 7 percent — both real, both good. But property crime specifically rose 13.7 percent over that same period, against a national average that declined about 9 percent. I reported the opposite of what happened on the one category most likely to affect somebody deciding where to buy a house.

I also owe you a caveat on the rankings themselves. They depend on voluntary FBI reporting, and small Arkansas cities submit inconsistently. In a town of a few thousand people, a handful of incidents swings the per-capita rate hard. Cave Springs being first is a genuine signal. Treat the exact ordering as directional and check the FBI's own release if a specific number is going to drive your decision.

The broader argument I made — that fast in-migration has not made this region less safe — still holds on violent crime. It does not hold on property crime, and I should not have said it did.