By Jordan P. Hickey for The Arkansas Advocate.
Broadcast version by Freda Ross for Arkansas News Service reporting for The Arkansas Advocate-Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation-Public News Service Collaboration.
On Easter Sunday, Elizabeth Buckeye reclined on a blue sectional in her new second-floor apartment just north of Northwest Arkansas National Airport. Amid cardboard boxes and large plastic containers stacked two and three high, the Bentonville school teacher took time out from her second job to talk with a reporter.
Instead of unpacking after her move, Buckeye spent the first several hours of the holiday delivering groceries through Walmart's Spark app. Shortly after the interview, she left her new apartment to make more deliveries.
She would have much preferred to spend her day off with two of her closest childhood friends or maybe just taking it easy with her cat, Jingle Bell, for a change. But that just wasn't feasible. There were too many expenses, too many bills, not enough money coming in.
On top of everything, Buckeye - an English teacher with five years of experience and a master's degree working for one of the highest-paid public school districts in the state - still had to teach tomorrow.
Another teacher interviewed for this story said he doesn't think about the future because of the constraints of the cost of living. Still another, a first-year teacher from central Illinois, resigned and moved back home after being unable to find a place to live that fit her budget.
"Everybody needs housing - it's just that teachers are kind of like a politically salient canary in the coal mine," said Sam Slaton, an instructor at the independent Thaden School in Bentonville. "You know, if the teachers are hurting, it kind of feels indicative of a broader systemic issue that is certainly affecting more people."
Indeed, teachers and other school employees represent the dilemma posed by the success of Northwest Arkansas' growth: They can't afford to live where they work, even with salaries that put them above a survival budget threshold identified by researchers who study what's called the ALICE population, which stands for asset-limited, income-constrained and employed. The ALICE population includes households that earn above the federal poverty level but struggle to afford the basics where they live.
Data from United for ALICE, the group that coined the acronym, shows that an employed single person in Benton County needs to earn more than $30,960 a year to move beyond the household survival budget threshold. But with rapidly escalating housing costs, even teachers who earn more than $50,000 - the new minimum starting salary created by the LEARNS Act - can find themselves treading water.
Local leaders recognize the problem and have tried to help. The NWA Council launched a workforce housing center in March 2021. In Fayetteville, the city council was recently pressured to declare a housing crisis.
Costs of both renting and buying throughout the northwest corridor are frequently described in aeronautical terms like soaring and skyrocketing. (The actual figures, particularly in Bentonville, where the median listing home price has gone from $450,000 in fall 2021 to $599,900 in July 2024, according to Realtor.com, indicate that perhaps the hyperbole is warranted.)
According to a recent analysis of rent data from the Washington Post, rent prices in Benton County have risen 34.6 percent since 2019.
What's also clear is that, barring a popped bubble, that trend isn't likely to break anytime soon, with census data showing that 36 people a day are now moving to the area, and a projected population of 1 million by 2050.
At the July 17, 2023, Bentonville School Board Meeting, Superintendent Debbie Jones revealed that the district had been feeling the pressure of the housing market since 2021, when several prospective out-of-state employees had accepted offers, looked for housing, then quit before the school year started. It became clear the district needed to find another path forward.
To that end, Jones explained, the district had discussed the matter with the Excellerate Foundation, a grant-making organization that has focused on housing issues in the region. The foundation offered a potential solution: Have the district donate nine acres of land adjacent to Bentonville High School, and Excellerate would pull together $25 million to build 100 multifamily and single-family rental homes, 40 of which would be set aside for Bentonville Schools employees.
Although the project met with some skepticism over the next several months - particularly during a January legislative meeting in Little Rock - the district eventually secured the approval of the Arkansas Attorney General's office and the Bentonville Planning Commission. All that remained was getting the Bentonville City Council to agree to a zoning change. Only seven zoning requests of 178 had been denied in the past two years: six at the city-planning level, but only one by the city council.
But at the Feb. 13 council meeting, a range of voices spoke, both for and against. One resident gave a brief timeline of Project Arrow, another affordable-housing initiative that had come before the council but eventually fizzled. Another resident said he didn't want any HUD housing (Excellerate CEO Jeff Webster explained that wasn't the case). Several identified themselves as parents of students in the district. Superintendent Jones said the workforce needs went beyond teachers.
No teachers spoke at the meeting. But that doesn't mean they weren't paying attention.
"When you hear the board proposing and saying, 'Hey, we have this plan, we have this grant, all we need is the City of Bentonville to do this,' you're like, 'Oh my gosh, y'all get it," Buckeye said on Easter. "You are fighting for us. Like, yes. And then for the City of Bentonville to be like, no thanks - it's really upsetting that the city doesn't see what the board and the district see for teachers and stuff like that."
Around the time of the Bentonville City Council meeting, Buckeye had been looking for a new apartment. In early 2023, she heard that the rent on her apartment - a 700-square-foot one bedroom five minutes from Bentonville High School that came to roughly $1,300 per month after trash and pet rent - was going to be increased by $100 per month.
That might not seem like a lot, but Buckeye knew she wouldn't be able to make it work. Even with the extra money she made delivering groceries after school and on weekends, she was drowning in expenses - $500 for a lease on a Toyota Corolla (her credit had cratered during COVID), car insurance, gas, food, cell phone, various debts, etc. - she was already stretched too thin. There was nothing left. There was less than nothing.
Although her new apartment was $300 cheaper per month than her old place, expenses associated with the move - putting a deposit down, paying the first month's rent, paying $700 to move, covering whatever she still needed to pay on the old place - had put a serious strain on her finances. Sitting on an incomplete blue sectional sofa, which she was still paying off at $30/month, Buckeye explained that she'd spent her entire spring break, 12 hours a day, delivering groceries to cover the cost of the move.
Her new apartment wasn't as centrally located as her previous place - at 9:30 p.m. the previous night, she and Jingle Bell had been rattled by the planes flying low overhead - but it would allow her, hopefully in time, to feel as though she wasn't on the verge of financial disrepair.
Maybe she'd even be able to open a savings account.
To be clear, not every teacher in Bentonville is struggling. Although all of the teachers at Bentonville Schools and the independent Thaden School interviewed for this story said affordable housing is very much a hot-button issue in teacher break rooms, it appears that the educators who struggle most are those with single-incomes and those who have relocated to the area in the past year or two.
What's also clear is that, for teachers who are renting - and who are hopeful for upward mobility - having a rent locked in doesn't necessarily equal financial security.
"I don't really think of the future a lot," said Justin Wilkinson, who teaches English at Bentonville High School, rents at the same complex as Buckeye, and also delivers groceries to help make ends meet. "When I do try to think of the future, it's more of just a hope rather than a practical idea ... It's more about, 'What do I need to do these next two weeks to make sure that I stay in the positive of my bank account before April 15 when I get paid again?' Three years have gone by up here and it's been like that every single month."
Still, Wilkinson noted, he's got it better than others.
"If I was graduating in May, and got a job offer for August of 2024 to start the school year, I would not accept it," Wilkinson said. "And that is not because of Bentonville Schools or anything. That is just strictly because if I saw the pricing up here, I know that I wouldn't be able to afford it."
In December 2022, three days after graduating from Illinois State University with her bachelor's degree in English Education, Katelyn Maxwell moved to Bentonville. She didn't know anyone in the area, nor did she have any career prospects, but she'd heard from family members living in Mountain Home that Northwest Arkansas was a good place to be.
Although Maxwell knew it was going to be hard to land a full-time teaching job midway through the school year, she figured it would be easier to get one if she was on the ground. Within a few weeks of arriving, she found work as a substitute teacher, and a few months later took a job as a long-term fourth-grade teacher in Rogers.
It didn't take long before she realized that her income teaching wouldn't come close to covering her rent - nearly $1,400 per month for a studio in a newly built complex near downtown Bentonville - so she picked up a second and third job as a server and a babysitter, respectively. As a result, she found herself teaching from 7 a.m.-3 p.m., working as a server from 4-10 p.m., and then babysitting on weekends.
"I was here," she said, "but I was never able to actually enjoy Northwest Arkansas because I was working every single day, all day."
In August 2023, she interviewed for an English instructor position at Bentonville High School for the 2023-24 school year. That weekend, she got an offer, and started teacher workdays the following week.
Although her salary of $51,924 dollars was considerably more than what she'd been making as a substitute teacher, server, and babysitter, she soon realized that her rent was still stretching her salary to the breaking point - and that she still needed to lean considerably on her credit card.
When her apartment management announced that they'd be hiking her rent by $100 per month, much like Buckeye, she realized she wouldn't be able to make it work - having quit her part-time jobs to focus on teaching. So she started looking for a new place that would better fit her budget. She couldn't find anything.
"There's so much money in this town, and it sounds so beautiful when you read about it or you hear about it," she said. "But I think that it hits a little bit differently when you necessarily aren't in the same tax bracket as everyone else."
In December, as her lease came to an end, Maxwell still hadn't found a place to live.
After couch surfing for a few months while unsuccessfully looking for housing that might fit her budget, she finally caught a break: A fellow teacher had a spare bedroom where she could stay while she was looking for a new place to live. After a month and a half, as the school year was drawing to a close, she heard about a girl in Fayetteville who was looking for a roommate. It seemed promising - but the apartment complex declined her application, saying she didn't make enough money to cover her half of the monthly $2,080 rent. If she had a cosigner, they explained, she could have it, but Maxwell didn't have anyone who was financially able to do so.
When she got the final decision from the apartment complex, she'd already been back home in central Illinois to celebrate her birthday. She'd already been telling her friends that she was done playing the waiting game when it came to housing. She decided to stay. She told Bentonville Schools that she had to quit, and she got a new job with a school 15 minutes from her mom's house.
It was the first time in the better part of seven months, Maxwell said, that she'd felt some semblance of stability.
Shortly before the Bentonville City Council voted 4-3 not to rezone the property for the Excellerate project, Alderman Bill Burckart said something that served as a reminder that the matter of housing in Northwest Arkansas goes well beyond teachers.
"We have a workforce in this building that - 80% of them - don't even live here," he said. "Ask the police department, they'll tell you. Ask the firemen, they'll tell you they can't live here."
The comment alluded to the notion that for every teacher who's been discussed at board meetings, city council meetings, and the like, there are bus drivers, maintenance workers, instructional aides, cafeteria workers, all of whom make less than licensed teachers, who are feeling the housing pressure even more.
Although Bentonville Public Schools doesn't keep tabs on how people are faring financially, Superintendent Jones said the reality is that the future of the growing district hinges upon finding the 140 new teachers that are hired each year - whether that's through local pipelines or finding people to relocate here.
What's not sustainable, she said, is having people live in other places that are not Bentonville.
"This is the district view," the superintendent said. "All we know is that when people don't live in our community - for example, they live in Fayetteville, and several do - and they start to have young families ... the family has sports and dance and all that, then the worker is tempted to look for something closer to home.
"From the district's point of view, we want to sustain their employment with us, and it's always a challenge when they live out of our borders."
In late May, Elizabeth Buckeye was at a childhood friend's place, attempting to detach her toddler-aged "nephew" from a broom. Once things were settled with the broom and a number of other grabbable objects, she explained that things had been better. Even though she still needed to deliver quite a few groceries on the side, that extra financial cushion would allow her to go out to eat, take a vacation, or put away money for a just-in-case emergency fund.
"I have a cat and he is like 12 years old and if anything happened, like, right now, I have no idea what I would do," Buckeye said. A few months later, the worst indeed happened: Buckeye found herself with a $500 vet bill after her cat had an emergency.
"I'm 32 years old," Buckeye said, "I should not be having to call my dad and be like, hey, like, Please help me."
Asked whether she'd heard about the Excellerate Foundation's recent groundbreaking ceremony for McAuley Place, a $35 million workforce housing development with 120 apartments and 40 single family cottages, Buckeye said she'd received an invitation to attend the ceremony. But because it fell on a Monday morning, she had been unable to make it. She still had to teach.
Last week, Excellerate announced that McAuley Place - which is supported with about $17 million in state and federal funds, $10 million from philanthropy and $8 million from permanent financing - would receive an additional $13.8M in federal tax credits and state loans, along with a $4.9 million grant from the Walton Family Foundation.
Although she was excited about the prospect of affordable housing, Buckeye said she was "cautiously optimistic." It seemed like a great project, to be sure. But she expressed concern about a few of the finer details she'd noticed. The apartments were great - but with the school board's recent decision to bump the minimum teacher salary to $54,416 for the 2024-2025 school year (which, Buckeye made a point of stressing, was very much appreciated), she worried that she'd be over the maximum allowed income for the apartments.
Excellerate said recently that its current target household income, based on the area's median income, is around $62,000 for the 20 cottages in the Home Ownership Mutual Equity Solutions, or HOMES program. The program enables renters to save toward a down payment on a home.
The McAuley Place cottages seem lovely, Buckeye said, but paying $1,000 for rent as well as another $1,500 per month for the HOMES program - there was just no way she could make that work. (Excellerate later clarified that HOMES cottages are $1,500 per month, not an additional $1,500 per month.) Plus, if housing prices were rising like they were, would that even be enough?
She stressed how grateful she was for the effort, but she had questions.
Had anyone sought her input on the program?
No, she said. She'd heard about it all secondhand.
Jordan P. Hickey wrote this article for The Arkansas Advocate.
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