If you want to see what every town square should look like...with shopfronts all rented with unique shopping, restaurants, a museum, a courthouse, a nice little park, just come on down to NW Arkansas and visit Bentonville. Rogers and Fayetteville have nice downtowns, too, but Bentonville has put a huge amount of money into infrastructure because of Crystal Bridges Museum. Also, the new 21C Hotel opened just off the Bentonville square, and it has it's own art gallery as well. I reccomend Flying Fish for Gulf Coast Style seafood, or Table Mesa for unique American and Southwest Style food, and it has a nice bar. Oh yeah, come on over to my hometown of Pea Ridge and visit Pea Ridge National Military Park. It's a "must see" stop as well!
Fayetteville's is every bit as nice as Bentonville's, but I digress. The parks dept. in Bentonville is headed up by a childhood friend from Marked Tree, from where I grew up between a rice patty and a cotton patch.
Table Mesa is also in Fayetteville on Dickson now. As time goes by, most all successful things are eventually are going to have a north and south location.
Junior, I'm waiting to see what the Walmart folks pull out their tails for the Neighborhood Market that's going to go where the Harps was once in downtown Bentonville. It's supposed to be three to four stories with office space above the store and a parking deck in the rear. I know their folks have done a couple of new urbanism stores in the DC area and Boston. But they were the 80,000 square ft. store kind not 35,000 sq. ft. kind. My brother in law used to work in their store planning office and he always has neat stories to tell about Sam and their formula stores and towns finally starting min design standards in the late 80's and early 90's.
Fayetteville has over 200 million dollars in new student housing developments with a couple of large ones still to come. The Modus outfit are doing then right and the others are ok and hopefully it'll get the kids out of residential areas. The attendance goal for the U of A now is 28,000. To put that into perspective, in the mid 90's when the boom actually started, it was just shy of 15,000.