The home of Walmart wants to beat sprawl

In his prime, Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, loved to fly. In the 1970s and 1980s, before anyone could stare at satellite pictures on Google Maps, he would take a Cessna 414 and bank over towns, trying to judge where to open new stores. The best locations would be at the edge of towns, where America’s expanding network of highways could bring customers to the firm’s “discount cities”, each with at least five acres of land, most of it given over to car parking. The stores thrived, growing with the suburbanisation of America, and made the Walton family rich. Though politicians and residents attacked the firm for leaving downtowns desolate, Walton hardly cared. If the customer liked to drive out of town in search of low prices, so be it.

Fly over Bentonville, in north-west Arkansas, where Walton opened his first store and where the firm has its headquarters, and it looks much like many small American towns, with tracts of single-family homes, highways and car parks. Yet visit on foot and you will see something else. Downtown, a clutch of cafes, yoga studios and a farmer’s market occupy an area smaller than a Walmart car park. A ten-minute walk along a tree-lined trail leads to an astonishingly good art museum, the Crystal Bridges, built on stilts amid the Ozark forest. Families roam around on bicycles. It is, in short, a model of urbanism.

Much of this is thanks to the Waltons. Many of them still live in the town, and take a close interest in its development. Having made their money from urban sprawl, America’s richest dynasty seems to want to build something different.

Bentonville is a boom town. Between 2010 and 2020 its population grew by over 50%, to 54,000. The wider region is the 13th-fastest-growing in America. Much of this is because of Walmart, which employs 14,000 people in the area, as well as Tyson Foods, a big meat supplier, and J.B. Hunt, a logistics firm. But the town also wants to attract people with its lifestyle. “We are not embarrassed to say we are borrowing heavily from Austin’s playbook,” says Olivia Walton, the museum’s chairwoman. The idea is that by sponsoring music events, building bike trails and investing in art, people will be drawn to Bentonville just as they have been to Texas’s capital.

Austin’s growth, however, has come with traffic congestion, costly housing and long commutes. Bentonville would like to dodge that. To do so, while still growing, it will have to persuade people to live more densely. The city has grandly trademarked itself “Mountain Biking Capital of the World”, and built miles of trails. Walmart notes that half of its employees in the city live within a five-mile commute, and it wants to get 10% of them cycling to work; its new headquarters has fancy showers and bike parking. Tom Walton, who is a grandson of Sam (and Olivia’s husband), cycles around town on an electric bike with a child seat attached.

“We are trying to prevent…the suburbification of northwest Arkansas,” says Nelson Peacock, president of a “regional council” set up by the Walton, Hunt and Tyson families in 1990 to bolster growth. His council has been trying to persuade the local governments to approve the development of flats, instead of just tract housing, close to jobs. Some are to be offered to workers for the city government at below-market rates. The idea is not only that flats are cheaper and enable people to live closer to their jobs. They also ought to make it more plausible to develop public transport. “We don’t have a really robust bus system,” says Mr Peacock. Tom Walton has proposed building a block of flats downtown with no car-parking spaces at all.

Densifying is tricky. Bentonville already has a lot of suburbia. Its population density is half of Austin’s, and around 6% of New York’s. Its zoning laws decree, for example, that bowling alleys must have six parking spaces for every lane. Developers like building suburbs of single-family homes; while land at the edge of town remains cheap, it is tricky to persuade people to buy apartments. Still, when Mr Peacock talks to officials from bigger cities, he says, “most of them say, ‘we wish we’d started when you did’.” Somebody has to try—even if it is a family that has profited from sprawl perhaps more than any other. ■

For exclusive insight and reading recommendations from our correspondents in America, sign up to Checks and Balance, our weekly newsletter.