The 112 acres owned by the Marinoni family at Wedington Drive and Interstate 540 has sat largely idle for years as other pieces of land along the I-540 corridor developed with commercial or multi-family resident projects. It was only a matter of time before conditions were right to see some sort of project happen on this prime piece of property.
The time has come, according to a company called Capstone Collegiate Communities. Following the recent building trend for high-occupancy, student-oriented housing, the company wants to build a 702-bedroom, 150-unit cottage-style apartment complex for the burgeoning market of University of Arkansas students.
What’s The Point?
A proposed student-focused cottage project at Wedington Drive and Interstate 540 demands careful attention of city officials because of its potential to put heavy traffic on infrastructure lacking capacity to handle it.
That intersection -- on a major city street crossing the region's major interstate -- seems entirely appropriate for a residential development that will generate a great deal of traffic.
The very legitimate concern among nearby residents, however, isn't so much about the raw numbers of people who will live at the development. It's about where many of them will want to go to and from on an almost daily basis. And that's the University of Arkansas campus.
Caught between the campus and the proposed development are neighborhoods and streets not designed to handle a flood of traffic on a day-to-day basis. These folks already get slammed by Arkansas Razorbacks football game day traffic, but the stadium and homeowners have co-existed for decades. The question many of them are asking is whether it's wise for the city to allow construction of a private development that will overburden the transportation infrastructure.
Credit the developers with some good ideas that mirror what other student-oriented private developments have featured. A spokesman said the company plans to incorporate a Razorback Transit bus stop in the project and may look at providing a private shuttle service if the transit stop proves inadequate. The problem with those ideas is that they very well could be temporary -- there's no guarantee -- while the development itself and its 702 bedrooms will be very much permanent once built.
The Capstone project, evaluated in a vacuum, looks like an impressive concept, and promises of quality management in future years are certainly welcomed. The real question of impact arises when those student-residents leave their rented bedrooms. Will they be prone to walking or biking? Or will they flood through the neighborhoods in their cars?
If the property were adjacent to the university, for example, its impact on traffic concerns might not cause any hesitation. But city officials must take into account the constant conflict approval of this project will create between student drivers and and the homeowners in the area of Sang Avenue and Cleveland Street. It won't be managers of the student community getting the calls about that traffic; the responsibility for this project's impact on the surrounding community rests with city planners and any shortcomings will create a city problem.
Other student-oriented housing has certainly been built off campus in the last few years, but mostly to the south and east, where other neighborhoods are not as big a barrier to connectivity, and closer to the UA campus.
We don't oppose the project at this stage, but encourage city officials to move with an abundance of caution for a project that so fundamentally could change traffic patterns in an area of town with limited infrastructure to handle the probable flow of traffic it would generate.
Commentary on 04/05/2014