Addressing Vacant, Abandoned, and Deteriorated Properties in Arkansas

Arkansas communities face sizable challenges with vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated (VAD) properties—what many call “blighted” properties. These challenges encompass vacant commercial properties in the state’s rural main streets and urban downtowns, abandoned houses and overgrown lots in residential neighborhoods, and deteriorated structures scattered throughout rural and agricultural communities.

Nearly 30 percent of Arkansas counties have residential vacancy rates exceeding 12 percent, the threshold considered high vacancy. In seven Arkansas counties, one in six residential properties were vacant. Many of the communities with concentrations of VAD properties, particularly those in its rural areas, also have the fewest resources available to address these properties.

Arkansas’s VAD property challenges are a result of larger, systemic policy failures and injustices. These include persistent racial inequalities rooted in racism, endemic poverty, and local, state, and federal policy responses to these twin challenges that have strengthened and calcified inequality rather than promote healing. They also include decades of industrial changes and population loss coupled with inadequate support for the individuals and communities impacted. At the same time, the most impactful responses to these challenges are being designed and championed by local leaders at the neighborhood and community level. With support and additional local government and legal capacity, these efforts have the potential to achieve tangible and systemic changes across the state.

This brief seeks to inspire Arkansas local governments, state agencies, nonprofit organizations, and philanthropies to focus on vacancy and disinvestment and collaboratively support and develop creative solutions to help communities transform these properties from liabilities into assets.

• describes the costs to communities imposed by VAD properties, as well as the opportunities they present,
• highlights what has worked for some Arkansas communities, and
• proposes ideas to improve and expand local governments’ ability to address VAD properties.

Arkansas’s Vacant Property Challenges, Costs, and Opportunities

Arkansas’s VAD property challenges are concentrated in its rural counties and have worsened significantly in the last decades. Vacancy rates measured 10 percent for residential properties from 2018–2022 and 9 percent in 2022 for commercial properties in rural counties, compared to 4 percent for residential properties and 6 percent for commercial properties in its urban counties. As shown in the chart below, the 20 counties with the highest residential vacancy rates all saw an increase in vacancy from 2012–2022.

These rural vacancy trends align with declining household numbers in rural counties. Nearly half of Arkansas’s counties saw a decline of more than 5 percent in number of households from 2012–2022, with 16 of these counties experiencing declines of more than 15 percent. The charts below show the resulting general concentration of residential and commercial vacancy in rural counties and in some urban centers outside of Northwest Arkansas.

VAD properties impose significant costs on Arkansas property owners, local governments, and taxpayers. Studies have shown that VAD properties drive down property values and lead to increases in violent crimes. When owners fail to maintain their properties, local governments—and by extension taxpayers—bear the costs of remedying nuisances and unsafe conditions, including boarding and securing structures, removing trash and debris, mowing high grass and weeds, and demolishing unsafe structures. Citing the “profound negative impacts” of VAD properties on their community, for example, this year the City of Fort Smith’s Board of Directors made reducing neighborhood blight their number one priority and doubled their budget allocation for cleanup and demolition from $150,000 to $300,000.

At the same time, VAD properties present critical opportunities. With public and private investment, vacant structures and lots can be leveraged to create new businesses, needed housing, or parks and green spaces. Such transformations can bring new jobs and services to communities, restore tax revenues to local governments, and help revitalize surrounding neighborhoods. Over the last five years alone, for example, the City of Little Rock, working with nonprofit and private partners, has transformed 69 VAD properties into 130 new housing units and one community garden. In North Little Rock, the City’s efforts turned a VAD property languishing on the post-auction sale list into a much-needed neighborhood grocery store.

Download the full brief to learn more about what’s working in Arkansas. »