The Vibes Are Free (Lance Turner Editor’s Note)

Northwest Arkansas enjoys a show at the Walmart AMP in Rogers.

In September 2007, not long after we married, my wife and I joined her sister and her sister’s husband for a trip to the Austin City Limits Festival, which takes place each year at Zilker Park in the Texas capital.

Laura and I had gotten engaged in Austin the previous year and were excited to return. It was clear that the city was one of those “cool places,” where young creatives were moving in droves, growth was happening everywhere and innovative ideas were taking shape. It was in early 2007, you might remember, that a peculiar little “microblogging” website called Twitter had made a big splash among attendees of the city’s other big annual festival, South by Southwest.

Music is the main focus of ACL, and that year’s lineup is a snapshot of the era’s up-and-coming newbies, at-their-peak performers and established veterans. There was Annie Clark, a.k.a. St. Vincent, performing solo to promote her debut album; Arcade Fire and Wilco, who drew big crowds with energetic shows built around releases now regarded as classics; and Bob Dylan, the icon dutifully fronting his Never Ending Tour.

We enjoyed it all — the live music, the food, the people, the vibe of a city at the center of so much. And that’s the picture we’ve carried with us for 15 years, that Austin is a “cool place,” alive with energy, ideas and culture.

For months, the Northwest Arkansas Council and other local interests have been promoting northwest Arkansas as the “next Austin,” a place where college graduates, young professionals and entrepreneurs can find affordable housing and great amenities, a great place to get a job or start a business and raise a family.

The council mounted a canny ad campaign, with billboards in cities like Austin and Seattle that tout northwest Arkansas’ lower cost of living (“It’s like Austin, but affordable”) and abundant opportunity (“Our Fortune 500 companies are hiring”). It’s also courted national media, making a case for the region as a flourishing, culturally rich but cheaper alternative to big-city living. In November, a piece by Bloomberg columnist Conor Sen carried this prized headline: “The Next Austin? How About Arkansas. Seriously.”

Meanwhile, those same local boosters have been working to ensure the region offers all the key advantages of choice communities. Among them: affordable housing for low- and middle-income families and health care. In a report published in 2019, the Walton Family Foundation said that minimum wage workers in the region would have a difficult time finding affordable homes; last year it recommended zoning ordinance changes to speed residential development and encourage more diverse planning, including greater housing density. Another 2019 report, by the Northwest Arkansas Council, said the area loses $950 million per year as residents seek medical care elsewhere and that it must add 6,000 jobs in the health care sector. Enter Walmart Inc. heir Alice Walton, who in 2020 announced her new nonprofit, the Whole Health Institute, which aims to launch a medical school and bring specialty care services to the region.

It was Walton, of course, who established a new era of regional growth in 2011 with the opening of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. The ever-expanding museum and its spinoff, communal arts space The Momentary, have transformed northwest Arkansas into an undeniable cultural destination. “Art has become a part of the DNA of this community, and that’s a huge transformation,” Walton told CBS “Sunday Morning” in an interview that aired April 24.

That transformation continues this fall, when Walton’s nephews, Steuart and Tom Walton, and Tom’s wife, Olivia, sponsor the area’s own ACL-esque music festival called FORMAT (For Music + Art + Technology), scheduled for Sept. 23-25 on a 300-acre property the family owns in Bentonville. The event, trumpeted in national news outlets including The Wall Street Journal and Axios, aims to earn the fast-growing region even more cultural currency, combining top music acts with visual and performance art happening outside a museum. The lineup includes French rockers Phoenix, psychedelic mainstays The Flaming Lips, instrumentalist trio Khruangbin and funk/disco legends Nile Rodgers & Chic, but also artists like Nick Cave, whose dazzling “Soundsuits” are on display at Crystal Bridges.

Attendance is limited to just 17,000 for the festival’s inaugural year — smaller than the 450,000 that pack Zilker Park over two weekends each year — but FORMAT will add to the case that northwest Arkansas is the new hotness among choice communities.

Starting at $300, the tickets aren’t cheap. But the vibes are free.

Lance Turner is the editor of Arkansas Business.