THE NEW TRADITIONALIST

Benton developer gives downtown a kick-start.

BY DWAIN HEBDA

It’s not often that someone can be claimed as a favorite son of a community to which they’re not native. But in the case of Michigander Shawn Hipskind, Benton is willing to make an exception.

Hipskind, a serial entrepreneur, moved to Arkansas in 2000. His business interests are varied, having included real estate, construction, development, excavation and even a restaurant and music venue. Now, he can add another title to that distinguished list: catalyst for the rebirth of Benton’s downtown district.

“I see vibrant downtowns as the growth center for the future of communities, as communities with vibrant downtowns are able to keep their college-age students locally instead of them going off to big cities,” Hipskind said. “Vibrant downtowns are what people want to be near and [where] they want to live by.”

Hipskind’s march toward downtown’s revival is a study in recognizing opportunity and pivoting to meet it. He was in his residential construction phase when he saw the first hints of the economic meltdown that would land full force in 2008.

“I saw it coming, so I switched over and got my commercial license because the government was going to give away a bunch of shovel-ready projects for commercial contractors,” he said. “We switched over to commercial contracting to avoid going bankrupt, like all my buddies did, in ’08 and ’09.

“I started doing first-time homebuyer homes because they were giving away $12,000 tax credits to first-time homebuyers. I think I sold more houses the first year of the crash than I’ve ever sold in my entire life.”

A decade later, Hipskind and his family were thinking of moving to Northwest Arkansas, but were turned off by the cost of living. That’s when he made a life-altering discovery.

“We researched prices of housing and decided real quick we weren’t moving to Bentonville, but we really liked that downtown town square,” he said. “When we looked around at Benton, we noticed it’s super similar. We’ve got a nice little courthouse, we’ve got a nice little town square, all we needed to do was build it out. It’s just been neglected for 60, 70 years.”

For about $350,000, about the same money commanded by a single fixer-upper in Bentonville, Hipskind bought an entire block of downtown Benton in 2017. He leveled the existing homes on the parcel, replacing them with 14 new ones.

“Most of the houses didn’t even have floors on the inside,” he said. “When you walked in, the floor systems had totally rotted out straight through to the dirt. Through the crawlspace you could see the ground; when you stepped through the threshold, you stepped onto dirt.”

Today, Hipskind has been honored by city leaders for replacing the ramshackle homes with new models. But at the time, he said, the effort to replace the homes wasn’t without its vocal detractors.