Question 1

Can I actually build a barndominium in Jacksonville?

Accepted Answer

Yes — but be clear about what you are buying. Jacksonville is a built-out city of 29,460 people on 28.69 square miles, about a third of which is Little Rock Air Force Base. Its residential zoning districts are sized for subdivision lots: R-1 asks 6,000 square feet, R-0 8,400, R-1A 5,000. The only district in the whole zoning ordinance with an acre minimum is A-1 Agriculture, and there is very little of it. Pulaski County as a whole has only 14.8 percent of its land in farms and the smallest median farm size in Arkansas at 35 acres, so the county is not hiding a supply of ten-acre tracts either. If what you want is a house with a real shop on real acreage, the honest answer is that you buy it one county over. Going east, Lonoke County has 82.9 percent of its land in farms — the highest share of any metropolitan county in Arkansas — with a median farm of 122 acres and only 99 people per square mile. Going west, Perry County is the least dense county in any Arkansas metro at 18.7 people per square mile and 76 percent forest. Going south, Grant County is 97 percent forest, the highest forest share of any county in the state. All three are inside the Little Rock–North Little Rock–Conway metro. What Jacksonville is genuinely good for is an infill build on a platted lot, or an addition, or a shop within the city's size caps — and this page tells you exactly where those caps sit.

Question 2

Who issues the permit in Jacksonville, and what does it cost?

Accepted Answer

The City of Jacksonville Engineering & Planning Department does, and unlike most Arkansas jurisdictions it publishes the fee. JMC 16.04.060 sets the building permit fee as a $10.00 minimum covering the first $1,000 of construction valuation, plus $2.00 for each $1,000 of valuation or part thereof above that. The ordinance also fixes how valuation is arrived at: all construction is presumed to be worth at least $35.00 per square foot of heated and cooled area, and where the builder and the City Engineer disagree, $30.00 per square foot of the whole floor plan including carports, garages, storage rooms, porches and steps. Run that on a 2,000 square foot heated and cooled dwelling and the presumed valuation is $70,000 and the permit fee is $148.00. Separate permits are taken out by the electrical, plumbing and HVACR contractors under JMC 16.08.010 and 16.12.030, and water and sewer fees must be paid at City Hall before the residential permit is issued. The permit application form warns that the applicant assumes full responsibility for placement of the building, accessory buildings and fencing on the plot plan, that the city's building official is not responsible for locating property lines, and that no structure may be occupied until a certificate of occupancy is issued. Residential construction estimated at $20,000 or more, and all new residential construction, requires an Arkansas contractor's licence number on the application.

Question 3

Can my shop be bigger than my house inside the city limits?

Accepted Answer

Not if it is detached. This is the one rule that decides whether a barndominium works in Jacksonville, and the city rewrote it recently. JMC 18.86.020, as amended by Ordinance 1720 on 2 March 2023, caps the combined area of all detached accessory buildings on a lot. On half an acre or less, the combined accessory area may be no more than half the floor area of the principal building, with a hard maximum of 850 square feet. On more than half an acre, it may be no more than 5 percent of total lot area, with a hard maximum of 3,500 square feet. On top of that, accessory buildings may never occupy more than 30 percent of the existing rear yard. On a one-acre A-1 lot, 5 percent is 2,178 square feet; you need just over 1.6 acres before the 3,500 square foot ceiling is even reachable. JMC 18.86.030 adds that an accessory building in a residential area may not exceed the height of the principal structure or 25 feet at the ridge, whichever is less. There is a legitimate way around this, and it is written into the ordinance: JMC 18.04.080 provides that an accessory building attached to the principal building by a breezeway, passageway or similar means must comply with the yard requirements of the principal building instead. Attach the shop and it stops being a detached accessory building. Detach it and JMC 18.04.090 also forces it fifteen feet clear of the house.

Question 4

What does Little Rock Air Force Base do to what I can build?

Accepted Answer

More than anywhere else in Arkansas. Jacksonville is one of four cities — with Sherwood, Cabot and North Little Rock — covered by A.C.A. 14-56-426, 'Control of property use — Proximity to military installation', adopted in 1995 and revised in 2005 and 2017, which requires them to regulate land use in a five-mile area around the base. The Compatible Use Study Phase II report puts that statutory five-mile area at roughly 100 square miles and the outer extent of the base's imaginary surfaces at roughly 315 square miles. Jacksonville's compliance is Chapter 18.66 of its municipal code, the AICUZ overlay district, enacted by Ordinance 1119 in 1999. Inside the Clear Zone and Accident Potential Zones I and II the overlay allows no more than one single-family dwelling per acre, requires sound insulation against levels exceeding 75 dB DNL, forbids any use that exposes a person to more than DNL 75 dB, forbids anything violating the height restriction criteria of FAR Part 77 Subpart C, and forbids emissions, light, electrical interference or bird attraction that would interfere with aircraft. The overlay supersedes the underlying zoning district. Worth knowing precisely: the 2011 AICUZ Study found that apart from land inside the installation boundary itself, the mapped noise zones and accident potential zones did not encompass land in the City of Jacksonville — the off-base APZ land at that time lay in Sherwood and in unincorporated Pulaski County. Each APZ I is 3,000 by 5,000 feet and each APZ II 3,000 by 7,000 feet.

Question 5

My land is not in a recorded subdivision. What happens?

Accepted Answer

You go in front of the Planning Commission before you get a permit. The city's own Residential Building Permit Checklist says it plainly: a plot plan is required showing all improvements in a recorded subdivision located in a properly zoned area, and if the proposed construction location is not in a recorded subdivision, the request for a building permit cannot be granted until it has been reviewed by the Jacksonville Planning Commission at the next regularly scheduled monthly meeting. The Planning Commission and the Board of Adjustment meet monthly on a calendar the city publishes a year ahead, with staff distribution, comment and revision deadlines set out for each meeting — the Board of Adjustment sits at 6:00 p.m. and the Planning Commission at 6:30 p.m. Two other city rules bite on the same kind of parcel. JMC 18.04.030 states that no building may be constructed on a lot which does not have frontage on a publicly dedicated, accepted and maintained street, so a tract served only by a private drive or an easement is a problem before anything else is. And JMC 18.04.130 requires a permit from the building inspector before soil is stripped, excavated or removed for sale or any other purpose, though grading incidental to construction under an issued building permit is excluded. Budget calendar time for all of this: the monthly cycle is the schedule, not the counter.

Question 6

Which building code applies in Jacksonville, and who inspects?

Accepted Answer

The state code applies everywhere in Arkansas — the Arkansas Fire Prevention Code, 2021 edition, Volume III of which is the 2021 International Residential Code with Arkansas amendments, adopted by the State Fire Marshal and effective 1 January 2023. The Arkansas Department of Labor and Licensing states on its own Contractors Licensing Board pages that the code applies statewide, even in rural and unincorporated areas. What differs from place to place is whether anyone is standing at a counter, and in Jacksonville someone is. JMC 16.04.010, last amended by Ordinance 1696 in July 2022, adopts a list of codes — the International Building and Residential Codes, the IECC, the International Property Maintenance Code, the Arkansas Fire Prevention Code Volumes 1 to 3, the NFPA Life Safety Code, the Arkansas fuel gas, mechanical and plumbing codes, the National Electrical Code and the International Mechanical Code — each qualified 'or Current Edition', with a closing sentence that any adopted or referenced code 'shall always reference the most recent and current edition'. Because Arkansas allows a local jurisdiction only to make the state code more stringent, never less, that rolling clause tracks the state code upward rather than freezing an old edition. Inspections and the certificate of occupancy come from the city. Electricians, plumbers and HVACR mechanics are licensed by the State of Arkansas regardless of the city, and they pull their own separate permits here.

Question 7

What is the ground like, and what does that mean for a slab?

Accepted Answer

Jacksonville sits on the eastern edge of the Arkansas River Valley, and the local soils are dominated by fragipan. A USDA-NRCS Soil Data Access query over the Jacksonville area returns Leadvale as the most extensive major soil component, with Amy, Taft, Guthrie, Calloway and Loring also present — Leadvale, Taft, Guthrie, Calloway and Loring are all fragipan soils. The NRCS Official Series Description for Leadvale puts depth to the fragipan at 16 to 38 inches, describes the Btx horizon as firm and brittle, and states that permeability is slow or moderately slow and that a perched water table sits two to three feet down late in winter and early spring. That combination — a dense restrictive layer within the depth a footing cares about, and seasonal water sitting on top of it — is a drainage design problem before it is a bearing problem. Amy is poorly drained. Perry-series Vertisol clay, the shrink-swell soil, is present here too, though Pulaski County's overall Vertisol share is low at 5.9 percent. On top of the soils sits an unusually specific city rule: JMC 16.05.010 requires the finished floor elevation of all houses to be six inches above the top of the curb, measured from the highest point on the curb the lot fronts, unless the lot is engineered above the hundred-year floodplain or above the flood from an eight-inch rain in one hour computed by the rational formula at C = 0.7, or the City Engineer gives written permission. Get that established before the pad is shaped.

Question 8

Is flooding a real issue, and how do I check?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and the city is unusually candid about it. Jacksonville's own Flood Protection Information sheet names the two sources: Bayou Meto and Jacks Bayou. When they leave their banks in heavy storms, the city writes, floodwaters can cover many blocks up to four or five feet deep, and flooding in these areas can occur with little warning. The sheet records Jacks Bayou flooding Highway 67/167 and John Harden Drive after heavy rain in December 2009 and May 2011, and Bayou Meto flooding Highway 67/167, Dupree Park and the one-lane bridge on West Main Street. Jacksonville participates in both the National Flood Insurance Program and the Community Rating System, which is what discounts flood insurance premiums for its residents. Practically, the checks are these. Flood maps and flood protection references are held at the Jacksonville Public Library and at the Engineering Department at City Hall, where staff will tell you whether a parcel is in a mapped floodplain, give you depth-of-flooding and past-problem information for the area, copy any elevation certificate already on file, and — free — visit the property to review its flood problem. The city publishes a Floodplain Development Permit Application, and the building permit application itself has a floodplain yes/no box and a LOMA/LOMR box, and states that a certificate of occupancy will not issue until all inspections are passed and an as-built elevation certificate, if required, is on file.

Question 9

If I look one county over instead, what changes?

Accepted Answer

The regulator changes, and so does the ground. Going east into Lonoke County, you leave a city with a building official, a zoning ordinance and a monthly Planning Commission and enter unincorporated land that the Little Rock AFB Compatible Use Study describes as being without jurisdiction-wide zoning regulations. In Arkansas that is not an oversight but a two-step opt-in: a county judge may create a planning board with the quorum court's approval under A.C.A. 14-17-203(a), and only then may the court adopt zoning, which 14-17-209(c) says is observed through denial of building permits. Pulaski County itself illustrates the halfway state — it has a planning board and a subdivision code, but its zoning ordinance, zoning map and building permit application all apply to the Lake Maumelle Watershed only, on the far west side of the county. Two things to carry across the line. First, Lonoke is one of the twelve counties named in statutory seismic Zone 2 under A.C.A. 12-80-103, where Pulaski is in Zone 1 — that statute governs public structures, not houses, but it is the vocabulary Arkansas engineers use. Second, the ground flips: Lonoke is Mississippi Alluvial Plain, flat, deep, soft and with a high water table, which is a different foundation conversation from Jacksonville's fragipan. Perry County to the west is Ouachita rock near the surface, and Grant County to the south is sandy coastal-plain timber. Same metro, three different foundations.

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