As I read the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal on a recent Saturday morning, I was drawn to a story about a 37-year-old University of Tennessee graduate named Ben Weprin. He's based in Chicago and happens to be one of the hottest hotel developers in the country. He's involved in projects in several states bordering Arkansas.
Weprin, who received a $500 million investment from Gaw Capital Partners in Hong Kong, is developing a chain of hotels, Graduate Hotels, in university towns. Weprin likes to take existing hotels and redo them with the theme of the local university, as he did recently in Oxford, Miss. He says he might have 40 or more Graduate Hotels in the next several years. Laurence Geller, a veteran Chicago hotelier, has called Weprin a "superstar in the making." Jonathan Tisch, the chairman of Loews Hotels & Resorts, tells Crain's Chicago Business: "He matches creativity with financial acumen, and the combination shows up in the hotels he develops."
Weprin is also the person behind the resurrection of the 88-year-old Pontchartrain Hotel in the Garden District of New Orleans. Noted restaurant owner John Besh was recruited to bring the famed Caribbean Room back to life as the hotel's formal dining venue along with reopening the Silver Whistle coffee shop, where the movers and shakers of the Crescent City once dined on blueberry muffins each morning. Weprin told Forbes: "It's going to look just like it did in 1927." Among Weprin's investors and close friends is Cooper Manning, the brother of NFL quarterbacks Peyton and Eli Manning. The bar at the Graduate Hotel in Oxford is named The Coop in honor of Cooper Manning, who attended Ole Miss.
Abram Brown said of Weprin in a Forbes article: "He does tend to look at a new property with a preservation architect's gaze, thinking first about what he can save and second about what he should add. He's careful not to apply a distasteful amount of gloss, sneering at the Hiltonesque idea of interactive TV with a video about the hotel's amenities and history. ... Weprin has designed each room at the Pontchartrain to feel homey, a rejection of cookie-cutter chic at other boutique hotels."
In Chicago, Weprin renovated and reopened the Soho House, the Hotel Lincoln and what once was a private men's club overlooking Millennium Park known as the Chicago Athletic Association. The old club is now a 241-room hotel. Weprin's company is AJ Capital Partners. The AJ stands for "adventurous journeys." He started the company in the fourth quarter of 2008 when the U.S. economy was in the tank, but he had the ability to raise capital. Hotel magnate John Pritzker says: "He's aggressive and knows what he wants. There's no stopping Ben if he wants something."
Brown wrote in Forbes: "He specializes in buying a rundown gem and giving it a new shine, a task undoubtedly made easier by his irrepressible Midwestern optimism." That line immediately made me think of the rundown gem that's downtown Hot Springs. There finally seems to be momentum to renovate buildings downtown, and Weprin struck me as just the type of developer who could bring life to an empty facility such as the Medical Arts Building or Velda Rose Hotel. If economic development officials in Garland County aren't trying to get an appointment with Weprin, they're missing the boat. By the same token, business and civic leaders in Fayetteville should be beating down his door to get a Graduate Hotel there.
We need a modern approach to economic development in Arkansas. We've read a lot in recent years about projects such as the new steel mill at Osceola and the unsuccessful attempt to land a major U.S. Department of Defense contract at East Camden. Those types of efforts must continue. Economic development in the 21st century, however, is about so much more than industrial development.
At its heart, economic development is now about attracting talented young people, and you attract talented young people with quality-of-life enhancements ranging from craft breweries to quality restaurants to biking and hiking trails. Had you told me a decade ago that a craft brewing scene would become important to economic development, I would have called you crazy. Times have changed. Mike Preston, the young man Gov. Asa Hutchinson brought in from Florida to head the Arkansas Economic Development Commission, gets it. I'm not sure that some local economic developers, who spend all their time chasing smokestacks, get it.
I spoke earlier this month to the Ozark Rotary Club. I love that part of our state and drove up early so I could stop at a winery in Franklin County. I mentioned to the club that my idea for economic development in the county wouldn't just be a manufacturing facility. I also would try to attract an investor who could build a world-class bed-and-breakfast in the vineyards near Altus and then hire a well-known chef. It would be the kind of place that would attract visitors from far away so they could eat dinner and spend the night.
Too often, we don't play to our strengths in this state. For instance, we fail to fully capitalize on a winemaking tradition in Franklin County that goes back to the 1870s, and we fail to polish the jewel that's downtown Hot Springs. Those sorts of things don't receive as much attention as attempts to land a steel mill or a Defense Department contract. If Arkansas would modernize its approach to economic development, though, they potentially hold far more promise than smokestack chasing.
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Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the director of corporate communications for Simmons First National Corp. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial on 04/27/2016