This is a pattern in Arkansas law, not a one-off

The same carve-out already exists in enacted Arkansas law. Act 313 of 2025 requires municipalities to allow at least one accessory dwelling unit by right on any lot with a single-family dwelling, and bars cities from demanding extra parking, matching exterior design or roof pitch, owner occupancy, or impact fees over $250.

Then § 14-56-205(c)(9) says a municipality shall not “[r]equire a restrictive covenant concerning an accessory dwelling unit,” and immediately adds: “Subdivision (c)(9)(A) of this section does not prohibit restrictive covenants concerning accessory dwelling units entered into between private parties.”²

So Arkansas has already legalised ADUs against city zoning while leaving HOA covenants on ADUs fully enforceable. SB456 would extend that same asymmetry from one building type to residential land use generally.

The Arkansas Times made precisely this point about the bill in March 2025: it dismantles public land-use control while leaving private covenant regimes untouched, so covenanted communities keep protections everyone else loses.

Why it matters more than it sounds

Arkansas has no general HOA statute. Condominium regimes run on the Horizontal Property Act; everything else runs on a recorded bill of assurance plus the Nonprofit Corporation Act. There is no state agency with jurisdiction over an HOA's rules, no ombudsman, and no registry. An exhaustive search of all 1,026 acts of the 2025 regular session finds no act addressing association assessments, elections, records, architectural control, reserves or resale disclosure.

That is the context that gives § 14-1-719 its force. Where zoning is the binding constraint, a homeowner has a public process to work with: a hearing, a published standard, a vote, a right of appeal. Where a covenant is the binding constraint, the homeowner has whatever the recorded instrument gives them and whatever their board decides — and in Arkansas, no statutory floor underneath it.

Transferring the decision from the first regime to the second is not deregulation for the roughly one in five American homes inside an association. It is a change in who regulates, and to which rulebook.

It would also widen an existing gap between neighbours. An Arkansas homeowner outside a covenanted subdivision could add a duplex or a tiny home as of right. An identically-situated homeowner three streets away, inside a subdivision with a residential-use-only bill of assurance, could not — and would have no zoning process left to appeal to, because the zoning process would be gone.

Where the bill actually stands

Be precise about this, because the status is easy to overstate:

• SB456 cleared the Senate Committee on City, County & Local Affairs on March 18, 2025.
• Senator Petty pulled it from the calendar to work with opponents.
• It was recommended for interim study on April 8, 2025 and filed as Interim Study Proposal 2025-013 on May 28, 2025 under Ark. Code Ann. § 10-3-217.
• It died at sine die on May 5, 2025.
• The interim study proposal was formally adopted on June 18, 2025, at a joint meeting of the Senate and House Committees on City, County and Local Affairs in Little Rock — the same meeting that heard a panel on housing affordability, planning and land use.⁴

At a housing forum in Cave Springs on September 4, 2025, attended by more than 70 people and at least 13 legislators — among them Senate President Bart Hester, Senator Petty and Representative Burkes — speakers said SB456 would be the starting point for zoning legislation in the 2027 regular session.³

That is an on-the-record statement of intent, not a filed bill. No 2027 bill exists, and none can until November 16, 2026. Anyone telling Arkansas homeowners that a 2027 HOA or zoning bill is currently pending is wrong.

What boards and owners can do now

Read your own instrument against the bill. If SB456 passes in something like its filed form, the operative question in every Arkansas subdivision becomes what the recorded bill of assurance actually says about density, dwelling type, design and home occupations — because that document, not the city code, will be doing the work. Many Arkansas instruments are decades old and were drafted against a zoning backdrop that would no longer exist.

Expect amendment fights. An association whose covenants are silent on duplexes may find members on both sides of a question the city used to answer for them. Amendment thresholds in the recorded instrument — often a supermajority of owners — would become the pressure point.

And watch the interim. The text that would be run is ISP-2025-013, which is public. There is no substitute for reading it, because the version that emerges in 2027 will be measured against it.

What to watch next

Since that adoption, the study's own status history records no further action — no hearing, no report, no recommendation. The committee has met only twice in 2026, on January 14 (a general panel on regulatory rethinking and land use, at which the study was not named) and on August 12 (a constitutional amendment on economic development districts). So the proposal is live on paper and dormant in practice.

Its short-term-rental counterpart has done even less. The HB1445 preemption text was refiled as Interim Study Proposal 2025-070 on June 26, 2025, and its status history reads, in full: “No actions found for this filing.” It has never been adopted, heard or discussed.

So the things to watch are whether the study is actually taken up before the session, whether the short-term-rental text is folded into the package, and whether anyone proposes removing § 14-1-719. Nothing we found suggests anyone has. And a final check on the calendar: as of today no bill has been filed for the 2027 session at all — both chambers' 2027 bill lists are empty, exactly as they should be until pre-filing opens on November 16.