This Friday I saw a great deal of affluent Little Rock (though not the most affluent areas at the city's northern and western edges). I stayed at a hotel in West Little Rock (boring sprawl) but took a bus to an area closer in, and walked through parts of three intown neighborhoods: Capitol View, Hillcrest and the Heights.
Capitol View is a socially mixed, slightly gentrified area about a mile and a half west of downtown, mostly built in the early 20th century. The housing fabric is mostly small, unadorned single-family homes as you might expect from such a neighborhood: not as adorned as the Quapaw Quarter's Victorians. Though lots of things are within a long walk of Capitol View, it seems to be basically a single-use area. The worst thing about the neighborhood (and about all the neighborhoods I visited): you can't count on sidewalks. One street will have them, the next street won't, and so on down the line. By contrast, in Atlanta the overall number of sidewalks may well be fewer than in Little Rock, but there is more of a clear pattern: pre WW-2 intown areas (Morningside, Virginia-Highlands, Midtown) tend to have sidewalks on every block, and areas built between 1940 and 1980 tend to have sidewalks only on commercial streets. (Newer sprawl is more likely to have sidewalks).
The Heights (about 5 miles from downtown) and Hillcrest (about 3-4 miles from downtown) are similar to Capitol View in many ways, but are far more affluent, have bigger houses (though not always much bigger) and a more clearly identifiable commercial strip (Kavanaugh). The residential areas struck me as notably prewar but not that distinctive: no dominant architectural pattern (unlike Dallas's M Streets), and sidewalks were normal but not consistently present.
What I liked the most about these areas: a walkable, small-shop-oriented commercial street (around the 3000 block of Kavanaugh for Hillcrest, around the 5000 block for the Heights). In this area, the main street is only two or three lanes wide, and parking (especially in Hillcrest, less consistently in the Heights) usually fronts the street rather than being set back behind yards of parking.
Also, an abomination separates the two Kavanaugh commercial districts: about a half mile where there is no sidewalk nor even grass to walk on, so pedestrians must walk in the shoulder of the road. (See https://www.youtube.com/user/mlewyn#play/all/uploads-all/0/SsjHK-3AAwI for details).
