Could the entire Barrel district in Arcata’s Gateway Area Plan be designed as 100% car-free? This intriguing concept is one that warrants discussion and worthy consideration.
See also: Could Gateway’s Barrel District be 100% free of cars? — Part 2
How about taking a big section of the Gateway area that could have housing for a thousand people — and making it entirely car-free from the start.
By designing it that way.
Of the areas proposed for redevelopment in the Gateway area, the Barrel district is unique in that it has no city roads currently. The 20-acre portion of the Barrel district that now contains industrial uses — where Wing Inflatables has its business — is, essentially, open for all kinds of innovation. The Gateway Area Plan requires a “master plan” for the Barrel district before any development can occur there.
Could we possibly develop a master plan that has no vehicle roads? I believe we can do just that.
Among my criticisms of the Gateway plan is that it lacks creativity. It’s an ordinary plan and it will have ordinary results. There is little of the visionary, future-oriented creativity that could put Arcata up as an example of a truly exemplary community. Yes, there are many good things, including an emphasis on non-vehicular transportation — I’m not denying that. But it could be so much better.
Among what’s proposed is to take an area of houses and apartments and stores and businesses — an area that is filled with roads and, whether we like it or not, is based on owning and driving a car — and see to make this “more car-free.”
The goal may be good, but the attempts to do this — by reducing and eliminating parking in these currently car-centric districts — is questionable.
How about upping the ante here?
How about taking a big section of the Gateway area that could have housing for a thousand people — and making it entirely car-free from the start. By designing it that way.
Portions of cities in Europe and around the world do it. Typically we see this in an area where there was an existing populated area with existing walkways or roadways, and over time it became impossible for the cars and the people to co-exist. Each spot has its own set of circumstances. Putting pedestrians first brings big rewards in happiness and actual wealth brought to that community.
Starting out as a car-free neighborhood is unusual. In the U.S. we see this more commonly on islands, where there’s a history of cars not being able to get there. Catalina Island in Southern California is an example. Sections of Venice, Barcelona, Nuremberg, Heidelberg, and Ghent are car-free. But it’s unusual to find an entirely car-free residential area that was designed that way from the start.
The Culdesac car-free housing development
The articles below center around “Culdesac,” a recent development in Tempe, Arizona — part of the metro area of Phoenix, where the population is 4.7 million. In the entire development, there are no roads and no parking. Transit is by walking, scooters, bikes, and electric bikes. The passages and paseos are designed to accommodate vehicles on an occasional basis — for example, food trucks come into the central plaza area — but the residents do not drive their vehicles to their homes. In general, the residents do not own vehicles.
Culdesac is being built on a 17-acre parcel, more or less the size of the Wing Inflatables 20-acre group of parcels (Opportunity Site K) in the Barrel district. The development is right on the Valley Metro light rail line, so public transit to the downtowns of Tempe, Phoenix, and Mesa and the airport are directly adjacent to these apartments. Much of Tempe is ~10 minutes travel by bike.
The total expected build-out is 760 units for about 1,000 people. Currently there are 114 units. Rents are around $1,400 for a one-bedroom, $2,000-$2,200 for a two-bedroom, and $3,060 for a three-bedroom. Those rates are roughly in line with the market rates for North Tempe.
Generally Tempe requires an off-street parking spot for every bedroom, based on the assumption that most residents will have a car and need a place to store it. This development is a departure from this approach and, as the articles described, are attractive to many people just for this reason.
Could something like this be built here in Arcata?
To be clear, I am in no way suggesting that we just copy “Culdesac” here to Arcata. There is much to be critical of how they’ve done things there. And, of course, Culdesac is in the desert and we’re on the the coast, and they’re in a big city and we’re a pretty isolated town. We would create our own version of a car-free environment.
One thing we can note is that the buildings of Culdesac are 2 and 3 stories — not very tall. It’s possible some future apartment buildings on that parcel might be higher. Here in Arcata we could consider adding some four-story buildings to the blend, so as to have more space between the buildings — more outdoor space and larger paseos and public areas.
Is 20 acres of car-free housing really feasible?
The short answer is: Yes.
Among what would be required would be a coordinated improvement in bus service. Culdesac residents have an unlimited transit pass included as part of the rent. There is an on-site fleet of electric per-hour carshare vehicles available to residents at discount prices. Phoenix now has Waymo driverless taxis, and the Culdesac development includes a drop-off/pick-up zone for them.
Also required for car-free success are walking-distance food stores, restaurants, and places of employment. As the central areas of the Gateway region develop with commercial opportunities, this will potentially become a sell-fulfilling benefit.
Requirements also involve open space, walking and biking trails, outdoor meeting places, and the needs of children: playgrounds, pre-schools, transport to schools.
Arcata is not Tempe, Arizona … and we’re also not Los Angeles, not Chicago, and not Europe
We have our own special needs, and we can find our own solutions.
With the open space of the industrial area along Samoa Boulevard there, we have an opportunity to create a wonderful example of what can be done. Let’s not make ordinary housing. Let’s make Arcata be special.
From the home page of Arcata1.com:
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” And that’s what good planning is all about: Creating our future.
The promises of affordable housing — of home-ownership —
of an equitable, environmental, walkable, bikeable, vibrant and alive community.
Let’s make those promises real. Let’s be bold. Let’s be creative and innovative and courageous. That is what we want.
Let’s put Arcata on the map as a shining star in America.
Articles below on the Culdesac car-free development
- “People are happier in a walkable neighborhood”
The US community that banned cars.
from The Guardian. -
New Arizona development bans residents from bringing cars
from The Wall Street Journal. -
This Development Wants Residents to Ditch Their Cars. In Phoenix.
from Bloomberg - From the website for Culdesac.com
Warning: This is marketing-oriented information. - Additional photos of Culdesac
“People are happier in a walkable neighborhood”
The US community that banned cars
A new housing development outside Phoenix is looking towards European cities for inspiration and shutting out the cars. So far residents love it.
by Oliver Milman in Tempe, Arizona
Re-printed from The Guardian – October 11, 2023
-
- This is the first in a new series in The Guardian, The Alternatives, looking at governments and communities around the world who are trying out new ideas for low carbon living
If you were to imagine the first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the modern US, it would be difficult to conceive such a thing sprouting from the environs of Phoenix, Arizona – a sprawling, concrete incursion into a brutal desert environment that is sometimes derided as the least sustainable city in the country.
But it is here that such a neighborhood, called Culdesac, has taken root. On a 17-acre site that once contained a car body shop and some largely derelict buildings, an unusual experiment has emerged that invites Americans to live in a way that is rare outside of fleeting experiences of college, Disneyland or trips to Europe: a walkable, human-scale community devoid of cars.
Culdesac ushered in its first 36 residents earlier this year and will eventually house around 1,000 people when the full 760 units, arranged in two and three-story buildings, are completed by 2025. In an almost startling departure from the US norm, residents are provided no parking for cars and are encouraged to get rid of them. The apartments are also mixed in with amenities, such as a grocery store, restaurant, yoga studio and bicycle shop, that are usually separated from housing by strict city zoning laws.
Neighborhoods of this ilk can be found in cities such as New York City and San Francisco but are often prohibitively expensive due to their allure, as well as stiff opposition to new apartment developments. The $170m Culdesac project shows “we can build walkable neighborhoods successfully in the US in [the] 2020s,” according to Ryan Johnson, the 40-year-old who co-founded the company with Jeff Berens, a former McKinsey consultant.
Johnson has the mien of a tech founder, with his company logo T-shirt and fashionable glasses, and was part of the founding team of OpenDoor, an online real estate business. But his enthusiasm for car-free living was born, he said, from living and traveling in countries such as Hungary, Japan and South Africa. Originally from the “classically sprawly” part of Phoenix, Johnson once had an SUV but has been car-free for 13 years. Instead, he has a collection of more than 60 e-bikes, although he said he has stopped acquiring them as he is running out of storage space.
“Today in the US we only build two kinds of housing: single family homes that are lonely and have a painful commute, or we build these mid-rise projects with double loaded corridors and people mostly just walk to their car and that makes people know fewer of their neighbors,” said Johnson.
“We look back nostalgically at college, because it’s the only time most people have lived in a walkable neighborhood. People are happier and healthier, and even wealthier when they’re living in a walkable neighborhood.”
“We look back nostalgically at college, because it’s the only time most people have lived in a walkable neighborhood. People are happier and healthier, and even wealthier when they’re living in a walkable neighborhood.”
Culdesac is not only different in substance, but also style. The development’s buildings are a Mediterranean sugar-cube white accented with ochre, and are clustered together intimately to create inviting courtyards for social gatherings and paved – not asphalt – “paseos”, a word used in Spanish-speaking parts of the US south-west to denote plazas or walkways for strolling.
Importantly, such an arrangement provides relieving shade from the scorching sun – temperatures in these walkways have been measured at 90F (32C) on days when the pavement outside Culdesac is 120F (48C), the developer claims. The architects call the structures “fabric buildings” that form shared public realm, rather than charmless, utilitarian boxes situated next to a huge, baking car park.
“It’s positively European, somewhere between Mykonos and Ibiza,” said Jeff Speck, a city planner and urban designer who took a tour of Culdesac earlier this year. “It is amazing how much the urbanism improves, both in terms of experience and efficiency, when you don’t need to store automobiles.”
There is a small car park, although only for visitors, some disgorged by Waymo, the fleet of Google-owned driverless taxis that eerily cruise around Phoenix with their large cameras and disembodied voices to reassure passengers. To calm any nerves about making the leap to being car-free, Culdesac has struck deals to offer money off Lyft, the ride-sharing service, and free trips on the light rail that runs past the buildings, as well as on-site electric scooters. The first 200 residents to move in will be getting ebikes, too.
Such a place is an oddity, Speck points out, because of a car-centric ethos that permeates US culture and city planning. Over the past century, huge highways have been plowed through the heart of US cities, obliterating and dislocating communities – disproportionately those of color – leaving behind a stew of air pollution.
These roads have primarily served a sprawling suburbia, comprised almost entirely of single family homes with spacious back yards where car driving is often the only option to get anywhere. This car dependence has been reinforced by zoning laws that not only separate residential from commercial developments, but require copious parking spots added for every new construction. “The result is a nation in which we are all ruthlessly separated from most of our daily needs and also from each other,” Speck said.
Culdesac can be seen, then, as not only a model for more climate-friendly housing – transportation is the US’s largest source of planet-heating emissions and, studies have shown, fuels more of the pollution causing the climate crisis – but as a way of somehow stitching back together communities that have become physically, socially and politically riven, lacking a “third place” to congregate other than dislocated homes and workplaces.
Culdesac residents have “this shared thing of living without a car” and can have the sort of chance encounters that foster social cohesion, according to Johnson, who himself lives in one of the airy apartments. “When we started, people said: ‘What are you doing? You’re not going to get permission to build that. The demand’s not going to be there,’” he said. “And instead, we got unanimous approval, and there’s a lot of demand, and it’s open. Residents love it.”
Vanessa Fox, a 32-year-old who moved into Culdesac with her Husky dog in May, had always wanted to live in a walkable place only to find such options unaffordable. For her, Culdesac provided a sense of community without having to rely on a car every time she left her apartment. “For some, cars equal freedom, but for me, it’s a restriction,” she said. “Freedom is being able to just simply walk out and access places.”
Speck said that he expects closer relationships to form among residents. “We will soon have Culdesac babies,” he predicted.
Fox admits, though, that some of her family and friends consider her decision to go car-free to be somewhat of an oddity. The New York subway and railroad tycoons of yore may have found international fame, but in the US, the car now reigns supreme.
Around nine in 10 Americans own a car, with only a tenth of people using public transport — which is typically underfunded and has suffered badly since the Covid pandemic — on even a weekly basis. Even Joe Biden’s administration, which has talked of reconnecting communities and acting on climate change, is enthusiastically pushing hundreds of billions of dollars to building new highways.
Driving to places is so established as a basic norm that deviation from it can seem not only strange, as evidenced by a lack of pedestrian infrastructure that has contributed to a surge in people dying from being hit by cars in recent years, but even somewhat sinister. People walking late at night, particularly if they are Black, are regularly accosted by police – in June, the city of Kaplan, Louisiana, even introduced a curfew for people walking or riding bikes, but not for car drivers.
If neighborhoods like Culdesac are to become more commonplace, then, cities will not only have to alter their planning codes, but there will also have to be a cultural switch from the ideal of a large suburban home with an enormous car in the driveway. Some US billionaires have dreams of creating new utopian cities that have such elements, although urban planning experts point out it would be better for the environment if existing cities just became denser and less car-centric.
Johnson, who said he is planning to bring the Culdesac concept to other cities, is upbeat about this. “This is something that the majority of the US wants, so they can work all over the country,” he said. “We have heard from cities and residents all over the country that they want more of this, and this is something that we want to build more.”
“Every trend begins with a one-off,” Speck said. “True proliferation will be dependent upon our cities improving their transit and micro-mobility systems. But for those cities that offer a decent alternative to driving, there is a great fit immediately. Government officials should be asking themselves whether their cities are Culdesac-ready.”
from The Wall Street Journal
New Arizona development bans residents from bringing cars
By Laura Kusisto | The Wall Street Journal
A $140 million Arizona development is banning residents from bringing their own cars in favor of scooters, bikes and ride-sharing, testing demand for a new type of walkable neighborhood.
The 1,000-person rental community, which broke ground this month in Tempe, won’t allow residents to park cars on site or in the surrounding area as a term of their leases. The founders say it will be the first of its kind in the U.S.
The neighborhood’s scale will be modest, with mostly three-story buildings. In place of parking spaces, the development known as Culdesac Tempe will feature significantly more retail and open spaces than are typical for its size. It will include a market hall for food vendors, coffee shop, plazas, communal fire pits and a building that residents can rent to host events.
from Bloomberg Green + Citylab
by Ira Boudway – July 31, 2023
Photographs by Rebecca Noble
This Development Wants Residents to Ditch Their Cars. In Phoenix.
Culdesac Tempe in the Arizona suburbs is creating desert-friendly housing for more than 1,000 people, none of whom will park on site.
Three years ago Robert Chaffeur, a retiree living in the suburbs of Tacoma, Washington, was looking for a new place to live when he saw an online ad for Culdesac Tempe. Billed as “the first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US,” the development in Arizona checked all the boxes on his wishlist: Chaffeur wanted to move somewhere warm, walkable and that wasn’t a retirement community.
“There’s going to be millions of walkable homes built in the coming years,” Johnson says.
“Culdesac wants to be a meaningful portion of that.”
The advertisement had found its target audience. Culdesac’s founders were planning to build about 700 apartments on a 17-acre lot in Tempe — a suburb of nearly 200,000 on the southeast edge of Phoenix — along with a restaurant, grocery store, coffee shop and other retail. There would be shady courtyards, ample bike parking and a stop on the Valley Metro light rail, a 30-mile tram system connecting Phoenix, Tempe and Mesa. There would not, however, be a single parking spot for residents. In a sprawling metropolis known for its strip malls and scorching hot summers, Culdesac aimed to be an oasis for 1,000 people ready to live car-free.
“I bought the concept hook, line and sinker,” says Chaffeur, 74, with a ponytail, white beard and the svelte frame of a dedicated runner and cyclist.
“Ask me again in a year,” Chaffeur says. “I’ll tell you if it is what I was looking for.”
The startup, led by co-founders Ryan Johnson and Jeff Berens and fueled by $47 million in venture capital, aims to demonstrate that car-free living is both greener and better — even in an Arizona summer. Following years of delays, Culdesac Tempe’s first residents only started moving in this spring. But the project has already become a poster child for the movement to abolish parking minimums, rules in many US cities that force housing developers to include space for cars in their plans. As work continues on the $200 million Tempe complex, which will take years to finish, Johnson and Berens are planning to build more like it in other cities across the US, creating a branded empire of car-free housing.
“There’s going to be millions of walkable homes built in the coming years,” Johnson says. “Culdesac wants to be a meaningful portion of that.”
Former roommates at the University of Arizona, Johnson and Berens founded Culdesac five years ago. Berens, 39, had been working as a public sector consultant at McKinsey & Co. in Boston. Johnson, 40, was on the founding team at Opendoor Technologies. A house-flipping startup that uses consumer surveys and market data to identify neighborhoods on the upswing, Opendoor buys houses by the thousands, fixes them up and, if all goes well, sells them for a profit — a practice known as iBuying. While at Opendoor, Johnson noticed that walkability was a highly desired trait, and one where supply didn’t match demand.
“People don’t just come out and say, ‘I want to live in a walkable neighborhood.’ They describe the attributes of a walkable neighborhood,” Johnson says. “The word that they use the most is cute. They want something cute that’s near a coffee shop. As you dive into the data, you realize that even though most people want that, only 8% of people have it.”
The first step was finding a location, a process Berens describes as “sleuthing on Google Maps” for large parcels of land near public transit. Hunting in the Phoenix area, they came across a block on Apache Boulevard about three miles east of downtown Tempe, on the outskirts of Arizona State University’s main campus, with a light rail stop on one corner.
During its postwar heyday, when Apache Boulevard was part of the state highway system, roadside motels and diners sprouted along the route. In the 1970s, Arizona started building a freeway to the south – robbing Apache of much of its traffic – and the area began a long slide into blight. The spot that Berens and Johnson found was mostly home to empty lots, mobile homes and derelict housing. “That’s a phenomenal parcel,” Johnson remembers telling Berens. “That would be amazing to be able to get that.”
With the backing of Sunbelt Holdings, a long-time Arizona builder that became Culdesac’s co-developer, Johnson and Berens convinced DMB to part with the land. They had the site for their car-free housing experiment; the next hurdle was convincing Tempe to approve it.
Tempe has parking minimums baked into its building code. As in many US cities, the ratio varies according to dwelling size and style. But in essence, Tempe requires an off-street parking spot for every bedroom, following the basic assumption that most residents will have a car and need a place to store it.
Over the past 20 years, a growing chorus of urban planners, led by Donald Shoup of the University of California Los Angeles, have called for abandoning such minimums, arguing that built-in allowances for cars perpetuate their dominance in America cities — adding to congestion, road deaths and carbon emissions — and sap resources from more sustainable modes of development.
In November 2019, Berens went before Tempe’s Development Review Commission to sell them on Culdesac. Taking the podium after an applicant looking to build a fast-food restaurant in a strip mall and a homeowner seeking permission to add a two-car garage, Berens spoke to a mostly empty room. Transportation, he told the commissioners, is one of most people’s largest sources of carbon emissions. By making it possible to live without a car, Culdesac could help its residents to cut those emissions in half. “There’s lots of fantastic places for people to live who want to have a private car,” Berens said. “This is meant to offer a new option.”
When Berens finished, Don Cassano, a now retired former transportation commissioner for the City of Tempe, quizzed him about backup plans. “Not to be negative,” Cassano asked, “but what if the project doesn’t lease?” Berens assured him that Culdesac would be built in phases and could adjust its parking plan if need be.
Tempe ultimately approved Culdesac’s proposal, marking the first time that the city agreed to a housing development without parking for residents. According to the parking management plan in Culdesac’s development agreement, residents must “disclose and register any car they own, control, or purchase,” as a condition of their lease, and cannot park on surrounding streets within a block in any direction — an area that Culdesac agreed to help monitor.
Photographer: Rebecca Noble/Bloomberg
With no need for parking garages, Culdesac breaks its housing into three-story, white stucco walk-ups arranged around interior courtyards with narrow passages between them. There are fewer bedrooms than in the earlier DMB design, but more green space. (Eliminating garages also saves about $20,000 per space in construction costs.) The buildings are set at odd angles to create distinctive crannies and views — a design that Dan Parolek, founding principal at Opticos Design, the master planner on the project, calls “Mykonos desert modern.”
“When you take parking out of the equation, you’re able to design for people first.”
“When you take parking out of the equation, you’re able to design for people first,” says Anders Engnell, Culdesac’s director of planning and construction, during a tour of the site in May. A lanky and boisterous 27-year-old with a scruffy beard, Engnell leads the way through a nearly finished “pod” of nine buildings scheduled to open in the fall. The Greek inspiration, he explains, is about more than aesthetics. The white stucco reflects heat, while the courtyards and narrow pathways provide shade and help tunnel breezes. (There’s not a single drop of heat-trapping asphalt at Culdesac. Even the guest parking lot is mostly brick.)
Photographer: Rebecca Noble/Bloomberg
“We expect the pods to create a bit of a microclimate,” says Engnell. To demonstrate, he leaves me standing in the sun as he talks. It’s a relatively mild morning, with temperatures headed to the high 90s, but still warm enough to get me sweating under my safety helmet. “The temperature drop is meaningful,” Engnell says when he invites me into the shade. “You actually feel a little bit of a breeze here even on what is a pretty calm Phoenix day.” (I did indeed feel one.)
Depending on your perspective, Culdesac’s timing has been fortuitous or terrible. The Tempe site broke ground in November 2019, a few months before the outbreak of a pandemic that drove booms in remote work, e-bikes and car-free streets — trends that play in its favor. The movement to abolish parking minimums has also gained momentum since 2019, with Minneapolis, Minnesota and Ann Arbor, Michigan joining a growing list of cities that have eliminated blanket rules. In 2021, Culdesac and its partners Sunbelt and Encore Capital Management secured a $50 million loan for the first phase of construction.
Since then, however, interest rates have risen sharply, venture funding and real estate lending have largely dried up and the rental market in the Phoenix area has cooled following a glut of new construction. According to real estate analytics firm Green Street Advisors, apartment asset values have fallen by 30% in greater Phoenix from their peak in late 2021. Meanwhile, investors are starting to take notice of long-term concerns over water supply in the region, according to Green Street analyst Ryan Miller.
“Culdesac hits a whole bunch of philosophical and ideological buttons,” says Mark Stapp, a professor of real estate at Arizona State University. “Cities and towns love it and it sounds sexy to certain investors, but what we don’t know is how the market in general is going to react.”
Berens says nearly 10,000 people have put down their names as interested in living at Culdesac and close to 400 have made $100 refundable deposits. “We’re going to have all these buildings full before they open for the rolling schedule for years,” he says.
Vanessa Fox, a 31-year-old manager at a rent-to-own real estate startup, was among the first to move in at Culdesac, leaving behind a townhouse in Phoenix. Before the pandemic, she’d been looking to move to San Francisco, New York or some other walkable city. Then her job went fully remote. Living without a car, Fox says, has been a long-held goal. “I finally have the ability to do it,” she says, “and I didn’t have to leave Phoenix.”
Fox was convinced that she could make Culdesac work because of its on-site amenities; the gym saves her a 40-minute daily roundtrip, for example. Culdesac also plans to offer co-working spaces and meeting rooms bookable by the day or hour, plus short-term apartment rentals for visiting friends and family. For dining, there’s Cocina Chiwas, a Mexican restaurant that opened on the site’s northwest corner in February, serving fare such as chorizo quesadillas ($14) and red chile flautas ($18). There’s space for regular visits from food trucks on the public plaza, and the coffee shop is set to open in the fall.
Residents also get a basket of transportation perks, including a free monthly pass with unlimited rides on the light rail and bus systems in greater Phoenix; free flat-tire fixes and discounts at Archer’s Bikes (an Arizona bike chain that will be opening a shop on site); discounts on trips with Lyft cars, Bird scooters, and the on-demand hauling service Lugg; and access to an on-site fleet of rentable EVs. In April, Culdesac announced that the first 200 residents would also get a free electric bike through a partnership with Phoenix-based startup Lectric eBikes.
Sara Hoy, a 40-year-old consultant from Pennsylvania, was also among the first to move in. Hoy had never been to Phoenix when she first heard about Culdesac two years ago during an online event for college students looking to learn about social entrepreneurship. One of the speakers was Erin Boyd, Culdesac’s head of government and external affairs.
“I thought it was a really cool concept,” says Hoy. After growing up in central Pennsylvania, Hoy studied in Sweden, spent time in South Korea and lived in Moldova as a Peace Corps volunteer – all places where she enjoyed living car-free. Culdesac sounded like a chance to replicate some of those experiences, and she was already working remotely. “It’s warmer than where I was in Pennsylvania,” Hoy says. “What’s the worst that can happen?”
Two weeks after moving in, her bike was stolen from an outdoor rack. Hoy describes it as the only bump in otherwise smooth experience, and one ameliorated by the free e-bike. The theft, she says, served as a lesson about the neighborhood, which is still in transition. There’s a UPS warehouse to the south, a tire shop to the west, an old hotel serving as a temporary homeless shelter to the east and more apartment buildings going up across the street to the north. The nearby light rail often serves as a rolling shelter for people looking to escape high temperatures.
Hoy is also learning lessons about the heat. While she’s been relieved to discover that a dry Phoenix 96F isn’t too hot for a morning stroll, she’s also found herself hailing a car instead of biking or walking. “I’ll just minimize the amount [of time] I’ll be outside,” she says of dealing with Phoenix summers.
Tempe mayor Corey Woods is hoping Culdesac draws many more like Hoy, Fox and Chaffeur. “They’re going to be here adding to the sales tax base,” he told me during a visit to his office last summer. “But they’re not going to be adding to the traffic congestion.”
In an effort to build goodwill with neighbors — and create buzz — Culdesac has been hosting a regular open-air market called Little Cholla since the early days of construction. During my visit in May, the market featured dozens of vintage clothing vendors selling bell-bottomed jeans, graphic tees and flowery sundresses on the main plaza. By 6 p.m., hundreds of people, mostly 20-somethings, were milling among the racks and drinking free cans of yerba mate. Cars streamed into Culdesac’s 100-spot guest lot until it overflowed and visitors began to park on nearby streets — turning Tempe’s first car-free neighborhood into a minor traffic jam.
From the website Culdesac.com
Warning: This is marketing-oriented information.
Welcome to Culdesac Tempe
The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US!
Seventeen acres of walkable homes, vibrant retail, and beautiful open space.
On a light rail station, next to downtown.
A community unlike any other.
How you move defines how you live
Culdesac Tempe is designed for walkability. We’ve partnered with the world’s leading mobility companies to bring you the most affordable and convenient ways to get around town. As a resident, you’ll receive 15% off all Lyft rides, free rides on the metro, and Bird scooters just a minute away.
- 15% off all Lyft rides
- Free rides on the metro
- Carsharing starting at $5/hour with Envoy
- 100+ Bird scooters on-site
- 1,000+ bike parking spots
1A community that embraces ebikes
Riding an ebike is wonderful. The cool breeze, freedom to travel anywhere, and joy of the electric boost. It’s even better when your neighbors love ebikes. And the on-site ebike shop is there to take care of you.
2Complimentary transit pass
There’s a light rail station steps away from your apartment, and a platinum pass provided by Culdesac makes it free. Valley Metro gives you access to downtown Tempe, downtown Phoenix, downtown Mesa, and the airport.
3Cars, when you need them
Culdesac residents get an exclusive 15% discount on all Lyft trips. Or use Waymo to access the world’s largest autonomous vehicle service area. Envoy’s on-site fleet of electric carshare vehicles has you covered for longer trips, starting at $5/hour. Culdesac Tempe has parking for visitors, deliveries, and mobility partners — but no resident parking.
Located in Tempe, Arizona
Tempe is the most bike friendly city in the 5-million person Phoenix metro, and has 300 days of sunshine a year. It also has a diverse food scene, and is home to one of the largest universities in the country.
4Transportation
- On-site light rail station and complimentary unlimited transit pass
- Full-service on-site ebike shop
- Biking classes, events, and 1-1 support from on-site team
- Bike repair stations
- Secure bike storage rooms & private ebike garages
- 15% discount on Lyft rides for Culdesac residents
- Waymo autonomous vehicle pick-up/drop-off zones
- On-site fleet of Envoy electric carshare vehicles
- On-site Bird rental scooters
- Parking for visitors, deliveries, and mobility partners
- Note: Culdesac Tempe does not have parking for residents. Onsite retail, amenities, & mobility benefits make living without a private car convenient and affordable.
Now leasing
- Studios from $1300s
- 1 bedrooms from $1400s
- 2 bedrooms from $2000s
- 3 bedrooms from $3200s
Living at Culdesac Tempe
Culdesac Tempe means life at your front door. Removing parking creates ample open space for a large dog park and pool. Our “Extend Your Home On Demand” program allows you to expand and contract your home as you need. Simply book a Guest Suite through the Culdesac app and we’ll handle the rest.
- 700+ apartments for rent
- 2+ miles of bike and foot paths
- 0 square feet of asphalt
- 50+ shared courtyards
- 44,000 square feet of retail and amenities
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All units include In-unit washer and dryer, Stainless steel appliances,$3,000 in mobility benefitsAmple natural lightPet friendlyShared courtyards
Culdesac Tempe is a car-free rental apartment community in Tempe, AZ. Units are situated around vibrant courtyards that become the outdoor living rooms and center of community for Culdesac.
- BBQ grills
- Water features
- Fire pits
- Hammocks
- Desert landscaping
Photos from the Culdesac.com website
