Culdesac Tempe: The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US

Yep. That’s how most of the world works.

Early iterations won’t be perfect, though I think with what the future holds this will become standard development and created mixed-use walkable neighborhoods.

Unless the housing's a lot denser than it looks (higher, for one thing), those streets and plazas seem to be way too big. Retail & restaurants completely detached from housing is also questionable, if you're going for walkability. Farther apart you put things, less walkable/bikable they are, so the harder it is for businesses to be viable without public transit or (more probably) car traffic.

Why only one bedroom apartments? You can't build a community that you think will stand for any amount of time and be this hostile to families.

These efforts seem well-intentioned but doomed to fail because it requires government action to make the rest of the area work , i.e. be more walkable / bikeable.

It's great you can bike from your pricey apartment to your friend's, but try getting passed by a bunch of distracted drivers going 50mph faster than you on the arterial stroad when getting to the nearest reasonably-sized grocery store that is 10 miles away because bike infrastructure is often "man up and pretend you're a car" in the US.

Not to mention anything involving grade-separated, rail-based public transit...

What we really need are YIMBY policy changes to improve these, e.g. separate bike infrastructure (note: it has almost zero maintenance costs because bikes produce almost no pavement damage), relaxing of development policies to allowing MFU or town-house (row house?) condos to be built, or at the very least getting rid of ridiculous SFU requirements like enormous setbacks or low max-area usage (e.g. a burb house built on an enormous lot!).

One notable advancement I did like from this proposal: having a "time-share-esque" guest unit. I do enjoy having space for family members to stay with me when they visit, but it feels so wasteful to have that space all the time (requiring maintenance, insurance, more mortgage) compared to having this guest unit thing common to all units in the development.

I don't really see anything addressing the heat issue of the location (AZ). In most hot environments people tend to minimize outdoor time, moving quickly from one AC'd zone to another. How do you get places while staying out of the heat in a neighborhood like this? Tunnels?