Don't the 100F+ temps sort of prevent walkability in Arizona?
Frequently 120+.
Culdesac Tempe: The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US
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Re: Culdesac Tempe: The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US
#52Why 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.
Given the sprawl in the Phoenix metro area, this is utterly unsuitable for families who need to shuttle kids to school. Arizona has flexible school choice and people aren't tied to their neighborhood school.
Re: Culdesac Tempe: The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US
#53I live in a master planned community (Daybreak, Utah), and while you can definitely scoff at the building quality (state of things everywhere right now, it's all done fast and with low quality materials), it's been fantastic, especially during the pandemic. The whole neighborhood is designed to be walkable, with parks, pools, trails, train stations, grocery stores and restaurants (added in the later phases, which are…
I decided to take a look at Daybreak on google maps, but I'm having a hard time understanding how the layout is different than other developments. I do notice that the lane system looks nice as opposed to just having alleys. Is there other stuff you like?
Re: Culdesac Tempe: The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US
#54I live in a master planned community (Daybreak, Utah), and while you can definitely scoff at the building quality (state of things everywhere right now, it's all done fast and with low quality materials), it's been fantastic, especially during the pandemic. The whole neighborhood is designed to be walkable, with parks, pools, trails, train stations, grocery stores and restaurants (added in the later phases, which are…
For sake of comparison, Wikipedia says Daybreak is over 4000 acres while Culdesac is 16. These projects aren't close in scale and I think the "neighborhood" in the marketing for Culdesac is misleading regarding what life would actually be like living there. There are several individual buildings in my neighborhood that house more people and I still need a car on a regular basis.
Re: Culdesac Tempe: The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US
#55These 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…
Having lived down the street from this site, I'm also skeptical. Tempe has some bike infrastructure, but the high temperatures four months of the year and the spread-out nature of the larger Phoenix metro makes a car a priority for most people, and cities (including Tempe and neighboring Mesa) design around that. There's a bike path to the west of this site that runs north-south but terminates after only a couple mil…
I love Tempe, though, might hope to move back, have several siblings and surviving parent in the area. My wife's family is in North Carolina (moved here 8 years ago after 21 years in Silicon Valley) but some day ... might head back.
Re: Culdesac Tempe: The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US
#56I hope this is the future of community design. We need to get people back together. I think most of our problems are that we only interact on the internet. My mom thought republicans were the devil until a guy with a trump flag helped her change a tire.
One-bedrooms start at $1250 / month. Can a community be designed so that the people working there can also afford to live there?
People need to get off the notion that those working the most entry level jobs should be living in the newest housing.
Re: Culdesac Tempe: The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US
#57These 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…
Having lived down the street from this site, I'm also skeptical. Tempe has some bike infrastructure, but the high temperatures four months of the year and the spread-out nature of the larger Phoenix metro makes a car a priority for most people, and cities (including Tempe and neighboring Mesa) design around that. There's a bike path to the west of this site that runs north-south but terminates after only a couple mil…
I went to ASU (in the 90s) and my family is still in the area, and I typically (and perhaps stupidly) visit in June... and when I go back to the old "neighborhood" I always see a ton of people riding their bikes around in the June heat.
With an e-bike, 2 miles is nothing.
Re: Culdesac Tempe: The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US
#58I live in a master planned community (Daybreak, Utah), and while you can definitely scoff at the building quality (state of things everywhere right now, it's all done fast and with low quality materials), it's been fantastic, especially during the pandemic. The whole neighborhood is designed to be walkable, with parks, pools, trails, train stations, grocery stores and restaurants (added in the later phases, which are…
The shared makerspace seems like a neighborhood level thing. There's all sorts of services / hobbies that make more sense to be neighborhood based instead of nationally based.
Tools and workshops are like that. The biggest issue with tools/workshops is liability. Someone's going to lose a finger, or a rotary tool will pull out their hair / a piece of their scalp... (even with all the safety precautions, its going to happen. There are some real idiots out there), and then everything goes to crap.
In a neighborhood solution, there's more local trust in each other, and a social contract where people care for each other.
In a city-solution, you need to bootstrap the community out of nothingness. When newbies come in, you've got forms and disclosure agreements and training videos to minimize the issue. It works but... I'm inclined to see how their neighborhood scale makerspace scales.
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Everyone wants that "doohicky": a holder for your lawn-mower's starting line that broke off last week. A new holder for your favorite coffee mug that got smashed. Etc. etc.
3d Printers + some woodworking equipment + a few skilled individuals who hang out for fun / leisure can solve these minor problems.
Re: Culdesac Tempe: The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US
#59It should be pointed out that this "neighborhood" is just a mixed use apartment complex of 760 rental units that does not currently exist yet though construction has sort of started. All pictures shown are renderings and this link is basically content marketing for it. They seem to cost ~$200-300 more per month than a market studio with parking in the same area.
Re: Culdesac Tempe: The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US
#60A community "maker space" would require careful curation of community members to be viable. Even if everyone were honest and conscientious. It's so hard to find the right tool or material at the right time in my own shop, it would be many times worse if I shared the shop with the neighborhood. Sure it's a long, hard, expensive trudge to accumulate your own tools, but at least it gives you a good chance of having the…
I belong to three different community workshops: a membership-based wood shop, a motorcycle repair shop that offers both memberships and drop-in work, and an electronics shop for members. At each I enjoy access to far better tools than I ever had at home, especially the motorcycle shop where I would never have something like a crane, a parts washer, cylinder reamers, and tire changing machines. I feel like this model…
>a motorcycle repair shop that offers both memberships and drop-in work
Wow, I never heard of such a thing. Or, I heard many years ago of something vaguely like that, and also how it wasn't viable financially. I think Click & Clack said they'd tried to run a do-it-yourself-with-our-tools garage and there were too many idiots.
I wasn't aware of any such thing existing in my area, anyway.