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

culdesac.com

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

#71

Post by mikem170 »

samstave wrote: post #43
jrsdav wrote: post #18

I 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 have a bit of subjective personal and professional experience with all of this (design, policy, politics, zoning, economics, etc etc etc... It ALL comes to one thing: ECONOMICS. And I don't mean a balanced budget - I am referring to greed and corruption. One may thing that greed and corruption is rampant on a federal level; no just look locally: HOS and Municipal governments (city councils etc) Did you know that ma…

> all the hedge funds are swooping in with dark money, dark legal and dark politics

I'm concerned about this also. I wonder if this is something that can be mitigated somehow via referendum?

It seems wrong if the will of the people in a democracy has to take a back seat to hedge fund profits, especially when it comes to a place to live. it's tough though, current homeowners don't want there to be more houses...

Or maybe we'll luck out demographically, when the baby boomer generation dies they'll be less demand for housing.

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

#72

Post by trynewideas »

godot wrote: post #40
dkhenry wrote: post #25

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.

I'm making a wild guess here, but I think the missing context from this web site and other comments is that this is intended to be a college town community. If you look up the address (2025 E Apache Blvd, Tempe, AZ 85281) it's a walkable/bikeable distance to Arizona State University which (from my understanding) is the prominent college in the Phoenix area.

Bikeable if you're comfortable with biking on Apache or University, but not really walkable. It's 2+ miles of sidewalks and throughfare crossings to the actual campus. I imagine that's why the site stresses bike and transit so much — it's 100 feet from an Orbit route, 0.3 mi. from a rail stop, and 0.7 mi. from Valley Metro bus stops, and all go to campus.

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

#74

Post by mattcantstop »

For those who are interested in what makes a great town, I recommend two books: Happy City by Charles Montgomery, and Strong Towns by Charles Marohn. Both were red pill/blue pill books for me on what makes a great city.

When my wife and I moved we completely changed what we were looking for in a house/community. We wanted a Main Street style town. We used to love master planned communities with huge houses. In our small, Main Street style town all of our kids can walk/ride to school, we have two grocery stores within 2 miles away, and all our doctors are biking/riding distance. It's changed how we live. We sold our second car. We own so many bikes. We are more active.

Cul-de-sac looks really promising. I've been following along and am excited to see what they create. We need more experiments, even if some don't work out.

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

#75

Post by deltasixeight »

What's the energy usage per area. per capita? I doubt this can beat tokyo, HK, Tapei or NYC.

If you want to build an actual car free place you need high density buildings and a subway system. A place like NYC or Tokyo is the true future of cities.

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

#77

Post by mattcantstop »

hamburgerwah wrote: post #59

It 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.

I would gladly pay $200/month more for an apartment that enables me to live in a walking community without so much space being taken up by parking. Not sure if Culdesac will fulfill that goal, but "you don't even get a parking spot!" doesn't seem like a sell, to me.

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

#78

Post by rollinggoron »

GavinMcG wrote: post #42
_huayra_ wrote: post #27

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…

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…

Not sure how long it's been since you've lived in Tempe, but the entire downtown area has been completely revamped and revitalized. The emphasis on bikes, walkable restaurants, and light rail access on Apache itself make this not an overall bad location. Your other points about the rest of PHX metro area outside of Tempe are true though. Neighborhoods for blocks for miles, but Tempe, especially downtown Tempe is trying hard to change that.

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

#79

Post by lstamour »

By the time I scrolled to the swimming pool render, I started to think that the photos weren’t very realistic. Then I realized why: everybody was white in the renders. There was a token person of colour here or there. But it was poorly added. The black guy at the swimming pool is in the back. And unlike everybody else, he forgot his swimwear…

This is one of the first times I’ve seen “Corporate Memphis” illustrations where the skin colours are exclusively shades of white and pink.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the nice drawings and car-free ideals, but those renders and illustrations seem rather tone-deaf for 2021…

Also, if you’re downvoting me, please reply with why I’m being downvoted. I smell astroturf… This is a legitimate concern about the project. I’m not saying anything particularly negative, but if Culdesac Toronto ever wanted to kick off, they would need a more multi-cultural set of renders than this. It’s incredibly distracting to the point of being clearly offensive.

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

#80

Post by JPKab »

jrsdav wrote: post #18

I 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…

Boulder Colorado here:

Bike commuting is amazing here, as it is in many parts of the US that have the population density and public funding to execute it.

Anyway, Daybreak sounds amazing, and yeah, communities like that will always get "bad raps" from locals outside of it. It's human nature:

These places are usually priced very high per square foot, due to the huge demand vs. supply of walkable neighborhoods. Locals outside of it see it as a luxury purchase, and then associate the residents with the most snobby behavior of the few snobs who inevitably inhabit it.

I'm going to take a wild guess that the locals outside of the community have stereotypical nicknames for it like "People's Republic of Daybreak" or "Bankbreak" or something like that, lol.

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