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

culdesac.com

251–260 of 384 posts

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

#251
post #4

I 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?

Depending on the housing market $1250/month for a 1-bed might be affordable. Quick google showed average rent for 1-bed in Tempe is $1,654.

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

#252

This ditch full of sims, without a car in it is yours. There are meny like it, but this one is yours. Even though it is in the middle of a perhaps overbuilt desert where it really ought to not be as ridiculous to have a car as it is say in the urban east coast, where you just need a car to escape the retail trap that has replaced sensible urbanity, this ditch is yours. Now crawl in and die already, god damn it. https…

Come on, doesn't everyone under 40 just want to keep the college experience going... and going...?

Wait, what am I saying. Americans want to retire to somewhere like this too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villages,_Florida

"Urban" my butt. Still, beats the hell out of North Korea.

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

#253
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…

Ive seen several attempts at master planned neighborhoods with little town center type things with the idea that youd rarely have to leave, around South Florida growing up, and even lived in one for a few years. They all failed miserably. I feel like ones that succeed are just lucky. These communities can have basic predetermined guidelines to how growth can happen but the actual growth needs to happen organically. Y…

I wouldn’t say Seaside, the new urban community where the Truman Show was filmed failed really. It seems to have held on to some sense of year round community that is not completely overwhelmed by the vacation crowd. I always liked staying there before it got too popular because it felt like a tiny functioning city with book store, arts, year round jobs etc, not like a vacation spot that turns into a ghost town after September.

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

#254

This ditch full of sims, without a car in it is yours. There are meny like it, but this one is yours. Even though it is in the middle of a perhaps overbuilt desert where it really ought to not be as ridiculous to have a car as it is say in the urban east coast, where you just need a car to escape the retail trap that has replaced sensible urbanity, this ditch is yours. Now crawl in and die already, god damn it. https…

Presumably all the nice places already have people there who have opinions that are incompatible.

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

#255
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well Manhattan, for example—obviously at first it developed organically, but the upper part of the island was largely planned, with a strict grid system of streets and avenues and a large park in the center! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaIOfgz8FVY

Planning works great for public utilities- roads, libraries, parks etc. The moment we cross that are have a planned bank, grocer, retail I think it falls apart. The grocery shop needs guarantee on revenue to be setup, and then they will slack off because they won’t need to compete or innovate. People will realize once the HOA bill runs in to several hundred dollars and have to deal with shitty services. In the real w…

I am one hundred percent certain that both the locatelli grocer that has almost nothing I want to eat in it ever and has nothing but mexican standoff intersections with people walking around really slow, and the 'california' grocery that I really have to work hard at not just eating all the food in inside the store are both heavily planned, in terms of where exactly they are and all of the ridiculously excessive lighting and product placement inside of the stores. There is some vague pretension to a capital market and some vague notion that some of the great many retail businesses which are essentialy a second form of rent extraction may go out of business, but by and large it would seem extremely clear that there is a great deal of planning going on with information that business people are not supposed to have access to. Whether or not there is a viable alternative to said situation is a more complicated question, but there is no question that there is not some kind of innovation() support system where if you just figure out how to build a better mousetrap or run a better grocery store or sandwich shop, you will succeed and grow.

() or even just hard work and reliability

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

#256
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fusion 360 is ridiculously good compared to anything i used previous to it. You have to spend a little time getting the basics down but once you do it is pretty damn fast. Plus you can import o part models from mcmaster carr, thingiverse, etc and tweak them. It really is better than it used to be imho

I think I was pretty proficient with my tools but most of the work was measuring out everything and then the first few prints either fail or were not designed correctly so it just becomes a big process that wasn't worth it if printing and CAD are not your passion.

I empathize with this... I designed and printed up a mating door bracket assembly . Lots of time spent measuring, designing, and multiple rounds of prototyping to get something that fit AND worked as expected. I was satisfied with the end product but not the journey to get there.

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

#257

Unfortunately this project lacks two things which are essential to a long-lasting, sustainable, and human-friendly town. 1) Architecture that inspires, elevates the soul, and will last the test of time. All I see is soulless pre-fabs. It looks like you're living in a shopping mall. 2) The freedom to create buildings and institutions that are meaningful to the residents who reside there. Churches, schools, sporting cl…

> But will people want to move and raise children here? It's pretty telling that not one of their CGI promotional images includes a family, or even a child.

You move there to get laid, brah. Definitely not to have kids. But if last month's hot tub girl should text you with a baby emoji, don't, like, freak out and start saving money to buy a house. It's probably not your baby anyway. [/sarcasm, in case that was undetectable].

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

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely agree! I would recommend the YouTube channel "Not Just Bikes" which has a series about the book Strong Towns and in general focuses on better city planning: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0intLFzLaudFG-xAvUEO-A The terrible layouts of US cities and neighbourhoods are what keep me in Europe. There is nothing you can do in the US without a car because it's so car dependent and it wastes so much time compa…

A lot of East Coast US cities are a lot more walkable -- the image of the sprawling US city is mostly true of West Coast cities that underwent their primary growth after WWII and the ubiquity of cars. For example, I live in Washington DC (well technically a suburb, but near a Metro station) and don't drive. I have grocery stores and restaurants within walking distance and can take the Metro for other things.

Walkable yes, but often not safely bikeable, which unfortunately limits mobility options quite a bit. I live in Philadelphia and likewise have lots of options within walkable distances/a subway station nearby - that's a big part of why I live here. But here we only have two subway lines, going roughly north/south and east/west. If you need to get anywhere that's not well served by those, your main options are:

- Take a bus, most of which only come every 15 minutes at most

- Walk, which is doable bit adds another 20-30ish minutes to your trip depending on exactly where you're going

That would be more like 10 minutes max on a bike, which easily makes it one of the fastest ways to get around if you consider that you'll be spending several minutes just looking for parking if you were to drive. But the city still prioritizes cars above all else, making it not really a safe option. I absolutely would bike everywhere here if I felt safe enough to do so.

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

#259

This ditch full of sims, without a car in it is yours. There are meny like it, but this one is yours. Even though it is in the middle of a perhaps overbuilt desert where it really ought to not be as ridiculous to have a car as it is say in the urban east coast, where you just need a car to escape the retail trap that has replaced sensible urbanity, this ditch is yours. Now crawl in and die already, god damn it. https…

It'd generally appear that most people under 80 want to keep the college experience going. I still haven't read this, and I strongly suspect that if I were to skim it I'd be less likely to read it, but it generally seems to almost be a pretty good cold read of most generations of modern americans since the boomers as we age rather than just specifically the boomers. It is shorter than Neal Stephenson's version though, I think. https://www.powells.com/book/boomeritis-9781570628016
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