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

597 points by foofoo4u 5y ago

stretchwithme 5y ago
Maybe what we actually need are neighborhoods where motor vehicles all travel in a well-ventilated basement level and people travel in the fresh air above.
dang 5y ago
A couple of past threads: Culdesac: Building car-free neighborhoods from scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21600773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21600773 - Nov 2019 (9 comments) Culdesac: Car-free neighborhood built from scratch in Tempe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21574850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21574850 - Nov 2019 (136 comments)
hirundo 5y ago
A 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 use of them when you need them.
- mrfusion 5y ago
  Seems like if it’s a problem they should buy more of the in demand tools. My makerspace also put its popular tools under webcam so you could check if it’s in use before heading out.
  - jedmeyers 5y ago
    > should buy more As if the resources are infinite. HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND MAY NO ONE BE LEFT BEHIND!
- black_puppydog 5y ago
  Have you ever been to a community maker space? Your Comment reads a bit like you're treating this as a hypothetical. The ones I've seen usually have a mix of people owning (and stashing in boxes or such) their own tools & materials, as well as shared stuff that is usually in okay order depending on the place & people. Especially for things like cnc machines though there's no sane way to own these individually if you're not a power user.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  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 is greatly superior to garage DIY.
  - jedmeyers 5y ago
    Membership-based shops and clubs seem to work much better than 'everyone can come' scheme. Even at Google the maker spaces require an intro class, and an approval from one of the managing members. And one can make a case that a googler is expected to be a more responsible person than a random member of the elite no-car community.
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      Having to get readability for the maker space is the most googly thing I can imagine.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    >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.
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      https://www.motoguild-sf.com/ https://www.motoguild-sf.com/
- unholythree 5y ago
  Yeah that makerspace rendering is insane. A sewing machine, combo wrenches, some plant in a vase, actual monkey wrenches (for time travelers wtf), and a slugging wrench like iron workers use in heavy construction.
mrfusion 5y ago
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.
- criddell 5y ago
  One-bedrooms start at $1250 / month. Can a community be designed so that the people working there can also afford to live there?
  - atlasunshrugged 5y ago
    That doesn't seem that crazy. A couple can easily split a one bedroom and many jobs in service sectors are paying above $15/hr now so it's approachable for the average worker, and following your implication that it'd be higher end, I'd expect wages even for local service workers to be somewhat higher than the regional average as well (plus no commuting costs).
  - beerandt 5y ago
    I suspect that's based on what amount section 8 will pay, not what working people can afford.
  - kevinpet 5y ago
    People need to get off the notion that those working the most entry level jobs should be living in the newest housing.
    - sammalloy 5y ago
      > People need to get off the notion that those working the most entry level jobs should be living in the newest housing. The infrastructure in the US is old and dilapidated. Newer housing is energy efficient, safer, and more conducive to modern living requirements (high speed internet, solar, heat and cooling), regardless of what kind of job a person keeps.
crazcarl 5y ago
I live about 10 min drive from there, and I honestly don't see how it's going to work. Yes it is right on the lightrail line, but otherwise it's not a very walkable area. I guess they are hoping to lock everyone into just doing most of their eating and shopping onsite. Is that actually desirable?
- ericmay 5y ago
  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.
- zeperoni 5y ago
  I think they're banking on the rest of tempe over there to have a similar growth soon, and use the cable car that is being implemented. It's a gamble it will grow that way, but it seems like most of tempe right now is being overhauled.
- bakies 5y ago
  Well, currently, I just drive my car 10 min and usually eat and shop in the same place. That being walkable does seem desirable, yes. And if the nearest city was accessible by light rail I would certainly spend more time there.
  - crazcarl 5y ago
    But how many options do you have within 10 minutes? Are there more options if you need them than just one store and restaurant? I think that's what confuses me as to why they didn't create this concept closer to an area that's also walkable to other services.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
  >guess they are hoping to lock everyone into just doing most of their eating and shopping onsite. Is that actually desirable? I am sure it would be desirable for the owners of the community, since they can charge the stores more money since they are basically giving them a monopoly within the community.
jedmeyers 5y ago
360 view feels like the inside of the 1 Hacker Way.
- throwaway1777 5y ago
  I was going to say the same. It looks like the googleplex or Facebook classic campus
jseliger 5y ago
I live in the Phoenix area and put down a small initial deposit (something like $100) for Culdesac: while I primarily work from home, my partner still works at multiple sites west of downtown Phoenix, which makes Culdesac impractical, even though I love the idea of it. Right now, Phoenix's light rail system runs east-west between downtown Phoenix and Tempe, and north-south from downtown to uptown, but none of those locations are near the important job sites. Other background on Culdesac: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/business/culdesac-tempe-phoenix-sprawl.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/business/culdesac-tempe-p...
moeris 5y ago
The renderings are almost entirely of white people. Are they not aiming for diversity, or is Arizona just very white?
- nyx-aiur 5y ago
  The renderings are pretty diverse, even the 2d illustrations are diverse and the team behind it all is pretty diverse as well. Maybe open your eyes.
- talor_a 5y ago
  https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/tempecityarizona/PST045219 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/tempecityarizon... tempe is majority white, but you're right about the renders
- ars 5y ago
  Aren't blacks around 10% of the population? That's about what the renderings show.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- tomato44 5y ago
  If there were diversity, there couldn't be collaborative spaces.
- mbfg 5y ago
  i got to say, the one prominent black guy in the model seems more robotic looking then the rest of the people. It kind of jumped out to me too. Maybe it's just that he's so close to the camera.
codesections 5y ago
Why does the promotional site for a car-free neighborhood feature food trucks three times on its home page?
oalae5niMiel7qu 5y ago
Tempe, AZ, also known as the civil asset forfeiture capital of the world. Set foot in this town at your own risk.
ars 5y ago
All the houses are single bedroom? They expect no kids at all?
- Rapzid 5y ago
  Honestly, I think they nailed their target demographic for the lie they are trying to sell.
jrsdav 5y ago
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 being developed right now) within 5 minutes of your doorstep. It gets a bad rap from locals on the outside, but talk to the people living here (mostly expats from out of state) and nearly all of them say the same thing: > "We love it here!" and > "Why aren't more communities built this way?" I will say though, the US is poorly equipped for bicycle commuting. Even our neighborhood doesn't have many dedicated bike paths, opting instead to share the road with cars. Most diehard cyclists I know will tell you it's a matter of "when" not "if" you have a scary encounter with a driver. And with the amount of gigantic trucks on the roads out here that people use as their commuter cars, you can imagine these encounters don't typically end well.
- milkytron 5y ago
  Very similar situation here. Master planned community with meh build quality, but our neighborhood is designed to be transit oriented. We don't have a lot of amenities within the community, mostly just a bike trail, and a light rail stop. Hopefully some retail and a grocery store open up nearby soon, because about 500+ units are all being built within a quarter mile. And well over 1000+ within a half mile. The bike trail is my favorite part. It connects to the major bike trails in my city, which allow me access to all the major sporting venues, downtown, major shopping centers, and job centers. I used to ride ~7 miles per day traveling from the office, and about 20 miles each weekend just going to do things I would have otherwise done via car. It allowed me to sell my car. The light rail also makes things convenient if the weather isn't so great. The odd thing is that nearly everyone in the community still drives everywhere, and some own multiple cars. Parking is a disaster and everyone complains about it, but these were all new builds and the buyers all should have known that parking would be limited.
  - fy20 5y ago
    > The odd thing is that nearly everyone in the community still drives everywhere, and some own multiple cars. Parking is a disaster and everyone complains about it, but these were all new builds and the buyers all should have known that parking would be limited. This sounds a lot like communities built during Soviet times. At the time the idea was everything you needed was in your community, and if you ever needed to travel outside you could use public transport. This worked fine during Soviet times, as they could house people near where they worked, but nowadays that doesn't work. We still have pretty good public transport, but who wants to take two buses for 45 minutes when you can drive for 20 minutes? The green spaces between buildings have been converted to car parking, but it's still not really enough. As such all new developments within the city have to have underground parking.
handrous 5y ago
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.
dkhenry 5y ago
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.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Because these sorts of developments are typically trying to fill the trailer park or retirement community niches without incurring the negative baggage that comes with either.
  - crooked-v 5y ago
    Both of those have kids around more often than you'd think, even if it's just visiting grandkids during the summer.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      >Both of those have kids around more often than you'd think, I might know that. You might know that. But does the average yuppie DINK who is looking to move out of the city and into one of these developments know that? These seem to be positioned as the suburban equivalent of luxury condos and targeting the same demographics with their messaging.
- godot 5y ago
  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.
  - trynewideas 5y ago
    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.
starkd 5y ago
I get the sense you will either think this is the most wonderful place on earth or the most miserable place. Not much in between. The photos look clean, new and very cosmopolitan, but it's a very anodyne sterile look to it. Like a corporate brochure from human resources. It's not real, not real life.
- lutorm 5y ago
  Since it's not actually photos, I agree that it's not real life....
_huayra_ 5y ago
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.
- vinceguidry 5y ago
  Not doomed to fail. Just doomed to not deliver what you're asking for, true car-free living. I moved to the nicest part of my city and drive twice a week, on weekends. When I go into the office, I walk. A neighborhood like this with cars evicted to the periphery would be miles better than this. It's already possible to commute without a car. You just have to plan your life around it. Which you're already in for if you're considering moving to a planned community like this. Going completely car-free is always going to a tough thing to ask for for a country as spread out as the U.S.. I expect in the next 20 years we'll start getting streets back into urban centers to replace the stroads*. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM
  - benatkin 5y ago
    Also doomed not to be a real community. The only gathering points will be overpriced regional chains like Firecreek Coffee. I don't see people walking to visit their neighbors at their homes very often. It seems destined to be similar to any large condo.
jedberg 5y ago
Don't the 100F+ temps sort of prevent walkability in Arizona?
- maxk42 5y ago
  Frequently 120+.
  - V99 5y ago
    If by "frequently" you mean "that one day in 1990"... The single highest day of the year for most years is 115 ± 3.
- vondur 5y ago
  I think people tend to do those activities in the early mornings or after the sun is down.
- rollinggoron 5y ago
  You'd be surprised how much it does not. Not saying its the same amount of folks out during Fall/Winter/Spring, but a surprising amount due walk.
- awslattery 5y ago
  Proper hydration habits and efforts to acclimate help greatly with this.
eikenberry 5y ago
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?
- headcanon 5y ago
  I've been to AZ, it has a fairly vibrant outdoor community. The heat looks bad on the numbers but its a dry heat, so your sweat glands can operate at full efficiency, making it not feel so bad. It can be an issue for vulnerable people as well, and of course I can't speak to how that changes with Climate change.
- Nicholas_C 5y ago
  I recently saw a YouTube video deriding Houston’s car-first city design. The video didn’t once bring up that it’s extremely hot and even standing and waiting for a bus at 8am is sweat-inducing for 4 months out of the year and riding a bike to work is even worse 7-8 months out of the year (speaking from experience for both these things). Interestingly enough, downtown Houston has a massive tunnel system with restaurants, barber shops, dentists, doctors, etc. to keep everyone out of the heat in the summer.
- awslattery 5y ago
  One of the oldest tricks in the book, acclimation. Running your A/C to 78°F during the day rather than 68 will do wonders for your acclimation of the 110°F+ ambient temps, but few things can help with the reflective 150°F+ from asphalt and the like. And yeah, a lot of A/C, misters, big outdoor fans, and the biggest of all, shade. Which, interestingly, is not highlighted in some of these sketches/mockups. As a third-generation Tucsonan (one of the oldest continually inhabited places in North America), the heat is both something to be mindful of as it is something that you simply get used to. The most glorious Monsoons are both a blessing and a curse. One of the wettest in my recent memory, but the humidity is as bad as my time in the summer at Ft. Gordon, GA; really did feel like your skin was melting off your bones...
Causality1 5y ago
How in the world did they get a trademark for something as generic as culdesac?
kozak 5y ago
So, there are some concept images, but no real plan of the territory yet, right? Or did I miss it?
- ryanj20021 5y ago
  check us out on instagram for construction updates and more details
  - kozak 5y ago
    I don't even have an account there :)
aeharding 5y ago
Is Tempe/Phoenix any good for getting around without a car? All I know about is the sprawl and hostile road design.
- throwaway1777 5y ago
  No, it’s not really liveable without a car.
- trevortheblack 5y ago
  Entire neighborhoods are set up in a grid formation with each "block" being a mile on the side with housing and parks in the middle. You'll almost always need to travel a "block" or two to get to anything of interest. Big problems being 1. Distance 2. Heat (120f+ 50c+) in the summer 3. Very car centric city, everyone is driving fast so the sidewalks are narrow and the cars are loud
echelon 5y ago
This looks worse than many of the suburban neighborhoods in and around Atlanta, GA. There are no trees. (Granted, I live in Atlanta and we're spoiled af with marvelous tree cover.) There's no clear demarkation of where to walk or bike. It's not safe to intermix the two without indications of direction. One elongated dog leash (ugh) or elder person and there will be problems. There's little privacy from neighbors. Maybe that isn't a problem, but yards are pretty dope and provide ample opportunity for gardening, customization, and dog/kid playground/activities. Again, I don't get the anti-car, anti-yard, anti-suburb meme. And I say this as I live in a densely populated condo in Atlanta city proper. Cul-de-sacs (the "old-school" car kind) have their place.
- vinceguidry 5y ago
  Lack of demarcation makes things safer by raising the awareness of the people around you. Making things 'safer' actually reduces safety. I've posted this video on another thread, but it really needs to be spread out more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM
- majormajor 5y ago
  At first glance this looks strictly worse than something like Atlantic Station in Atlanta from 15 or so years ago, where you have a similar sort of mixed use development but also have tons of underground parking for when you need to visit the area or (as a resident) leave the area.
- AlotOfReading 5y ago
  There are thousands of neighborhoods in metro Phoenix that are designed exactly how you're suggesting. Anyone who wants that is positively spoiled for choice already. I don't see the harm in one or two developments exploring other types of urbanism, especially in the middle of a college town.
jborichevskiy 5y ago
I want this but a few thousand feet up in elevation, surrounded by trees, and preferably near a lake. Can't take the heat.
hamburgerwah 5y ago
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.
- trynewideas 5y ago
  I think "market studio" really depends on the target. Student-targeting studios are definitely $200/mth cheaper and Tempe has lots of those, but "luxury" studios within 0.5 mi. are already at the same price or higher.
- joshspankit 5y ago
  I was amused by the “built neighborhood” being entirely renders.
- mattcantstop 5y ago
  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.
  - hamburgerwah 5y ago
    I think it's a bit more like a microscopic walking oasis in an absolute megaocean of car infrastructure. Phoenix metro has probably the best car infrastructure of any US metro, maybe best in the world. Also for 3 months of the year it is not very comfortable to walk outside, day or night, because it is over 100f (yes including during the night). You won't die but it's not really comfortable.
- baby 5y ago
  Yeah it really doesn't sound as attractive as an entire district built without cars being the first-class citizen.
trynewideas 5y ago
> Studios start at $1,090/mo, and 1-bedrooms start at $1,250/mo This puts studios and 1bdrs in the low end of the largest rent band in Tempe ($1-1.5k) per Yardi Matrix, and on par with the average rent in Tuscon. All AZ cities are seeing 14% or higher YoY increases in rent. I'm very curious how solid those prices are, and how quickly they escalate ("starts at" pricing is really frustrating, however common it might be). Most apartments available on Apartments.com for less are in complexes between University and Broadway closer to campus. Apache Boulevard is between University and Broadway east of campus, and this Culdesac is much closer to US Hwy 101 than campus. One nearby traditional "luxury" apartment complex has studios for $1,040/mth and 1bdrs for $1,350/mth.
paxys 5y ago
"Neighborhood" is a bit of a stretch. This is an apartment complex.
- eplanit 5y ago
  Shhhh....you'll ruin the illusion. It's marketing aimed at a narrowly defined demographic that is highly attuned for this kind of imagery (Heaven on Earth, for some). As a ruse, it's rather well-done.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mattcantstop 5y ago
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.
- Improvotter 5y ago
  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 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 compared to walking or biking places. The beautifully walkable cities you find in Europe are so much more enjoyable to live in.
  - jhbadger 5y ago
    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.
    - ryukafalz 5y ago
      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.
deltasixeight 5y ago
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.
lstamour 5y ago
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.
- lutorm 5y ago
  I didn't color survey the renders, but the first picture at the top of the page has a non-white person front and center.
- FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
  Yeah, looks amateur. Typically you expect to see mixed white/Black couples, Muslim women (never men), a shortage of east-Asian people (usually women, presented as casual but desexualized professionals), rarely Indians (and never the Indian Family, marking a stark contrast to actual Desi ads), and everybody between 27 and 35 (the absence of children you're not supposed to think about, and old people might hold bad opinions). Departures from this pattern are indeed noticeable.
- prawn 5y ago
  I downvoted because it looked like there were people of various skin colours there to me, in the renders, in the illustrations and in the wait-list headshot illustrations. People in renders often look awkward. I appreciate diverse crowds in these sorts of things also, but I think you're reading into it too much here. Saw renders of an Aboriginal arts building locally where you could tell they struggled to find Aboriginal figures in their set of 3D models, so they seemed to include Indian families. Skin tone was generally fine, but the attire was miles off!
kernoble 5y ago
I'm curious how big the adjacent parking lot or parking garage will be.
Animats 5y ago
It's just a superblock in a developed area. Major roads on both sides. Here it is in Google StreetView.[1] Looks like they bought up a few trailer parks and leveled them to build this. It looks like an ordinary apartment complex, without parking. [1] https://earth.google.com/web/search/2025+E+Apache+Blvd,+Tempe,+AZ+85281/@33.41469477,-111.89915812,361.0155325a,0d,90y,125.99573031h,85.98304793t,0r https://earth.google.com/web/search/2025+E+Apache+Blvd,+Temp...
munificent 5y ago
I don't see why anyone would call this a "neighborhood". As far as I can tell, it's just a single apartment complex that doesn't have parking, right?
na85 5y ago
>Book a Guest Suite or day in the Makerspace through the Culdesac app and we'll handle the rest. The neighborhood has its own app? That sounds horrific.
globular-toast 5y ago
I'd love to live in a car-free neighbourhood. My town centre had blocked off all the on-street parking to make extra-wide walkways during the pandemic. Just last week they've removed the bollards and resumed the parking. It's awful. Ugly cars lined up taking up all the space. I can't believe I'm the only one who notices how much worse it is. I've lost hope in anything changing, though. People are just too dependent on their cars to let them go.
Thorentis 5y ago
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 clubs. Trusting the company behind this to provide for your every need is naive. Maybe it will work for some people. But will people want to move and raise children here? Creating one-off experiences is not the way to create the sustainable towns and cities of the future. This is like Airbnb taken to an obscene level. We should be designing car-free towns where people can buy property, design beautiful homes, participate in a small local economy, work locally and start small businesses, create the local institutions that their children and their children's children will participate in. I don't want to rent my space in a town I'm only partially attached to. I want to put roots down, and build things that will last.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  1 is a quintessential first world problem. If the value prop of the neighborhood is good people won't care how it looks. 2 is doing to doom it long term though IMO
- goodpoint 5y ago
  > All I see is soulless pre-fabs. It looks like you're living in a shopping mall. Spot on. Like a town from Greece or Portugal, Spain, Italy, Mexico... but with a dystopian feel.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    The dystopian feel was mostly coming from it being not so great renders which feel overly flat and vibrant.
- nwallin 5y ago
  I tend to agree. Communities need to be built organically. Let's say a town has 5,000 buildings in it; is somebody going to pay an architecture firm to design 5,000 buildings for them? Or are they going to pay them to design 40 buildings and copy and paste 125 times? Neighborhoods in the United States have a tendancy to look like shit, and that's because most of them are planned developments that were designed and constructed all at the same time. Each neighborhood is a snapshot in time of what "modern" "new" and "interesting" looked like some number of decades prior. IMHO the best thing about these houses is that they're not designed to last for 40 years. So 50 years from now after half of the houses are torn down and replaced with something different -- maybe worse, maybe better -- they have a chance of being nice. If you compare Factorio to Cities:Skylines, the best and worst feature of Factorio is that it lets you copy-paste, and C:S doesn't.
TheMagicHorsey 5y ago
Given how cheap land is in the far north part of California, I've always wondered why there isn't a city built specifically for walking and bicycling up north of Sacramento. Seems like with everyone telecommuting, if you build a community with a good school and with walkability and bikeablity, you could probably attract some families from the Bay, where prices are so high that people are looking for alternatives that are within 2 - 3 hours drive of the Bay Area.
golemiprague 5y ago
Manhattan is a car free neighbourhood in the sense that as a resident you don't need a car. This is an apartment complex with couple of shops.
mrobin88 5y ago
that's call the ghetto projects. damn they really just rebranded them.
keepper 5y ago
Ah yes, nothing like building a "sustainable" community in the dessert. Yes, there's sarcasm in there. But part of long term human sustainability is well, figuring out the areas we should not fight the environment ( more than reasonable ) to be able to sustain a human population.
sib 5y ago
As a borderline introvert, all I can say is, "wow, that looks extremely crowded and uncomfortable right outside my 'front door'." (And I have lived in Manhattan and in a mid-sized city in Germany, although I currently live in Los Angeles.)
- baby 5y ago
  Yeah this seems more like coliving than an a european neighborhood.
trevortheblack 5y ago
I live 5 miles from the location and have visited the Tempe area many time for recreation. While there isn't much in the way of infrastructure at this part of Tempe at the moment, it's close enough to the main boulevard, called Mill, and close enough to downtown phoenix. The entire Phoenix area is quickly becoming a popular place to live and lots of tech is moving here. Phoenix is, _in general_, a decent third or fourth choice across a ton of different metrics. Tech jobs, decent university system, growing economy. Yeah, the weather can be downright terrible, but lots of people from CA are moving here during the pandemic. Indeed, Arizona State University (based in Tempe) is a tremendously popular school for high schoolers from CA. I'm going to recommend investing in real estate to everyone I know in the area.
fnord77 5y ago
are all developments like this only rentals?
nick007 5y ago
Super excited for this, and I am planning to relocate from SF to Tempe for [mostly] this reason. It's about time there was a truly novel offering in the world of residential living, and the Culdesac crew are doing in in the right way! Been a huge fan from the sidelines ever since their YC days.
SN76477 5y ago
It looks like a product a theme park for suburbanites. Nothing about it looks friendly or organic. I would imagine there is a disasters HOA. Now that I am done ranting. I would love to see this happen organically all over the world.
nathanvanfleet 5y ago
Sort of neat I guess. Seems like a community type thing, similar to Facebook campus. But also somewhat harrowing that this could catch on and you have entire neighborhoods that are self contained and corporate owned. Maybe living on a lord's land was something that just stopped for a little while.
- FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
  Some huge percentage of Americans already live under an HoA or condo association. They've all but replaced municipal governments in many places.
  - dd36 5y ago
    You still own your property when there’s an HOA. I wonder why they didn’t do that here.
    - FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
      If you're building 1BRs, my guess is that you don't maximize your profits by selling them off as condos, because the demand to own is for 2BRs and larger. That, in turn, is probably because 1BRs are (very generally) for younger people in more temporary situations. I.e., those younger people are less likely to buy.
Stratoscope 5y ago
Somewhat tangential to the article, people are sometimes unsure of how to pronounce Tempe. As someone who lived there for many years, I can answer that. It's not "temp" or "tempuh" or "tempay". It's pronounced "TEM-PEE" with both syllables accented.
yodon 5y ago
SF generally gets a bad rap here on HN but it can be incredibly walkable if you do it right.
owenfi 5y ago
I was looking for a general map and found one here: https://opticosdesign.com/work/culdesac-tempe/ https://opticosdesign.com/work/culdesac-tempe/
hermannj314 5y ago
I think is is wonderful that builders are making good faith attempts to listen to us and make walkable communities. I think it great for someone to do something and try to make the world a more decent place for the subset of customers that might be looking for a walkable community to live in. I selfishly hope this takes off, iterates and improves, and becomes commonplace.
ryanj20021 5y ago
Founder here. Great to see the excitement people have for Culdesac and for Culdesac Tempe. Our vision is to build the first car-free city in the US, starting with the first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US. Join our waitlist at culdesac.com. We open next year! If you want to visit in the meantime, drop me a note. Hiring-wise, we're hiring in Tempe or remote. Our top hiring prio is to lead product design. https://www.culdesac.com/jobs https://www.culdesac.com/jobs Here's our insta, which has lots of construction updates https://www.instagram.com/liveculdesac https://www.instagram.com/liveculdesac Here's our tik tok https://www.tiktok.com/@liveculdesac https://www.tiktok.com/@liveculdesac Here's our twitter https://www.twitter.com/culdesac https://www.twitter.com/culdesac Here's my twitter where I also talk a lot about ebikes https://www.twitter.com/ryanmjohnson https://www.twitter.com/ryanmjohnson Here's our intro article https://medium.com/culdesac/introducing-culdesac-3fbfe7c4219c https://medium.com/culdesac/introducing-culdesac-3fbfe7c4219... Here's a longer piece on us https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/business/culdesac-tempe-phoenix-sprawl.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/business/culdesac-tempe-p...
- nick007 5y ago
  +1 for the NYT feature -- that piece really does a good job at introducing your vision, worth the read
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  Good luck! I’m not sure how much of an issue stormwater management is, in Arizona, but that was something my mother harped on, in Maryland. Developers hate stormwater management, with a burning passion. My mother was not popular with them. Planned communities were notorious for not, er…planning for stormwater management. It usually required setting aside significant acreage, and doing a lot of fill work. It was a really big deal, though. The communities that cut corners, suffered millions of dollars in damages, and often multiplied damages in other communities. The dirty little secret about all these natural disasters; earthquakes, wildfires, volcanoes, tornadoes, etc., is that the single deadliest and most destructive force in nature, is good ol’ H2O.
  - 5y ago
flemhans 5y ago
At the same time, "Master Planned" areas in actual Europe tend to be super horrible to live in, due to the detachment from what actually makes a place livable. (And the transportation part is generally already solved in Europe). Here in Copenhagen, everybody loves the 100-200 year old areas way more than the newly built ones.
- jusssi 5y ago
  Wouldn't a 100-200 year old city area be much more likely to have originally been "Master Planned" than a modern development?
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Town,_Edinburgh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Town,_Edinburgh and quite nice too. The undercurrent behind https://www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/articles/why-medieval-city-builder-video-games-are-historically-inaccurate https://www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/articles/why-medieval-... is our romanticized notion of the past actually under-emphasizes the planning that did occur. After those overzealous tower-and-park modernists, we did a big romantic counterrevolution in aesthetics that ironically justifies the even more current neoliberal weak state planning as the default. I recommend https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contemporary-architecture https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contempo... for trying to weave the needle right for yes planning but also yes a little relativism and humility.
porlune 5y ago
The existing plot shows numerous roads and existing infrastructure. In what way do they mean "from scratch"? https://www.google.com/maps/place/2025+E+Apache+Blvd,+Tempe,+AZ+85281/@33.4137558,-111.8995944,500m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x872b085e7c994d05:0x8b138e446744cd7c!8m2!3d33.4146177!4d-111.8992679 https://www.google.com/maps/place/2025+E+Apache+Blvd,+Tempe,...
ekianjo 5y ago
Looks pretty bad compared to what we have in most cities around the world. Uninspiring to say the least.
PostThisTooFast 5y ago
So... they're building a mall.
stanski 5y ago
I kept reading this as "cat-free neighbourhood", multiple times too. Looked at the website but couldn't figure out what part of all the nice features was thanks to the community being cat-free. Were the BBQs and hammocks better if there is no cats anywhere? There is a cat in one of the images near the top. I thought maybe they were being sarcastic or something. Geez! :)
readonthegoapp 5y ago
May Culdesac rub off on insanely-car-centric-for-a-university-town-with-a-gajillion-walking/biking/scooting-students town (Tempe) in Their name, amen.
throwaway984393 5y ago
How many people actually like walking around in Arizona heat? I thought everybody just jumped from their car's AC to a building's AC.
Igelau 5y ago
Nice food truck.
solox3 5y ago
Calling it "The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US", and then mentioning "zero private cars means zero hassle" (so there are other private vehicles, like trucks?), "Rideshare" (what are we sharing if not a car?) and "On-site car share" (so there ARE cars?), makes the headline inspirational - and with the best will in the world - a bit misleading.
- rblatz 5y ago
  It’s also built between two massive public parking lots that serve as park and ride locations for the light rail.
gwbas1c 5y ago
Studio and 1-bedroom only? What about families? Couples that need an extra room for an office or home business? And where do you park your personal car? I REALLY mean it. There are many "car-free" developments with well-placed parking areas for residents who choose to have a car. Even when I was able to live in a bike/walk/train situation, I still drove 2-3 times a week. (And, no I wouldn't have used a car share service, even if was easily available.)
elliekelly 5y ago
Mackinack Island is also car-free: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackinac_Island https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackinac_Island
nullc 5y ago
Looks like an open air shopping mall. I wonder if there is any public space or if all the walkways are privately owned, allowing the owners to outlaw any persons or ideologies they dislike?
- dd36 5y ago
  The whole project is rentals.
ISL 5y ago
The headline/title seems like something of a stretch for two reasons. The first is pedantic. The US was formed in the 1700s, roughly a century before the first car was invented. Most, if not all, neighborhoods prior to that were built from scratch. The second is less-pedantic. It is hard to imagine that the various communes and utopias designed/built throughout the twentieth century in the US all required a car in order to live in them and be a part of the community.
ThinkBeat 5y ago
Is this pure vaporware? It seems scammy to me. Initially when I first saw the page, I figure it was some virtual community. All the computer-generated graphics looked like some version of Second Life. (If that is stilla thing). It says "Coming to Tempe, Arizona in 2022" "Located at 2025 E Apache Blvd, Tempe, AZ 85281" In Google maps it looks like it has a long way to go before it is finished. https://www.google.com/maps/place/2025+E+Apache+Blvd,+Tempe,+AZ+85281,+USA/@33.4155324,-111.9013475,1039m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x872b085e7c994d05:0x8b138e446744cd7c!8m2!3d33.4146177!4d-111.8992679 https://www.google.com/maps/place/2025+E+Apache+Blvd,+Tempe,... The Google images can be years out of date, so it might not be a fair assessment. Still to develop something like that has to require enormous amounts of money and resources. The area such as pictured in Google Maps does not look like a foundation it is easy to build this neighborhood on. The link to their "capital partner" does not load for me but that may be a local glitch. The link to "resize your home on demand" goes to a blog with no relevant information. They want people to send them $100 to reserve a spot. What is the timeline? What has been achieved? How much of it is funded? What permits have been obtained? Rezoning? To me this looks like a quickly and poorly cobbled together website with at best somebodies' vision for what could one day in the far future be built, but at present consist of this website and nothing else.
- andrewmcwatters 5y ago
  There's a tremendous amount of building happening in Phoenix, because people keep moving here driving home prices up. I would almost guarantee these rents will be much higher once they open.
  - erik_seaberg 5y ago
    It looks like everyone who puts down a deposit is getting on a waiting list to rent at market rate next summer (maybe later).
dshpala 5y ago
Surprised no one mentioned Irvine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvine,_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvine,_California New neighborhoods are quite nice, e.g. https://www.irvinepacific.com/homes/eastwood-village https://www.irvinepacific.com/homes/eastwood-village
- m-ee 5y ago
  I love the idea of a car free neighborhood, and Irvine is the exact opposite of what I want. My in laws are there and my partner unfortunately loves it but the urban planning makes me viscerally uncomfortable. Sure you can walk from the million+ dollar homes to the gated communities admittedly nice pool, but I felt like most of what I was doing was driving long distances on wide roads through depressing big box stores and strip malls.
wiradikusuma 5y ago
How about noise and crowdedness? Everything look (from the picture) so close together, if there are too many people and stuff, things will get messy. Not to mention when there are outdoor activities like musical performances. I like the concept, I'm just worried when it's over capacity.
whatever1 5y ago
Jails are also car free.
hlehmann 5y ago
Oh look, a bunch of CGI images of selfie-taking, twenty-something, hipsters. Jump off a bridge while you still can.
bigmattystyles 5y ago
I tend to think that these things have to come up more organically. I get Soviet cityblock vibes from this. Maybe it’s unfair of me. I guess If it fails the eventual occupants can translate cul de sac into English to refer to what the place has become.
truenindb 5y ago
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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmrOQ4BizCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmrOQ4BizCE
- noduerme 5y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villages,_Florida "Urban" my butt. Still, beats the hell out of North Korea.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  Presumably all the nice places already have people there who have opinions that are incompatible.
- truenindb 5y ago
  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 https://www.powells.com/book/boomeritis-9781570628016
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TaylorAlexander 5y ago
Gosh I would love places like this in the Bay Area. I recently watched a video [1] about the planned cities built by the Soviets and it all seems really nice. One advantage in their case is that they planned industrial activity as well so they built residences within bicycling distance from factories (with green space in between) so people could get to home, shops, and work with a walk or bike ride. Actually I remember that Japan has done a lot of industrial planning too, but I don’t know if they paired that with residential and commercial spaces. Something to look in to. (Please comment if you know.) [1] https://youtu.be/CWKuCoSg85w https://youtu.be/CWKuCoSg85w
zippergz 5y ago
I like the idea of a community that truly doesn’t need cars. I don’t like the idea of living in a community built and owned by a YC company. I don’t need Uber for housing.
lemax 5y ago
Why not just move to a dense city or downtown? How can a random developer-planned concrete mixed use fortress possibly achieve the nature of a city? A street in a city is a market. People compete to offer the best goods/services/experiences based on the what the local people want and this organically grows into something interesting. If one person plans it all out from the get-go it kind of loses the sheen of any level of culture/unpredictability that makes living in this setting appealing. This feels like a repackaging of those McMansion neighborhoods in a cute urban millenial flavor.
hoseja 5y ago
Everyone wants to live in Shi Tpa Town.
sirmike_ 5y ago
Hard pass for me. But in 25 years maybe as an option.
K9z31DfON85ik5b 5y ago
Very ironic to see a food truck on the first picture for "The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US!" American culture, cars and food. Enough said.
KaiserPro 5y ago
interesting etymology pointer, "cul de sac" is literally the arse of the bag. (cul deriving from cullus, which is latin for arse. )
david_frier 5y ago
That looks like nothing so much as Season 1 of The Good Place.
scrumper 5y ago
The very first picture (next to "The Heart of the Community" reminds me a lot of one of those neo-primitive settlements the Enterprise would visit in a Star Trek: TNG episode. Captain Picard would have some kind of intense relationship with a local lady and everyone would learn something about the value of the simple life. But more seriously, won't this be like living in a vacation resort? Fine for a week or two, but a bit grating after that. One restaurant, one grocery store... The car-freeness is amazing but it seems a little small to be really livable. I am glad that someone is trying and paving a trail - we need things like this.
VoodooJuJu 5y ago
These kinds of designs have this utopian vibe that just leaves a bad taste. Good urban design is more naturally emergent and less-so centrally-planned.
dirtyid 5y ago
How's the weather in Tempe AZ? I'd love to have a scooter / walk centric community but rain and snow is a bitch.
fearfulofview4 5y ago
See what the professionals have to say about good planning: https://books.google.ch/books/about/Suburban_Nation.html?id=UZ0-0X4aiwQC&redir_esc=y https://books.google.ch/books/about/Suburban_Nation.html?id=... https://books.google.ch/books?id=pkmluwVdwx0C&source=gbs_navlinks_s https://books.google.ch/books?id=pkmluwVdwx0C&source=gbs_nav...
jlj7 5y ago
Completely tone-deaf. Those mock-ups would be pretty scary, were I visually-impaired (as an example): accidents waiting to happen everywhere; chaos, from a guide dog's perspective (if they were lucky enough to have one). One wheelchair in all the mock-ups; and one of the smaller ones at that, that you can't zoom in on. No prams. Anywhere. This one's tricky, I'll admit, but, well, it looks really crowded. Any thought to low-arousal environments? I guess this was designed. But for who?
freemint 5y ago
Given that all neighborhoods created before the invention of the auto mobile were car free it is hardly the first. However congrats getting around zoning regulations

597 points by foofoo4u 5y ago

Maybe what we actually need are neighborhoods where motor vehicles all travel in a well-ventilated basement level and people travel in the fresh air above.

dang 5y ago

A couple of past threads: Culdesac: Building car-free neighborhoods from scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21600773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21600773 - Nov 2019 (9 comments) Culdesac: Car-free neighborhood built from scratch in Tempe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21574850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21574850 - Nov 2019 (136 comments)

hirundo 5y ago

A 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 use of them when you need them.

mrfusion 5y ago
Seems like if it’s a problem they should buy more of the in demand tools. My makerspace also put its popular tools under webcam so you could check if it’s in use before heading out.
- jedmeyers 5y ago
  > should buy more As if the resources are infinite. HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND MAY NO ONE BE LEFT BEHIND!
black_puppydog 5y ago
Have you ever been to a community maker space? Your Comment reads a bit like you're treating this as a hypothetical. The ones I've seen usually have a mix of people owning (and stashing in boxes or such) their own tools & materials, as well as shared stuff that is usually in okay order depending on the place & people. Especially for things like cnc machines though there's no sane way to own these individually if you're not a power user.
jeffbee 5y ago
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 is greatly superior to garage DIY.
- jedmeyers 5y ago
  Membership-based shops and clubs seem to work much better than 'everyone can come' scheme. Even at Google the maker spaces require an intro class, and an approval from one of the managing members. And one can make a case that a googler is expected to be a more responsible person than a random member of the elite no-car community.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    Having to get readability for the maker space is the most googly thing I can imagine.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  >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.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    https://www.motoguild-sf.com/ https://www.motoguild-sf.com/
unholythree 5y ago
Yeah that makerspace rendering is insane. A sewing machine, combo wrenches, some plant in a vase, actual monkey wrenches (for time travelers wtf), and a slugging wrench like iron workers use in heavy construction.

mrfusion 5y ago

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.

criddell 5y ago
One-bedrooms start at $1250 / month. Can a community be designed so that the people working there can also afford to live there?
- atlasunshrugged 5y ago
  That doesn't seem that crazy. A couple can easily split a one bedroom and many jobs in service sectors are paying above $15/hr now so it's approachable for the average worker, and following your implication that it'd be higher end, I'd expect wages even for local service workers to be somewhat higher than the regional average as well (plus no commuting costs).
- beerandt 5y ago
  I suspect that's based on what amount section 8 will pay, not what working people can afford.
- kevinpet 5y ago
  People need to get off the notion that those working the most entry level jobs should be living in the newest housing.
  - sammalloy 5y ago
    > People need to get off the notion that those working the most entry level jobs should be living in the newest housing. The infrastructure in the US is old and dilapidated. Newer housing is energy efficient, safer, and more conducive to modern living requirements (high speed internet, solar, heat and cooling), regardless of what kind of job a person keeps.

crazcarl 5y ago

I live about 10 min drive from there, and I honestly don't see how it's going to work. Yes it is right on the lightrail line, but otherwise it's not a very walkable area. I guess they are hoping to lock everyone into just doing most of their eating and shopping onsite. Is that actually desirable?

ericmay 5y ago
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.
zeperoni 5y ago
I think they're banking on the rest of tempe over there to have a similar growth soon, and use the cable car that is being implemented. It's a gamble it will grow that way, but it seems like most of tempe right now is being overhauled.
bakies 5y ago
Well, currently, I just drive my car 10 min and usually eat and shop in the same place. That being walkable does seem desirable, yes. And if the nearest city was accessible by light rail I would certainly spend more time there.
- crazcarl 5y ago
  But how many options do you have within 10 minutes? Are there more options if you need them than just one store and restaurant? I think that's what confuses me as to why they didn't create this concept closer to an area that's also walkable to other services.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
>guess they are hoping to lock everyone into just doing most of their eating and shopping onsite. Is that actually desirable? I am sure it would be desirable for the owners of the community, since they can charge the stores more money since they are basically giving them a monopoly within the community.

jedmeyers 5y ago

360 view feels like the inside of the 1 Hacker Way.

throwaway1777 5y ago
I was going to say the same. It looks like the googleplex or Facebook classic campus

jseliger 5y ago

I live in the Phoenix area and put down a small initial deposit (something like $100) for Culdesac: while I primarily work from home, my partner still works at multiple sites west of downtown Phoenix, which makes Culdesac impractical, even though I love the idea of it. Right now, Phoenix's light rail system runs east-west between downtown Phoenix and Tempe, and north-south from downtown to uptown, but none of those locations are near the important job sites. Other background on Culdesac: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/business/culdesac-tempe-phoenix-sprawl.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/business/culdesac-tempe-p...

moeris 5y ago

The renderings are almost entirely of white people. Are they not aiming for diversity, or is Arizona just very white?

nyx-aiur 5y ago
The renderings are pretty diverse, even the 2d illustrations are diverse and the team behind it all is pretty diverse as well. Maybe open your eyes.
talor_a 5y ago
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/tempecityarizona/PST045219 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/tempecityarizon... tempe is majority white, but you're right about the renders
ars 5y ago
Aren't blacks around 10% of the population? That's about what the renderings show.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
tomato44 5y ago
If there were diversity, there couldn't be collaborative spaces.
mbfg 5y ago
i got to say, the one prominent black guy in the model seems more robotic looking then the rest of the people. It kind of jumped out to me too. Maybe it's just that he's so close to the camera.

codesections 5y ago

Why does the promotional site for a car-free neighborhood feature food trucks three times on its home page?

oalae5niMiel7qu 5y ago

Tempe, AZ, also known as the civil asset forfeiture capital of the world. Set foot in this town at your own risk.

ars 5y ago

All the houses are single bedroom? They expect no kids at all?

Rapzid 5y ago
Honestly, I think they nailed their target demographic for the lie they are trying to sell.

jrsdav 5y ago

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 being developed right now) within 5 minutes of your doorstep. It gets a bad rap from locals on the outside, but talk to the people living here (mostly expats from out of state) and nearly all of them say the same thing: > "We love it here!" and > "Why aren't more communities built this way?" I will say though, the US is poorly equipped for bicycle commuting. Even our neighborhood doesn't have many dedicated bike paths, opting instead to share the road with cars. Most diehard cyclists I know will tell you it's a matter of "when" not "if" you have a scary encounter with a driver. And with the amount of gigantic trucks on the roads out here that people use as their commuter cars, you can imagine these encounters don't typically end well.

milkytron 5y ago
Very similar situation here. Master planned community with meh build quality, but our neighborhood is designed to be transit oriented. We don't have a lot of amenities within the community, mostly just a bike trail, and a light rail stop. Hopefully some retail and a grocery store open up nearby soon, because about 500+ units are all being built within a quarter mile. And well over 1000+ within a half mile. The bike trail is my favorite part. It connects to the major bike trails in my city, which allow me access to all the major sporting venues, downtown, major shopping centers, and job centers. I used to ride ~7 miles per day traveling from the office, and about 20 miles each weekend just going to do things I would have otherwise done via car. It allowed me to sell my car. The light rail also makes things convenient if the weather isn't so great. The odd thing is that nearly everyone in the community still drives everywhere, and some own multiple cars. Parking is a disaster and everyone complains about it, but these were all new builds and the buyers all should have known that parking would be limited.
- fy20 5y ago
  > The odd thing is that nearly everyone in the community still drives everywhere, and some own multiple cars. Parking is a disaster and everyone complains about it, but these were all new builds and the buyers all should have known that parking would be limited. This sounds a lot like communities built during Soviet times. At the time the idea was everything you needed was in your community, and if you ever needed to travel outside you could use public transport. This worked fine during Soviet times, as they could house people near where they worked, but nowadays that doesn't work. We still have pretty good public transport, but who wants to take two buses for 45 minutes when you can drive for 20 minutes? The green spaces between buildings have been converted to car parking, but it's still not really enough. As such all new developments within the city have to have underground parking.

handrous 5y ago

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.

dkhenry 5y ago

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.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Because these sorts of developments are typically trying to fill the trailer park or retirement community niches without incurring the negative baggage that comes with either.
- crooked-v 5y ago
  Both of those have kids around more often than you'd think, even if it's just visiting grandkids during the summer.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    >Both of those have kids around more often than you'd think, I might know that. You might know that. But does the average yuppie DINK who is looking to move out of the city and into one of these developments know that? These seem to be positioned as the suburban equivalent of luxury condos and targeting the same demographics with their messaging.
godot 5y ago
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.
- trynewideas 5y ago
  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.

starkd 5y ago

I get the sense you will either think this is the most wonderful place on earth or the most miserable place. Not much in between. The photos look clean, new and very cosmopolitan, but it's a very anodyne sterile look to it. Like a corporate brochure from human resources. It's not real, not real life.

lutorm 5y ago
Since it's not actually photos, I agree that it's not real life....

_huayra_ 5y ago

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.

vinceguidry 5y ago
Not doomed to fail. Just doomed to not deliver what you're asking for, true car-free living. I moved to the nicest part of my city and drive twice a week, on weekends. When I go into the office, I walk. A neighborhood like this with cars evicted to the periphery would be miles better than this. It's already possible to commute without a car. You just have to plan your life around it. Which you're already in for if you're considering moving to a planned community like this. Going completely car-free is always going to a tough thing to ask for for a country as spread out as the U.S.. I expect in the next 20 years we'll start getting streets back into urban centers to replace the stroads*. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM
- benatkin 5y ago
  Also doomed not to be a real community. The only gathering points will be overpriced regional chains like Firecreek Coffee. I don't see people walking to visit their neighbors at their homes very often. It seems destined to be similar to any large condo.

jedberg 5y ago

Don't the 100F+ temps sort of prevent walkability in Arizona?

maxk42 5y ago
Frequently 120+.
- V99 5y ago
  If by "frequently" you mean "that one day in 1990"... The single highest day of the year for most years is 115 ± 3.
vondur 5y ago
I think people tend to do those activities in the early mornings or after the sun is down.
rollinggoron 5y ago
You'd be surprised how much it does not. Not saying its the same amount of folks out during Fall/Winter/Spring, but a surprising amount due walk.
awslattery 5y ago
Proper hydration habits and efforts to acclimate help greatly with this.

eikenberry 5y ago

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?

headcanon 5y ago
I've been to AZ, it has a fairly vibrant outdoor community. The heat looks bad on the numbers but its a dry heat, so your sweat glands can operate at full efficiency, making it not feel so bad. It can be an issue for vulnerable people as well, and of course I can't speak to how that changes with Climate change.
Nicholas_C 5y ago
I recently saw a YouTube video deriding Houston’s car-first city design. The video didn’t once bring up that it’s extremely hot and even standing and waiting for a bus at 8am is sweat-inducing for 4 months out of the year and riding a bike to work is even worse 7-8 months out of the year (speaking from experience for both these things). Interestingly enough, downtown Houston has a massive tunnel system with restaurants, barber shops, dentists, doctors, etc. to keep everyone out of the heat in the summer.
awslattery 5y ago
One of the oldest tricks in the book, acclimation. Running your A/C to 78°F during the day rather than 68 will do wonders for your acclimation of the 110°F+ ambient temps, but few things can help with the reflective 150°F+ from asphalt and the like. And yeah, a lot of A/C, misters, big outdoor fans, and the biggest of all, shade. Which, interestingly, is not highlighted in some of these sketches/mockups. As a third-generation Tucsonan (one of the oldest continually inhabited places in North America), the heat is both something to be mindful of as it is something that you simply get used to. The most glorious Monsoons are both a blessing and a curse. One of the wettest in my recent memory, but the humidity is as bad as my time in the summer at Ft. Gordon, GA; really did feel like your skin was melting off your bones...

Causality1 5y ago

How in the world did they get a trademark for something as generic as culdesac?

kozak 5y ago

So, there are some concept images, but no real plan of the territory yet, right? Or did I miss it?

ryanj20021 5y ago
check us out on instagram for construction updates and more details
- kozak 5y ago
  I don't even have an account there :)

aeharding 5y ago

Is Tempe/Phoenix any good for getting around without a car? All I know about is the sprawl and hostile road design.

throwaway1777 5y ago
No, it’s not really liveable without a car.
trevortheblack 5y ago
Entire neighborhoods are set up in a grid formation with each "block" being a mile on the side with housing and parks in the middle. You'll almost always need to travel a "block" or two to get to anything of interest. Big problems being 1. Distance 2. Heat (120f+ 50c+) in the summer 3. Very car centric city, everyone is driving fast so the sidewalks are narrow and the cars are loud

echelon 5y ago

This looks worse than many of the suburban neighborhoods in and around Atlanta, GA. There are no trees. (Granted, I live in Atlanta and we're spoiled af with marvelous tree cover.) There's no clear demarkation of where to walk or bike. It's not safe to intermix the two without indications of direction. One elongated dog leash (ugh) or elder person and there will be problems. There's little privacy from neighbors. Maybe that isn't a problem, but yards are pretty dope and provide ample opportunity for gardening, customization, and dog/kid playground/activities. Again, I don't get the anti-car, anti-yard, anti-suburb meme. And I say this as I live in a densely populated condo in Atlanta city proper. Cul-de-sacs (the "old-school" car kind) have their place.

vinceguidry 5y ago
Lack of demarcation makes things safer by raising the awareness of the people around you. Making things 'safer' actually reduces safety. I've posted this video on another thread, but it really needs to be spread out more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM
majormajor 5y ago
At first glance this looks strictly worse than something like Atlantic Station in Atlanta from 15 or so years ago, where you have a similar sort of mixed use development but also have tons of underground parking for when you need to visit the area or (as a resident) leave the area.
AlotOfReading 5y ago
There are thousands of neighborhoods in metro Phoenix that are designed exactly how you're suggesting. Anyone who wants that is positively spoiled for choice already. I don't see the harm in one or two developments exploring other types of urbanism, especially in the middle of a college town.

jborichevskiy 5y ago

I want this but a few thousand feet up in elevation, surrounded by trees, and preferably near a lake. Can't take the heat.

hamburgerwah 5y ago

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.

trynewideas 5y ago
I think "market studio" really depends on the target. Student-targeting studios are definitely $200/mth cheaper and Tempe has lots of those, but "luxury" studios within 0.5 mi. are already at the same price or higher.
joshspankit 5y ago
I was amused by the “built neighborhood” being entirely renders.
mattcantstop 5y ago
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.
- hamburgerwah 5y ago
  I think it's a bit more like a microscopic walking oasis in an absolute megaocean of car infrastructure. Phoenix metro has probably the best car infrastructure of any US metro, maybe best in the world. Also for 3 months of the year it is not very comfortable to walk outside, day or night, because it is over 100f (yes including during the night). You won't die but it's not really comfortable.
baby 5y ago
Yeah it really doesn't sound as attractive as an entire district built without cars being the first-class citizen.

trynewideas 5y ago

> Studios start at $1,090/mo, and 1-bedrooms start at $1,250/mo This puts studios and 1bdrs in the low end of the largest rent band in Tempe ($1-1.5k) per Yardi Matrix, and on par with the average rent in Tuscon. All AZ cities are seeing 14% or higher YoY increases in rent. I'm very curious how solid those prices are, and how quickly they escalate ("starts at" pricing is really frustrating, however common it might be). Most apartments available on Apartments.com for less are in complexes between University and Broadway closer to campus. Apache Boulevard is between University and Broadway east of campus, and this Culdesac is much closer to US Hwy 101 than campus. One nearby traditional "luxury" apartment complex has studios for $1,040/mth and 1bdrs for $1,350/mth.

paxys 5y ago

"Neighborhood" is a bit of a stretch. This is an apartment complex.

eplanit 5y ago
Shhhh....you'll ruin the illusion. It's marketing aimed at a narrowly defined demographic that is highly attuned for this kind of imagery (Heaven on Earth, for some). As a ruse, it's rather well-done.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mattcantstop 5y ago

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.

Improvotter 5y ago
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 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 compared to walking or biking places. The beautifully walkable cities you find in Europe are so much more enjoyable to live in.
- jhbadger 5y ago
  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.
  - ryukafalz 5y ago
    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.

deltasixeight 5y ago

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.

lstamour 5y ago

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.

lutorm 5y ago
I didn't color survey the renders, but the first picture at the top of the page has a non-white person front and center.
FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
Yeah, looks amateur. Typically you expect to see mixed white/Black couples, Muslim women (never men), a shortage of east-Asian people (usually women, presented as casual but desexualized professionals), rarely Indians (and never the Indian Family, marking a stark contrast to actual Desi ads), and everybody between 27 and 35 (the absence of children you're not supposed to think about, and old people might hold bad opinions). Departures from this pattern are indeed noticeable.
prawn 5y ago
I downvoted because it looked like there were people of various skin colours there to me, in the renders, in the illustrations and in the wait-list headshot illustrations. People in renders often look awkward. I appreciate diverse crowds in these sorts of things also, but I think you're reading into it too much here. Saw renders of an Aboriginal arts building locally where you could tell they struggled to find Aboriginal figures in their set of 3D models, so they seemed to include Indian families. Skin tone was generally fine, but the attire was miles off!

kernoble 5y ago

I'm curious how big the adjacent parking lot or parking garage will be.

Animats 5y ago

It's just a superblock in a developed area. Major roads on both sides. Here it is in Google StreetView.[1] Looks like they bought up a few trailer parks and leveled them to build this. It looks like an ordinary apartment complex, without parking. [1] https://earth.google.com/web/search/2025+E+Apache+Blvd,+Tempe,+AZ+85281/@33.41469477,-111.89915812,361.0155325a,0d,90y,125.99573031h,85.98304793t,0r https://earth.google.com/web/search/2025+E+Apache+Blvd,+Temp...

munificent 5y ago

I don't see why anyone would call this a "neighborhood". As far as I can tell, it's just a single apartment complex that doesn't have parking, right?

na85 5y ago

>Book a Guest Suite or day in the Makerspace through the Culdesac app and we'll handle the rest. The neighborhood has its own app? That sounds horrific.

globular-toast 5y ago

I'd love to live in a car-free neighbourhood. My town centre had blocked off all the on-street parking to make extra-wide walkways during the pandemic. Just last week they've removed the bollards and resumed the parking. It's awful. Ugly cars lined up taking up all the space. I can't believe I'm the only one who notices how much worse it is. I've lost hope in anything changing, though. People are just too dependent on their cars to let them go.

Thorentis 5y ago

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 clubs. Trusting the company behind this to provide for your every need is naive. Maybe it will work for some people. But will people want to move and raise children here? Creating one-off experiences is not the way to create the sustainable towns and cities of the future. This is like Airbnb taken to an obscene level. We should be designing car-free towns where people can buy property, design beautiful homes, participate in a small local economy, work locally and start small businesses, create the local institutions that their children and their children's children will participate in. I don't want to rent my space in a town I'm only partially attached to. I want to put roots down, and build things that will last.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
1 is a quintessential first world problem. If the value prop of the neighborhood is good people won't care how it looks. 2 is doing to doom it long term though IMO
goodpoint 5y ago
> All I see is soulless pre-fabs. It looks like you're living in a shopping mall. Spot on. Like a town from Greece or Portugal, Spain, Italy, Mexico... but with a dystopian feel.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  The dystopian feel was mostly coming from it being not so great renders which feel overly flat and vibrant.
nwallin 5y ago
I tend to agree. Communities need to be built organically. Let's say a town has 5,000 buildings in it; is somebody going to pay an architecture firm to design 5,000 buildings for them? Or are they going to pay them to design 40 buildings and copy and paste 125 times? Neighborhoods in the United States have a tendancy to look like shit, and that's because most of them are planned developments that were designed and constructed all at the same time. Each neighborhood is a snapshot in time of what "modern" "new" and "interesting" looked like some number of decades prior. IMHO the best thing about these houses is that they're not designed to last for 40 years. So 50 years from now after half of the houses are torn down and replaced with something different -- maybe worse, maybe better -- they have a chance of being nice. If you compare Factorio to Cities:Skylines, the best and worst feature of Factorio is that it lets you copy-paste, and C:S doesn't.

TheMagicHorsey 5y ago

Given how cheap land is in the far north part of California, I've always wondered why there isn't a city built specifically for walking and bicycling up north of Sacramento. Seems like with everyone telecommuting, if you build a community with a good school and with walkability and bikeablity, you could probably attract some families from the Bay, where prices are so high that people are looking for alternatives that are within 2 - 3 hours drive of the Bay Area.

golemiprague 5y ago

Manhattan is a car free neighbourhood in the sense that as a resident you don't need a car. This is an apartment complex with couple of shops.

mrobin88 5y ago

that's call the ghetto projects. damn they really just rebranded them.

keepper 5y ago

Ah yes, nothing like building a "sustainable" community in the dessert. Yes, there's sarcasm in there. But part of long term human sustainability is well, figuring out the areas we should not fight the environment ( more than reasonable ) to be able to sustain a human population.

sib 5y ago

As a borderline introvert, all I can say is, "wow, that looks extremely crowded and uncomfortable right outside my 'front door'." (And I have lived in Manhattan and in a mid-sized city in Germany, although I currently live in Los Angeles.)

baby 5y ago
Yeah this seems more like coliving than an a european neighborhood.

trevortheblack 5y ago

I live 5 miles from the location and have visited the Tempe area many time for recreation. While there isn't much in the way of infrastructure at this part of Tempe at the moment, it's close enough to the main boulevard, called Mill, and close enough to downtown phoenix. The entire Phoenix area is quickly becoming a popular place to live and lots of tech is moving here. Phoenix is, _in general_, a decent third or fourth choice across a ton of different metrics. Tech jobs, decent university system, growing economy. Yeah, the weather can be downright terrible, but lots of people from CA are moving here during the pandemic. Indeed, Arizona State University (based in Tempe) is a tremendously popular school for high schoolers from CA. I'm going to recommend investing in real estate to everyone I know in the area.

fnord77 5y ago

are all developments like this only rentals?

nick007 5y ago

Super excited for this, and I am planning to relocate from SF to Tempe for [mostly] this reason. It's about time there was a truly novel offering in the world of residential living, and the Culdesac crew are doing in in the right way! Been a huge fan from the sidelines ever since their YC days.

SN76477 5y ago

It looks like a product a theme park for suburbanites. Nothing about it looks friendly or organic. I would imagine there is a disasters HOA. Now that I am done ranting. I would love to see this happen organically all over the world.

nathanvanfleet 5y ago

Sort of neat I guess. Seems like a community type thing, similar to Facebook campus. But also somewhat harrowing that this could catch on and you have entire neighborhoods that are self contained and corporate owned. Maybe living on a lord's land was something that just stopped for a little while.

FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
Some huge percentage of Americans already live under an HoA or condo association. They've all but replaced municipal governments in many places.
- dd36 5y ago
  You still own your property when there’s an HOA. I wonder why they didn’t do that here.
  - FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
    If you're building 1BRs, my guess is that you don't maximize your profits by selling them off as condos, because the demand to own is for 2BRs and larger. That, in turn, is probably because 1BRs are (very generally) for younger people in more temporary situations. I.e., those younger people are less likely to buy.

Stratoscope 5y ago

Somewhat tangential to the article, people are sometimes unsure of how to pronounce Tempe. As someone who lived there for many years, I can answer that. It's not "temp" or "tempuh" or "tempay". It's pronounced "TEM-PEE" with both syllables accented.

yodon 5y ago

SF generally gets a bad rap here on HN but it can be incredibly walkable if you do it right.

owenfi 5y ago

I was looking for a general map and found one here: https://opticosdesign.com/work/culdesac-tempe/ https://opticosdesign.com/work/culdesac-tempe/

hermannj314 5y ago

I think is is wonderful that builders are making good faith attempts to listen to us and make walkable communities. I think it great for someone to do something and try to make the world a more decent place for the subset of customers that might be looking for a walkable community to live in. I selfishly hope this takes off, iterates and improves, and becomes commonplace.

ryanj20021 5y ago

Founder here. Great to see the excitement people have for Culdesac and for Culdesac Tempe. Our vision is to build the first car-free city in the US, starting with the first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US. Join our waitlist at culdesac.com. We open next year! If you want to visit in the meantime, drop me a note. Hiring-wise, we're hiring in Tempe or remote. Our top hiring prio is to lead product design. https://www.culdesac.com/jobs https://www.culdesac.com/jobs Here's our insta, which has lots of construction updates https://www.instagram.com/liveculdesac https://www.instagram.com/liveculdesac Here's our tik tok https://www.tiktok.com/@liveculdesac https://www.tiktok.com/@liveculdesac Here's our twitter https://www.twitter.com/culdesac https://www.twitter.com/culdesac Here's my twitter where I also talk a lot about ebikes https://www.twitter.com/ryanmjohnson https://www.twitter.com/ryanmjohnson Here's our intro article https://medium.com/culdesac/introducing-culdesac-3fbfe7c4219c https://medium.com/culdesac/introducing-culdesac-3fbfe7c4219... Here's a longer piece on us https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/business/culdesac-tempe-phoenix-sprawl.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/business/culdesac-tempe-p...

nick007 5y ago
+1 for the NYT feature -- that piece really does a good job at introducing your vision, worth the read
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
Good luck! I’m not sure how much of an issue stormwater management is, in Arizona, but that was something my mother harped on, in Maryland. Developers hate stormwater management, with a burning passion. My mother was not popular with them. Planned communities were notorious for not, er…planning for stormwater management. It usually required setting aside significant acreage, and doing a lot of fill work. It was a really big deal, though. The communities that cut corners, suffered millions of dollars in damages, and often multiplied damages in other communities. The dirty little secret about all these natural disasters; earthquakes, wildfires, volcanoes, tornadoes, etc., is that the single deadliest and most destructive force in nature, is good ol’ H2O.
- 5y ago

flemhans 5y ago

At the same time, "Master Planned" areas in actual Europe tend to be super horrible to live in, due to the detachment from what actually makes a place livable. (And the transportation part is generally already solved in Europe). Here in Copenhagen, everybody loves the 100-200 year old areas way more than the newly built ones.

jusssi 5y ago
Wouldn't a 100-200 year old city area be much more likely to have originally been "Master Planned" than a modern development?
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Town,_Edinburgh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Town,_Edinburgh and quite nice too. The undercurrent behind https://www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/articles/why-medieval-city-builder-video-games-are-historically-inaccurate https://www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/articles/why-medieval-... is our romanticized notion of the past actually under-emphasizes the planning that did occur. After those overzealous tower-and-park modernists, we did a big romantic counterrevolution in aesthetics that ironically justifies the even more current neoliberal weak state planning as the default. I recommend https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contemporary-architecture https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contempo... for trying to weave the needle right for yes planning but also yes a little relativism and humility.

porlune 5y ago

The existing plot shows numerous roads and existing infrastructure. In what way do they mean "from scratch"? https://www.google.com/maps/place/2025+E+Apache+Blvd,+Tempe,+AZ+85281/@33.4137558,-111.8995944,500m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x872b085e7c994d05:0x8b138e446744cd7c!8m2!3d33.4146177!4d-111.8992679 https://www.google.com/maps/place/2025+E+Apache+Blvd,+Tempe,...

ekianjo 5y ago

Looks pretty bad compared to what we have in most cities around the world. Uninspiring to say the least.

PostThisTooFast 5y ago

So... they're building a mall.

stanski 5y ago

I kept reading this as "cat-free neighbourhood", multiple times too. Looked at the website but couldn't figure out what part of all the nice features was thanks to the community being cat-free. Were the BBQs and hammocks better if there is no cats anywhere? There is a cat in one of the images near the top. I thought maybe they were being sarcastic or something. Geez! :)

readonthegoapp 5y ago

May Culdesac rub off on insanely-car-centric-for-a-university-town-with-a-gajillion-walking/biking/scooting-students town (Tempe) in Their name, amen.

throwaway984393 5y ago

How many people actually like walking around in Arizona heat? I thought everybody just jumped from their car's AC to a building's AC.

Igelau 5y ago

Nice food truck.

solox3 5y ago

Calling it "The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US", and then mentioning "zero private cars means zero hassle" (so there are other private vehicles, like trucks?), "Rideshare" (what are we sharing if not a car?) and "On-site car share" (so there ARE cars?), makes the headline inspirational - and with the best will in the world - a bit misleading.

rblatz 5y ago
It’s also built between two massive public parking lots that serve as park and ride locations for the light rail.

gwbas1c 5y ago

Studio and 1-bedroom only? What about families? Couples that need an extra room for an office or home business? And where do you park your personal car? I REALLY mean it. There are many "car-free" developments with well-placed parking areas for residents who choose to have a car. Even when I was able to live in a bike/walk/train situation, I still drove 2-3 times a week. (And, no I wouldn't have used a car share service, even if was easily available.)

elliekelly 5y ago

Mackinack Island is also car-free: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackinac_Island https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackinac_Island

nullc 5y ago

Looks like an open air shopping mall. I wonder if there is any public space or if all the walkways are privately owned, allowing the owners to outlaw any persons or ideologies they dislike?

dd36 5y ago
The whole project is rentals.

ISL 5y ago

The headline/title seems like something of a stretch for two reasons. The first is pedantic. The US was formed in the 1700s, roughly a century before the first car was invented. Most, if not all, neighborhoods prior to that were built from scratch. The second is less-pedantic. It is hard to imagine that the various communes and utopias designed/built throughout the twentieth century in the US all required a car in order to live in them and be a part of the community.

ThinkBeat 5y ago

Is this pure vaporware? It seems scammy to me. Initially when I first saw the page, I figure it was some virtual community. All the computer-generated graphics looked like some version of Second Life. (If that is stilla thing). It says "Coming to Tempe, Arizona in 2022" "Located at 2025 E Apache Blvd, Tempe, AZ 85281" In Google maps it looks like it has a long way to go before it is finished. https://www.google.com/maps/place/2025+E+Apache+Blvd,+Tempe,+AZ+85281,+USA/@33.4155324,-111.9013475,1039m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x872b085e7c994d05:0x8b138e446744cd7c!8m2!3d33.4146177!4d-111.8992679 https://www.google.com/maps/place/2025+E+Apache+Blvd,+Tempe,... The Google images can be years out of date, so it might not be a fair assessment. Still to develop something like that has to require enormous amounts of money and resources. The area such as pictured in Google Maps does not look like a foundation it is easy to build this neighborhood on. The link to their "capital partner" does not load for me but that may be a local glitch. The link to "resize your home on demand" goes to a blog with no relevant information. They want people to send them $100 to reserve a spot. What is the timeline? What has been achieved? How much of it is funded? What permits have been obtained? Rezoning? To me this looks like a quickly and poorly cobbled together website with at best somebodies' vision for what could one day in the far future be built, but at present consist of this website and nothing else.

andrewmcwatters 5y ago
There's a tremendous amount of building happening in Phoenix, because people keep moving here driving home prices up. I would almost guarantee these rents will be much higher once they open.
- erik_seaberg 5y ago
  It looks like everyone who puts down a deposit is getting on a waiting list to rent at market rate next summer (maybe later).

dshpala 5y ago

Surprised no one mentioned Irvine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvine,_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvine,_California New neighborhoods are quite nice, e.g. https://www.irvinepacific.com/homes/eastwood-village https://www.irvinepacific.com/homes/eastwood-village

m-ee 5y ago
I love the idea of a car free neighborhood, and Irvine is the exact opposite of what I want. My in laws are there and my partner unfortunately loves it but the urban planning makes me viscerally uncomfortable. Sure you can walk from the million+ dollar homes to the gated communities admittedly nice pool, but I felt like most of what I was doing was driving long distances on wide roads through depressing big box stores and strip malls.

wiradikusuma 5y ago

How about noise and crowdedness? Everything look (from the picture) so close together, if there are too many people and stuff, things will get messy. Not to mention when there are outdoor activities like musical performances. I like the concept, I'm just worried when it's over capacity.

whatever1 5y ago

Jails are also car free.

hlehmann 5y ago

Oh look, a bunch of CGI images of selfie-taking, twenty-something, hipsters. Jump off a bridge while you still can.

bigmattystyles 5y ago

I tend to think that these things have to come up more organically. I get Soviet cityblock vibes from this. Maybe it’s unfair of me. I guess If it fails the eventual occupants can translate cul de sac into English to refer to what the place has become.

truenindb 5y ago

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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmrOQ4BizCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmrOQ4BizCE

noduerme 5y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villages,_Florida "Urban" my butt. Still, beats the hell out of North Korea.
renewiltord 5y ago
Presumably all the nice places already have people there who have opinions that are incompatible.
truenindb 5y ago
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 https://www.powells.com/book/boomeritis-9781570628016

deleted 5y ago

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TaylorAlexander 5y ago

Gosh I would love places like this in the Bay Area. I recently watched a video [1] about the planned cities built by the Soviets and it all seems really nice. One advantage in their case is that they planned industrial activity as well so they built residences within bicycling distance from factories (with green space in between) so people could get to home, shops, and work with a walk or bike ride. Actually I remember that Japan has done a lot of industrial planning too, but I don’t know if they paired that with residential and commercial spaces. Something to look in to. (Please comment if you know.) [1] https://youtu.be/CWKuCoSg85w https://youtu.be/CWKuCoSg85w

zippergz 5y ago

I like the idea of a community that truly doesn’t need cars. I don’t like the idea of living in a community built and owned by a YC company. I don’t need Uber for housing.

lemax 5y ago

Why not just move to a dense city or downtown? How can a random developer-planned concrete mixed use fortress possibly achieve the nature of a city? A street in a city is a market. People compete to offer the best goods/services/experiences based on the what the local people want and this organically grows into something interesting. If one person plans it all out from the get-go it kind of loses the sheen of any level of culture/unpredictability that makes living in this setting appealing. This feels like a repackaging of those McMansion neighborhoods in a cute urban millenial flavor.

hoseja 5y ago

Everyone wants to live in Shi Tpa Town.

sirmike_ 5y ago

Hard pass for me. But in 25 years maybe as an option.

K9z31DfON85ik5b 5y ago

Very ironic to see a food truck on the first picture for "The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US!" American culture, cars and food. Enough said.

KaiserPro 5y ago

interesting etymology pointer, "cul de sac" is literally the arse of the bag. (cul deriving from cullus, which is latin for arse. )

david_frier 5y ago

That looks like nothing so much as Season 1 of The Good Place.

scrumper 5y ago

The very first picture (next to "The Heart of the Community" reminds me a lot of one of those neo-primitive settlements the Enterprise would visit in a Star Trek: TNG episode. Captain Picard would have some kind of intense relationship with a local lady and everyone would learn something about the value of the simple life. But more seriously, won't this be like living in a vacation resort? Fine for a week or two, but a bit grating after that. One restaurant, one grocery store... The car-freeness is amazing but it seems a little small to be really livable. I am glad that someone is trying and paving a trail - we need things like this.

VoodooJuJu 5y ago

These kinds of designs have this utopian vibe that just leaves a bad taste. Good urban design is more naturally emergent and less-so centrally-planned.

dirtyid 5y ago

How's the weather in Tempe AZ? I'd love to have a scooter / walk centric community but rain and snow is a bitch.

fearfulofview4 5y ago

See what the professionals have to say about good planning: https://books.google.ch/books/about/Suburban_Nation.html?id=UZ0-0X4aiwQC&redir_esc=y https://books.google.ch/books/about/Suburban_Nation.html?id=... https://books.google.ch/books?id=pkmluwVdwx0C&source=gbs_navlinks_s https://books.google.ch/books?id=pkmluwVdwx0C&source=gbs_nav...

jlj7 5y ago

Completely tone-deaf. Those mock-ups would be pretty scary, were I visually-impaired (as an example): accidents waiting to happen everywhere; chaos, from a guide dog's perspective (if they were lucky enough to have one). One wheelchair in all the mock-ups; and one of the smaller ones at that, that you can't zoom in on. No prams. Anywhere. This one's tricky, I'll admit, but, well, it looks really crowded. Any thought to low-arousal environments? I guess this was designed. But for who?

freemint 5y ago

Given that all neighborhoods created before the invention of the auto mobile were car free it is hardly the first. However congrats getting around zoning regulations