Tag Archives: Tempe

Building a car-free 1,000 person development in Arizona

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Construction of a small community with no cars is underway in Tempe, Arizona:

Photo by Steven Arenas on Pexels.com

Culdesac, a 17-acre car-free community being built in Tempe, has leased out its final retail spot ahead of its opening later this year.

Culdesac Tempe, which cost $170 million to develop, will have 761 residential units but with zero parking spaces for its residents. The final retail spot fits into Cudlesac’s “post-car” design and ethos – Archer’s Bikes, which will offer bicycle and accessory sales, test rides, rentals and repair.

Three thoughts on this limited description:

  1. This fits with a number of trends including denser areas (both in cities and “surban” spaces) and utilizing other forms of transportation beyond personal cars. Add in an exciting mix of shops, restaurants, and entertainment spaces and I could imagine a new development like this charging top dollar for units.
  2. Such a development could help make more day-to-day activity car-free but residents would likely still need motorized transportation to access areas outside of these 17 acres. It is important for such a development to be near other walkable/bikeable areas and mass transit options so residents can easily access the rest of the city and more of the region.
  3. Once this development opens up, it would be interesting to track residents in how they move, where they work, the relationships they build, and more. If this is going to catch on elsewhere, positive data – and hopefully some data on how such developments could be accessible to a wide range of people – could help make the case.

Going without a car in Tempe, Arizona

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Is it possible to not own a car in Tempe? A new apartment project hopes the answer is yes:

The 1,000-person rental community, which broke ground this month in Tempe, won’t allow residents to park cars on site or in the surrounding area as a term of their leases. The founders say it will be the first of its kind in the U.S.

The neighborhood’s scale will be modest, with mostly three-story buildings. In place of parking spaces, the development known as Culdesac Tempe will feature significantly more retail and open spaces than are typical for its size. It will include a market hall for food vendors, coffee shop, plazas, communal fire pits and a building that residents can rent to host events.

The site is next to a light rail that connects residents to a grocery store, Arizona State University, downtown Phoenix and the airport. There will also be designated spots for ride-sharing and an on-site car-sharing service for residents traveling to other neighborhoods…

The Phoenix area might seem an unlikely spot for such an experiment, but Tempe is something of an outlier among its neighbors. The 190,000-person college town has a median age of less than 30 years old, and younger people are less interested in driving than they were in the past.

A suburban community in a sprawling region might not be the location I would first think of in embarking on this new idea. At the same time, the last paragraph cited above suggests Tempe is a unique place.

I wonder if a residential development would attract only certain kinds of residents and whether that is desirable in the long-run either for the developers or the community. The hint in the article is that this might especially appeal to younger adults. It might also appeal to older adults who want a car-free lifestyle, perhaps those who for environmental reasons do not like car ownership or those who cannot drive. There could be a market for such housing. Additionally, what kind of community or culture in the building might arise if many people come primarily because of not knowing a car? This could be interesting to explore down the road.

Going further, it would be worth knowing whether this is a viable concept in different kinds of places and different kinds of housing. It probably makes the most sense with denser housing (multi-unit apartment buildings) but could it work with rowhouses or townhomes built near a mass transit stop or hub?