Arizona’s Culdesac: A Car-Free Paradise or Part of the Problem?
(Source: Culdesac)
There’s a new housing development in Tempe, Arizona, that’s getting a lot of attention for something it excludes. Culdesac offers more than 700 apartments — and zero parking spaces. Its developers say they’re striving to make Culdesac Tempe “the best place to live car-free in the U.S.” It’s a great goal, but is it a realistic one?
In Favor Of
In another setting with another developer, this 17-acre tract could have become a multiplex highrise surrounded by acres of surface parking (one of the two types of sanctioned housing construction, as described in "Escaping the Housing Trap"). It’s located in a metropolitan region that is overwhelmingly car-centric, and Culdesac’s developers made the admirable decision not to contribute to that pattern.
In exchange for residents’ commitment to eschew car ownership, management offers an excellent package of transportation benefits including transit passes for a light rail, streetcars and buses; on-site scooter rentals with a 15% discount; and Lyft discounts with dedicated pickup spots. It even offers a handful of electric cars by the hour for those errands where you really need one. Goods and services onsite include a restaurant, coffee shop, food market and a “micro-retail” program that lowers the barriers for small-business startups. Shared courtyards provide outdoor access for residents and encourage social interaction.
Tempe is one of the few cities in the greater Phoenix region with an urban core that can support a car-free lifestyle, and Culdesac is adjacent to a station on the regional light rail system. In the face of the housing crisis, any additions to the housing supply have cascading benefits, and the rhetoric from Culdesac’s developers in favor of multimodal transportation and integrated retail and business push the development discussion in a good direction.
Not So Fast
The biggest impediment to improving our transportation system and adding inventory and diversity to the housing supply is the suburban development pattern, which can be seen on steroids in the greater Phoenix area. So any critique of Culdesac is really a critique of a broader problem. But the model of another large residential development built to completion from day one is a long way from the incremental urbanism and thickening our cities need.
A dozen or even a thousand Culdesacs can’t solve that problem. While such developments can be built to resemble traditional neighborhoods, they lack the historical benefits of long-term, incremental growth. Chief among these is the resilience of a system where many hands have built the neighborhood and have a financial stake in it. This limits the impact of any given business or real estate failure, and it stands in contrast to what could happen when the owners of a complete neighborhood of hundreds or thousands of residents face financial peril.
This type of development, even when executed as well as Culdesac, reflects a zoning and finance stream that favors industrial over incremental production. On the regulatory side, a huge percentage of American cities are zoned single-family only, with other areas supporting multiplex towers, so projects that seek to deviate or diversify require greater scrutiny and variances. Similarly, financing mechanisms are virtually plug and play for this type of top-down development, but those same mechanisms are filled with barriers for local developers who are less experienced and capitalized. This creates a negative cycle in which the lack of infill development is spun as an example of its futility and an endorsement of the construction status quo.
Verdict
Culdesac is an improvement over most of what gets built around Phoenix and similar metropolitan areas. But we’ve gone far awry when this counts as progress.
Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.