Inside Culdesac, America’s first car-free neighborhood built from scratch
Exciting news!
I recently got home from visiting America’s first car-free neighborhood built from scratch. It’s a community in Tempe AZ, called Culdesac.
Culdesac is a company that designs, builds, and manages walkable communities. Seeing it in person was amazing!
In today’s audio letter (just tap or click the image to hear it) — you’ll hear about my visit there, what life looks like for the first fifty residents, and what’s in store for the 1,000 people who will get to be a part of Culdesac’s first car-free neighborhood in the U.S. (Maybe you’ll be one of them? ;)
Don’t forget to check out the gallery of pictures from my trip below.
XO,
Kat
Transcript
Hey, it's Kat. I just got back from a trip and I am still getting into the groove so I'm setting an audio newsletter today and I have a slideshow that goes along with this on my website.
So, exciting news! As you can see from the headline here, I recently got home from visiting America's first car-free neighborhood built from scratch.
Culdesac is a company that designs bills and manages walkable communities. I've been following them ever since I first heard about them around like 2019 or so. I even once applied for a job even though I have zero experience in urban planning, lol 🤣. I was just a super fangirl of what they were doing and so I've been following ever since. As a result of a recent social media comment, I actually got invited to come and check out the newly unboxed Culdesac community out in Tempe, Arizona. They invited me to come and stay in one of their guest suites for two nights to come and check out the community — and I have to say it was incredible.
(Side note: They did not ask me to write about it, although they probably know that I would, because I write about community. And I'm very happy to tell people about it because it's a project that I really, really believe in and that I really want to see succeed! So, I'm sharing this on my own volition, and, and hopefully it's something that you dig too!)
So, at America's first car-free neighborhood from scratch I'm going to tell you all about all the cool things that I saw there and what they have planned.
One of the very cool things I noticed at the very beginning was that the parking for my building. It consisted of two rows of bike racks in a center courtyard for the apartment building, and it had a beautiful fountain and a lot of shade in the middle of the courtyard and it was just a really welcome scene. (See photos)
Here's our parking — and it's only bikes. For those of you who may or may not have read my book yet, you know that I'm a big proponent of walkable neighborhoods and bikeable neighborhoods because when you live in a walkable neighborhood, it's beneficial in basically every way:
You're going to spend less money on transportation, you're going to get more exercise, you're going to breathe cleaner air and most importantly my favorite is that it's going to make it so much easier to see your friends nearby and when you see your friends more often, you improve your social health
And when you improve your social health, it improves your physical, your mental and your emotional health too.
Fun fact, one of the studies that I quoted in my book We Should Get Together was about an urban design study by Donald Appleyard where he compared a street in San Francisco that had light car traffic to one that had heavy car traffic. Light car traffic was 2,000 cars passing per day. Heavy car traffic was 16,000 vehicles per day. The finding was that residents on a street with high traffic had one-third as many friends and half as many acquaintances as people who live on a street with light car traffic. So you can extrapolate that out to assume that if you have a zero traffic street, like no vehicle is going by, you're going to have even more likelihood of having successful friendships and acquaintances nearby.
So, anyhow, back to Culdesac.
I spoke to a few of the neighbors and residents there — and I'm not joking when I say they just unboxed this community… they literally just opened it and only about 50 people live there so far.
I asked one of them, “what made you choose to live here?” She said that she hadn't used her car in the last few years of the pandemic and it just became an unnecessary expense, so she wanted to try living without a car. The nice thing about living without a car in a community that is designed for that is it's going to be a lot easier here. She also said that the rent was actually comparable or even a little bit cheaper than some of the other places she was looking at. Then she left to go finish her errand at the post office which was directly across the street.
Another neighbor that I talked to said that she moved in because she was interested in biking more and really interested in living in community. I would assume people that want to live in a car-free neighborhood maybe care about community, care about the environment, possibly care as well about health.
Another neighbor I spoke to have an interesting story: She’s actually the manager of their on-site independently owned mini grocery store and she and her three kids live at Culdesac. They can run and play in a community where she doesn't have to worry that they're gonna get hit by cars. And she can easily walk around the corner to get to work or to get home.
So those were some a few snapshots of the very cool people that I met there.
All of their goals are reflected in the planning of this community. I want to, like, brag about their mobility benefits because I think it's incredible:
The residents get discounts on light rail passes, e-bike rentals.
If you need to take Lyft somewhere, you get discounts on that.
They also have just a few electric cars that are available by the hour if you need to rent them to go somewhere farther away.
Another amenity that I think is really cool is that they have guest suites which is like the one that I stayed in. So if you have company coming from out of town and you don't have space in your apartment or you just want them to have some space for themselves, you can have your guest stay in one of the guest units which is sort of like an Airbnb. And it was beautiful. It was just gorgeous.
And then of course because you want to be able to do things on foot, they have this on site grocery store. And a deli. And there’s a James Beard Award winning restaurant called Cocina Chiwas which had incredible Chihuahuan-style Mexican food. Mouth-watering food and drinks, really friendly staff, and a really diverse crowd. So I was right at home.
And then there's all these other perks as well for the health and well-being.
If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that I'm a big fan of another author named Charles Montgomery. He wrote a book called Happy City and in it, he talks a lot about how zoning rules are the reason why so many of our cities are not walkable, not bikeable, and not community friendly. And ZONING is a major reason why you have to get in your car to do almost everything.
So the cool thing is in Tempe, their city council is pretty progressive, I guess. In the walking meeting I did with Culdesac staff, they said that the city council was really open to changing the zoning laws so that they could do things differently. They made it easy for Culdesac to add a crosswalk right in front of the community. Another example of their partnership is that they have a bunch of small businesses slated to go on the first floor underneath the apartments. Mixed-use zoning usually requires business to be far away from residential areas. Instead, there's gonna be a barber shop and there's already a thrift shop. There's gonna be like a salon, a bakery, a coffee shop, and a co-working space.
Some of these will be live-work spaces right underneath the regular apartments, and so in doing this they want to make it possible for you to essentially do every single thing you would need to do to live your life without ever getting in a car. And it's not because they want to like trap you there so you never leave — it's not like The Truman Show! 😂 There’s a light rail station right in front ok… you can you can leave, but you also don't have to leave for all of these day-to-day amenities.
Oh, and did I mention that there's also this really cool weekly outdoor market with food trucks and performances every Thursday night?! There were local vendors, local businesses at different booths, and I also got to catch performance by the local Arizona State University K-Pop dance troupe which kind of made me want to get into K-Pop dancing. The performance was really well done and they even held a free workshop for the people who came to the night market.
So anyways I spent a really wonderful car free weekend with one car-free exception: I’d never driven an electric car before so I checked out one of the electric car hourly rentals from Culdesac and went to Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and National Historic Landmark situated in the desert foothills of Scottsdale, Arizona, about half an hour’s drive away.
Taliesin West is really interesting and you'll see how this ties in to this whole car free thing in a second…
Taliesin West was the winter home and design studio for Frank Lloyd Wright and his family. Dozens of architecture apprentices and staff also all lived on site with him at Taliesin West, and it felt pretty on theme for this trip to Culdesac because everyone at Taliesin West was living on site in that community — building it, designing other buildings, living in this space of creativity, and sharing ,and community, all together.
One of my favorite spots at Taliesin West (which you'll see in the pictures above) was this room called The Cabaret. It was this triangular shaped theater that they built, where dozens of the apprentices could hang out in the evening to socialize. They could host talks. They could host performances for each other. It was really beautiful to think about when you get a bunch of people together in one space that are living and working together, they're also going to need a wonderful space to socialize, play, and have fun. And the cabaret was that. So it was really, it was really cool. Check out the pictures.
Another commonality about these design apprentices at Taliesen West and the residents at Culdesac is that they all get this experience of showing up to a place at just about the same time. There are generally only a few times in our life when we show up to live somewhere at the same time as everyone else we're gonna live around. Think: that first week of college when everyone moves into the dorm. When that happens, people notice each other, they’re more likely to introduce themselves, and they’re curious about what brought their neighbors to the same place at the same time. (Side note: I truly believe this is one of the most effective ways to build community instantly. It happened for me when I joined AmeriCorps, and it happened again when I moved to an intentional community. 10/10 recommend.)
At Culdesac, they’re building and opening in phases. They have these planned chunks that are gonna be built and open successively. And as each of those opens, each chunk will get the residents from that portion. They’ll all get to have that feeling of, “Hey! We're all new here at the same time!” And that's a really beautiful place to fall…. a very warm connection because it's a shared experience that you have with the neighbors around you.
So, anyhow, I'm gonna wrap this up now.
If you’ve ever wanted to have an intentional community without the stress of figuring out how you're gonna buy acres of land in the middle of nowhere, or how you're gonna convince all your friends to go in on a mortgage with you, one idea is you could just convince a bunch of your friends to all get units together, at Culdesac or something like it, and then boom — You have an instant co-living community all together right there.
Or just move in and make friends with all the people who are in there!
But stuff like this is really cool because of the flexibility: Sure, you can do this there in Tempe. But if the desert is not your vibe (I personally loved the 100-degree weather but maybe you don't), fine you can pick, another city or town, or another apartment/complex anywhere you want!
Test it out and see what happens if you all move in together and spend a year living as neighbors.
Oh — and there was one other thing that a neighbor told me that I wanted to go back to…She mentioned that the prices were as affordable as the surrounding area which made it easy for her to give car-free life a shot. And I was really impressed by the pricing because everyone knows the Bay Area is bananas expensive. At Culdesac, one-bedrooms are around $1,500 a month. Two-bedroom apartments are around 2K a month, and three-bedroom units are around 3K a month, which is highly affordable compared to the SF Bay Area.
All of the units that I toured were really gorgeous with lots of natural light and these beautiful courtyards and sitting areas. They did a really beautiful thing with the design, where all of the walkways between buildings are designed in such a way so that you're almost always in the shade, which if you live in a desert, you know you really want to be in the shade a lot of the time.
One afternoon while I was hanging out in one of the ourdoor community lounges, I was in sitting outside eating my sandwich, having my cherry-flavored Clearly Canadian (which they had at the grocery store and that I have not had since I was 16 years old!) …but anyhow, I was eating my lunch and I noticed that I couldn't hear any cars or street noise. That's because cars and traffic make a lot of background noise and that’s another benefit of a car-free community: a peaceful, calming quiet where you can hear yourself think and conversations can be mellow. The only traffic noise I heard was at the main road where you enter the community and can hear the light rail metro going by because there's a stop right in front.
So that's my update about what I've been up to lately! I have a bunch of pictures for you to see, so check out the gallery in the slideshow above. You can also stay in one of the Airbnb-esque guest suites like mine (which was a huge two-story 1.5-bedroom apartment with full kitchen) for about $100/nt.
If you have any other questions about what it was like, let me know!
Like I said, Culdesac didn't ask me to do this write-up. They just tweeted that they had guest suites open; I replied I wanted to come check it out, and they generously offered me a free stay. (They probably know that I write about community and I like to tell people about cool resources. 😄)
Maybe you'll check it out in person or do something similar in your local community that helps you bring the same spirit into your life. Whether it's biking more often, offering new neighbors some extra friendly curiosity, or whatever else it might be. I would love to hear about it if you have any thoughts or reflections after this!
Hope you have a great week ahead. Take good care of yourself, and I'll talk to you later.
Kat Vellos
Author of We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships