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.
Ive seen several attempts at master planned neighborhoods with little town center type things with the idea that youd rarely have to leave, around South Florida growing up, and even lived in one for a few years. They all failed miserably. I feel like ones that succeed are just lucky. These communities can have basic predetermined guidelines to how growth can happen but the actual growth needs to happen organically. You cant just plot and build every house in town at the start, and you cant expect that things wont change as things pan out. Otherwise youre forcing residents to live in this deterministic Truman Show world lacking real freedom, echoing the major failures of a lot of mid 20th century heavy-handed big-ego design that we still suffer the effects of today
Better than no planning. I live in a part of Dublin (Ireland) that was rapidly developed back in the 1950s to house families that were being rehomed from condemned tenement buildings in the city. The design came from "garden cities", a design from England in the early 1900s. It wasn't very "organic". Entire housing estates were built. These were modest family homes with gardens, and the estates included ample green spaces. Roads still cope well enough with today's traffic. At several places within 10 minutes walk from my house, there are purpose-built shop-front buildings that housed butchers, grocers, maybe even a pub. This was the high watermark of planned development in Dublin. These houses fetch 450k today, and while building regulations were atrocious back then, I km wouldn't trade my old house for anything that's been built since the 2000s at double the asking price. Sincere those good old days, the government and local councils have basically stopped building entirely and leave it up to private building contractors to hoard land, wait for property prices to hit a profitable price and then apply for permission to build multi-story one-bedroom apartments with minimal parking or greenspace, and no thought given to other amenities whatsoever. Because "We have a housing crisis!!" permission is usually granted.
There is a chasm between the Truman Show and a vertical hellhole. If I had to choose, I'd live in the Truman Show.
It's pretty much the same story in the UK. Early c20th slum clearances, followed by well planned council estates built around a community, later (late 60s or 70s) the estates started to fall out of favour with tower blocks taking their place, which was a disaster and led to the justification for the private development free-for-all that we've had to put up with since the 80s which has resulted in terrible American-style, car-dependent suburbs filled with poorly built and poorly designed houses with no services within walking distance.
Same thing in the UK, council housing was high-quality and affordable for new families. Blame Thatcher for selling off council housing (amid her many disastrous policies).
It's amazing how many problems in the UK and the US today can be traced back to Thatcher and Reagan respectively.
The Irish political/building establishment thrives on crisis and desparation: it's a sort of small time disaster capitalism in which the electorate continually collude with their betters in order to further their immiseration.
Seeing the greenspaces of my childhood filled-in with shoddy-looking, expensive housing was shocking. Fingal County Council planning department seem to be giving the go-ahead to build any and every piece of rubbish using the excuse of "housing crisis" that you mention.
I just returned from visiting Dublin (mainly the Northside) after several years away and was irritated by: ridiculous levels of private vehicle usage; broken in-carriage electronic stop announcements on the DART (light electric rail); difficulty in planning trips connecting dublin bus/iarnrod eireann/dart; bus stops without proper shelters; drivers parking on the pavement(sidewalk); lack of courtesy from drivers at non-signalized intersection. On a positive note I will say that all (especially Dublin Bus drivers) personnel interacted with on an individual level were wonderful.
I’m skeptical that all planning is necessarily doomed to fail. Towns already do a considerable amount of planning via their zoning rules, and subdivisions are planned as well. The example here just seems like a subdivision, but planned for walkability rather requiring you to drive. Where did the place you lived in go wrong?
Half of Polish cities were rebuilt using central urban planning and came up awesome (build quality aside). There were a few rules:
- 5-10 min walk to kindergarden/school and local stores
- 3-5 min walk to a bus stop
- tons of green space
- taller buildings but varied in size and angles so that there is both ample space and variety
I literally had no streets to cross when I had to go to an elementary school, and literally 1000 other kids had 1-2 small streets to cross at most, walking 10-15 min or less.
There's also the classic - Nowa Huta, a former city and now part of Kraków, built next to Tadeusz Sędzimir Steelworks (formerly Vladimir Lenin Steelworks) - "nowa huta [stali]" translates to "new steelworks".
I'm linking to a traffic map, because it's best at highlighting the structure of the place. See the big roads forming straight lines, crossing to form distinct cells? This was intentional, top-down design. Zoom on a cell, see how it's made from apartment blocks surrounding shared, green communal areas.
It's currently the greenest place in Kraków, and despite having a reputation of a dangerous place in late 90s[0], it's one of the nicest and most family-friendly areas in the city.
The urban legend I grew up with goes, this cell-based design is partially for defensive purposes: during a ground conflict, spaces between outermost apartment blocks form choke points and could be barricaded to close off the sub-district.
There's another, less happy story that I've heard - that the steelworks and the city of Nowa Huta were purposefully placed by the Soviets on the most fertile soil in the area, destroying it in the process, in order to get the Poles to urbanize more and generally to spite them. I haven't found a confirmation of this - it might be an urban legend, but it's one that's widely believed over here.
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[0] - Since taken by other districts; last I heard, Kurdwanów was the prime "hot zone". By "dangerous" I mean "you can get robbed at knife point" and "you can get beat up by hooligans". The joke goes, hooligans that lived in Nowa Huta have since grown up, started families, and don't have time for petty crime anymore.
And a lot of old issues about how drab they were are due to how long it took for the green areas to flourish properly after the building spree. These days it's much easier to "kickstart" the green areas.
Indeed, in the places that lacked decoration it's nice to see them added.
A bit of a problem however is when original detailing gets removed on n the estates that did have it, often replaced with cheap pastel Styrofoam insulation.
Oh absolutely! I was surprised to find that the communist city planning in Poland made for extremely livable cities. The block apartments may not have much going for them architecturally, but they are arranged around beautiful parks and gardens, wonderful public spaces dotted with stores and markets. The best way to describe the planning philosophy is US college dorm life on a big state campus. It's even common to have a canteen in the center of the neighborhood just like you would a dining hall. The only sad thing is that as car ownership expands, the green space keeps getting eaten away by parking lots since these areas were designed for car-free living with excellent transit links to the rest of the city.
It's a virulent meme. Planned towns are bad. Organic growth is good. Planning is tyranny, is oppression, is taxation. Please read "Seeing Like a State". Organic growth is freedom, is markets, is good.
It's not entirely wrong, just extremely misleading. Urban planning doesn't have to create complete, inflexible designs, managing every tiny bit of life. And outside some failed experiments[0], it almost never is.
Think of planning towns as growing gardens. You work with the forces of organic growth, not against them, but still nudge and direct them to create a result that's better[1] than what would be there on its own.
--
[0] - Some planners got high on cybernetics/system thinking, in an era we could not computationally support designing complex systems - then others used this to push political ideologies; mix in power struggles and regular corruption, and of course it fails. What's annoying is that it gets painted as "planning bad", "cybernetics bad", "central bad", instead of recognizing the incentive failures in the mix.
[1] - Better according to the gardener. Nature optimizes for its own thing. It's important to remember that natural, organic growth rarely optimizes for the benefit of individual units, whether plants or people.
This is fascinating! Thanks for sharing. It’s hard to tell what the specificity of the planning was… it seems to have included the street layouts and the below-ground infrastructure, but unclear on the facades and the shop/business distribution?
I didn’t know about this but it makes a lot of sense. Those enormous boulevards are clearly not original nor unplanned.
Even the facades in Paris were planned to the point that there were regulations on color and material and design [1]. Regulations were eventually loosened up somewhat.
Well Manhattan, for example—obviously at first it developed organically, but the upper part of the island was largely planned, with a strict grid system of streets and avenues and a large park in the center!
Planning works great for public utilities- roads, libraries, parks etc. The moment we cross that are have a planned bank, grocer, retail I think it falls apart. The grocery shop needs guarantee on revenue to be setup, and then they will slack off because they won’t need to compete or innovate. People will realize once the HOA bill runs in to several hundred dollars and have to deal with shitty services. In the real world, depending on the area, one grocery chain will die and another will take its place.
In a small neighborhood, that would shatter the illusion that you never need to leave, at which point the distant walk to your car for actual shopping becomes a problem. (Or, alternatively, the lack of delivery services because they can't actually reach both your home and the place they shopped using the same mode of transportation.)
You have a bus stop with buses getting to city center every 3-5 min, and the supermarket store around a corner has literally all grocery things I needed when I lived around (it’s the size of 3-4 medium Wallgreenses)
The post I was responding to suggested that it wasn't necessary to arrange for at least one grocery store in the walkable neighborhood, and that leasing to retail establishments could be entirely up to the building owners. I was observing that if that results in no grocery stores located in the neighborhood, that would make the neighborhood much less walkable.
(Even if there's one in walking distance, hopefully it has an excess of carts and doesn't mind them going home with people...)
And unless you want to go out for groceries far too often, you're going to end up with a quantity of groceries that's incompatible with taking a bus. You'd need a car, or a bike trailer for a very dedicated cyclist, or a delivery service and the ability for them to deliver.
I live in a London suburb. I don't have a car, or even have a drivers license because I've always lived places where having a car isn't important enough to weigh up the cost and nuisance (to me).
Before delivery services, I'd walk to the grocery store every few days. It was perfectly fine. When I commuted I'd just pop by on the way home from work. There are at least 4 small-ish shops within 10 minutes walk, and half a dozen bigger ones within 20 minutes walk or a short bus ride (that would also coincide with the commute for a large portion of the people living around me).
And I live in perhaps the worst location locally in this respect - I'm pretty much equidistant from three 3-4 different shopping areas, dead centre of a very low density residential area with few shops.
Overall, the key thing to maintain a walkable neighbourhood is simply that enough people who live there actually want to walk. In that case there will be enough shops nearby. The problem occurs when too many of the people in these neighbourhoods like to live in an area that is walkable, but still prefer to use the care.
I think the key to make such neighbourhoods work is fewer parking spaces to explicitly ensure a sufficient portion of the people living in them actually bring foot traffic to the nearby retail spaces. Do that and you get grocery stores without any need for detail regulation.
Where I live the council won't approve planning applications with more than 1.5 parking spaces per living unit on average. It could probably be significantly lower.
Zoom Google Maps into almost any town in continental Europe[0] and search for "grocery store" or "supermarket". [1]
Or look at one supermarket and see how many shops they have [2].
Depending on the size of the household and personal preference, people might use these shops every 2-4 days, perhaps using a bicycle or trolley to take things home.
[0] I'm sure there are exceptions, like Arctic areas, mountains, tourist towns, etc.
> And unless you want to go out for groceries far too often
I know carless Londoners whose commute takes them past a grocery store on foot every day. So they will literally go into the store for a single item.
However, you're right that this isn't a good solution for everyone - for example, people who are starting a family. Even if you can fit a week's groceries for one person into a backpack, that's no help for four-person households. Grocery delivery services are widely used in London for this reason. As is moving out of the city in order to start a family.
For a grocery store, it's location location location. A grocery store is going to want to be located there. It'll happen organically. I've lived in Europe, there always seems to be a grocery store of some sort nearby. Nobody centrally planned it.
For much the same reason I don't want an hour-long commute: I don't want to waste the time. I enjoy taking a pleasant 5-minute (or 20-minute) walk regularly, but I'd much rather spend 90 minutes grocery shopping a month rather than 10-20 minutes every day or every few days.
Rather than national businesses that take the profit out, how about an accommodation for small business owners to live in the community as well? But not subsidize them so they actually have to be viable businesses.
In many cities, there are plenty of first floor shops with the proprietors living upstairs. It seems that collectively, they'd keep the planning and policies in favor of active and vibrant lifestyle, focus on keeping crime in check, promote community cohesion.
I am one hundred percent certain that both the locatelli grocer that has almost nothing I want to eat in it ever and has nothing but mexican standoff intersections with people walking around really slow, and the 'california' grocery that I really have to work hard at not just eating all the food in inside the store are both heavily planned, in terms of where exactly they are and all of the ridiculously excessive lighting and product placement inside of the stores. There is some vague pretension to a capital market and some vague notion that some of the great many retail businesses which are essentialy a second form of rent extraction may go out of business, but by and large it would seem extremely clear that there is a great deal of planning going on with information that business people are not supposed to have access to. Whether or not there is a viable alternative to said situation is a more complicated question, but there is no question that there is not some kind of innovation() support system where if you just figure out how to build a better mousetrap or run a better grocery store or sandwich shop, you will succeed and grow.
Doesn't zoning largely let you choose where private businesses go? Maybe you can't select exactly where to put the bank versus the grocery store, but you can select categories of businesses, to create the feel you want.
(I'm not sure whether zoning is a "good" thing or not in general, but there are certainly lots of successful towns and cities with zoning rules.)
* People don't want the things that are specified in the master plan, so there's no tenant that would be both legal and viable.
* Businesses are protected from competition (for their space, and for their niche in the area) so they charge too much and deliver too little.
* People want things that aren't in the master plan, and they aren't allowed to exist. (The politically engaged majority can get the plan amended with enough work, but these top-down designs can miss the long tail of niche interests, none individually powerful enough to get itself on the agenda).
The solution in most of the world is to not create too detailed plans, and often to minimize the amount of zones with pretty much all of them having multiple uses.
This means for example that people obsessed with house prices can't stop a grocer from existing within walking distance.
Alternatively in the real world, one grocery store will die because a Wal*Mart opened an hour away and is replaced by an hour's drive instead of a brief walk to pick up groceries because people can't resist a dollar cheaper and ten more in gas.
> People on a budget absolutely pay attention to the cost of gas.
People on a budget do for certain levels of "on a budget". If you only have $5 to buy food (and no credit) and a full tank of gas, it doesn't matter if it costs more in the long term. You burn extra gas now or your kids don't eat.
No, you either didn’t read what I wrote or you haven’t been living on a budget. Poor people don’t waste more money on gas than they save by going to Walmart.
They go to Walmart because it’s significantly cheaper to do weekly shopping there than even other big retail grocery outlets, let lone little ones. My parents absolutely fucking hate going to Walmart but they go there weekly because it’s $50/week difference just for the two of them vs Kroger.
You’re both not wrong. I’ve seen both. I’ve lived both. One of my earliest memories was being chastised by my family for spending a tiny fraction more than the lowest price on something; same brand, twice the volume, didn’t have a shelf life, wasn’t over budget. I got in trouble as a poor kid in a poor family for listening to advice my family had given me to shop smart.
I also got the same in reverse for being less thrifty and more considerate.
Big shrug emoji. I know poverty so much it scares and traumatized me. I appreciate that not everyone does, but I also don’t think it should be represented as something uniquely rational.
Poverty is duress. People make all kinds of good decisions because they have survival instincts, and all kinds of bad decisions because they have a bunch of incentives. They often do both and everything in between in a single outing because, yep, gas is expensive. And they’re tired. And the world is hard and expensive.
I definitely have been living on a budget, having been literally born into poverty and never quite able to move up a level. It's been with me my entire life and I assume it'll continue to be so for the rest of it. Kroger's a rich people store; there are plenty of stores that aren't that have been actually driven out of business by Wal*Mart.
Because their prices weren’t competitive, it’s that simple. Shopping at Walmart is not fun. People flock there because it’s cheaper than everyone else.
You’re suggesting that poor people lose more money by going to Walmart than they would shopping locally, which is just ridiculous. It implies poor people have no basic math skills on a average, which isn’t the case.
Walmart doesn’t crush local competitors with shitty warehouse lighting and angsty employee vibes. They do it by being far cheaper with their massive logistics.
Poor people shop where the money will go the furthest, full stop.
I find this pretty insulting to the average persons intelligence and out of touch with the pricing realities in many locations.
I have two local grocery stores. One is in town and the other the next over. Both are less than 3 miles. The prices are between 2-4x compared to me driving 30 miles in either direction to visit Cost Co/Walmart.
I don’t mind paying more for local or the convenience but I quite literally can’t afford to more than double my grocery budget for the month. So I only buy perishables locally for the most part.
The economics of this are problematic in both directions, but I still need to put food on the table.
I’m not disagreeing with the functionality, and personally don’t find the grid to be particularly bad, but do you really think West Village isn’t dramatically more liveable feeling? I suppose this quickly veers into hard-to-define sensations so perhaps the point is moot :)
I do suspect that a lot of people would prefer to live in that part of town over the more modern areas… as evidenced by the especially insane rent.
I’ve lived in Manhattan for close to thirty years got married here and raised a family here.
What you call a dramatically more livable feeling means different things to different people. Honestly it meant different things to me at 25, 35 and 45. It also meant different things when I was stretched financially and when I was flush.
The village substantially more expensive than e.g. the upper west side? (These places are all outside of my price range so I've never really looked.)
There are also lots of other reasons the tip of manhattan may have been more expensive—for example, it's just the oldest part of the city, so everything started there and expanded outwards.
...that might not be the best metric, I bet there are fewer super small apartments to be had on the UWS! I know the village has a fair number of places that were built before current laws about minimum square feet per apartment.
I don't know what the right metric would be—maybe median rent or even family income? I guess I also don't really think you can tell much from all this.)
Totally ripe for confirmation bias, which is why my comment seemed very uncertain. I’m kind of going from a heuristic of older cities versus newer ones under the (potentially wrong!) assumption that zoning has tended toward more stringency over time.
One of the main reasons to make a plan should be that it allows you to realize when you are starting to deviate from it. That’s a time you have to do some thinking and either realize you’re about to make a mistake or adjust the plan/come up with a new one.
If you do plans badly, you don’t do the thinking, but just declare any deviation from the plan a mistake.
Rather than trying to plan it all out from the beginning, it has a planning philosophy that seems to have sustained it through the decades and my understanding is that the philosophy is used to this day to try to ensure a vibrant town. Not all of the early ideas and development worked either, but change seems to have been built in and the town is looking to grow in the coming years pretty significantly.
I've been there a couple times and it reminds me of various mixed developments outside of city centers I've been at in Europe. The twist seems to be a gearing around walkability and abundant commercial/business zoning so people can live and work there.
I just don't see the point of these kinds of things when you could just move to an existing city. I moved to the middle of an Australian city and I haven't left a 2km radius because there is just no need, everything exists within walking distance. My city is also great because it is surrounded by a ring of parklands so I could go on a 10km walk through nature without ever leaving the parklands (other than crossing a few roads).
I wouldn’t say Seaside, the new urban community where the Truman Show was filmed failed really. It seems to have held on to some sense of year round community that is not completely overwhelmed by the vacation crowd. I always liked staying there before it got too popular because it felt like a tiny functioning city with book store, arts, year round jobs etc, not like a vacation spot that turns into a ghost town after September.
while that is true, a lot of the house are for sale and people will make small changes. Also local governments ask for input from the people that live there. Shops can come and go as these are mostly rentel spaces. So while we do a lot of planning there is still room to make it your own. This village seems to be a Holliday park like experience. With only rentals and pre defined shops
> You cant just plot and build every house in town at the start, and you cant expect that things wont change as things pan out.
I wonder if you have ever talked with actual urbanist, as I have, and this definitely not how they think.
Urbanism can actually be very ‘agile’, with a difference that you have a vision for the outcome you want to reach (which good agile in sw development is adding as well).
A master plan doesn't hurt, they could get it wrong but it's not that much worse than haphazard randomness.
The good cities you see aren't good because of early planning. They're good because of constant vigilance to improve and maintain. Subway systems for example aren't usually part of the master plan of the city at inception but are the result of constant vigilance to improve.
Meanwhile western US suburbia is the result of unplanned urbanization reacting to the whims of corporate car culture. Totally unplanned and terrible.
Those aren't "planning" codes, it's more rules and guidelines. Development is still largely free and left to the market so long as they stick within the guidelines.
It's those rules and guidelines that make suburbia so miserable though. When you can't build retail without 1 off-street parking spot per 100 sq ft or new residential without 1.5 parking spaces per bedroom, then there is no possible outcome other than the car-dependence we see today. Parking requirements make building a walkable town impossible.
Car dependence comes from the low density infrastructure. The rules are a consequence of that. Low density infrastructure exists because many cities were built during a time when car companies were trying to make the automobile mainstream.
Density is limited explicitly by code. It's limited implicitly by parking requirements which are code. Car dependence also largely follows from segregation of uses (residential and retail can't mix) which is again code.
That's too simple of an answer. These codes did not exist until recent times. The codes actually exist because people wanted them to exist, because car culture influenced the way people think and how they should live. All these codes were put into place AFTER low density infrastructure was already the established norm.
You can see it in how cities are built this country. Cities established in the east before car culture took over are much more walkable and have a different set of "codes"
Part of the problem is that presently walkable cities don't have walkable codes, so as they expand or even replace old buildings they become more car centric. They are only walkable because current buildings are from prior to the adoption of the code. The Illegal City of Somerville [0] brought popular attention to this a few years ago.
I don't know why you insist on putting scare quotes around the words "planning" and "codes." In municipal governments all across the country, people who went to school for "Urban Planning" and have the job title "Planner" work for the "Planning Department" and administer the "Planning Code." These the canonical, legal names.
I put quotes around them because they aren't actually planned. They're officially and canonically called "planning" codes but no real long term urban planning is involved. It's more short term satisfaction planning and not the kind of actual planning that goes on in other places like say China or Tokyo. Now you know why.
>Part of the problem is that presently walkable cities don't have walkable codes, so as they expand or even replace old buildings they become more car centric
Unlikely a city doesn't convert a high density building into a low density building because of a remodel. People really need to leave the city in droves for this to happen.
What you're referring to is NEW cities or new expansions.
Somerville is like a one off. It's also not really a walkable city like Tokyo or Hong Kong is. It's more like a walkable town or village.
I think you're right for two reasons. The first being that cities and communities should evolve organically to meet the changing needs of the people living there over time. The second reason is that all successful communities (arguably all successful anything) are so because they're lucky.
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.
> 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.
In most American cities the bus schedules are like every 15-20 minutes and buses arrive at a near random distribution over that time. So even if traffic is so bad that driving is consistently 40 minutes, the bus-to-stop-to-bus trip is really anywhere from 40-80 minutes depending on your luck. I think people really value being able to estimate their commute and buses add a lot of variance.
The issue is that a lot of transit planning is politically motivated and done to maximize "coverage" rather than more meaningful metrics like ridership, usefulness, and profitability.
Planning for coverage allows you to tell individual taxpayers that they're "served" by the transit they help fund, but most will never use it because it's infrequent and the routes take forever to get anywhere. Optimizing for ridership means you focus on a smaller number of straight-line routes that are highly useful and run them at high frequency so that a smaller pool of people come to rely on them and use them regularly, instead of as a last resort.
> The issue is that a lot of transit planning is politically motivated and done to maximize "coverage" rather than more meaningful metrics like ridership, usefulness, and profitability.
That's definitely my experience in York Region (north of Toronto for those unfamiliar) and Ottawa. Far too many bus stops, but wait times > 15 minutes _per route_ outside all but the most peak parts of rush-hour. Including on their "bus rapid transit" trunk lines. You almost end up feeling like a patsy every time you decide to take public transit.
I enjoy taking LRT and buses in Waterloo Region, especially with my kids, but I think I go in expecting that there's a tradeoff— longer wait/travel time in exchange for being able to read on my kindle or play games on my phone on the way.
Busses are the thing that needs to be self-driving first (after trains, which can already be). Combined with automated passing spots.
The worst about busses is when they come every 30 min, but already arrive full. Or when they have more than one bus for a given timeslot and don't dock the less-full bus first.
In Seattle, a typical local bus trip costs the transit company around $10, while the ticket costs around $3. Running twice as many buses would result in cost of something like $18-20 per ride, which would make it require even more subsidies than it already receives.
That assumes the buses would be similarly packed. With a denser and reliable schedule you get more people using the bus and it can actually require fewer subsidies.
(In other words: instead of a half-empty bus every 20 minutes you end up with packed buses every 5 min)
The "farebox recovery ratio" for cars is also low: taxes and user fees only pay for only ~50% of the cost of roads, at most. The rest comes out the general fund.
I really think the answer to this is to run much smaller and cheaper buses instead of the extremely expensive big ones that only have a few occupants. Shuttle buses cost around $60-70k vs >$600k for a new full size bus. Of course, driver labor is also a significant cost, but I think it's easier to find shuttle bus drivers as it only requires a class B license.
Which country? In both of my post-communism neighborhoods citizens decided to keep all the green areas, and there is a better public transit than it used to have.
Most people still take bus/subway to work, although the car traffic increased.
The same thing happens in all new communities re: schools, sports facilities, fire departments, etc. You can argue that the developer should have to account for these needed public goods, but everyone buying knows they don't exist, then immediately complains that they don't exist once they move in.
Idk if the developer should have to account for those services. I think that's more of the role of local government. And I'm not complaining, just hoping that some things get built. I was fully aware of the lack of services when I moved in, and others should be as well.
The shared makerspace seems like a neighborhood level thing. There's all sorts of services / hobbies that make more sense to be neighborhood based instead of nationally based.
Tools and workshops are like that. The biggest issue with tools/workshops is liability. Someone's going to lose a finger, or a rotary tool will pull out their hair / a piece of their scalp... (even with all the safety precautions, its going to happen. There are some real idiots out there), and then everything goes to crap.
In a neighborhood solution, there's more local trust in each other, and a social contract where people care for each other.
In a city-solution, you need to bootstrap the community out of nothingness. When newbies come in, you've got forms and disclosure agreements and training videos to minimize the issue. It works but... I'm inclined to see how their neighborhood scale makerspace scales.
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Everyone wants that "doohicky": a holder for your lawn-mower's starting line that broke off last week. A new holder for your favorite coffee mug that got smashed. Etc. etc.
3d Printers + some woodworking equipment + a few skilled individuals who hang out for fun / leisure can solve these minor problems.
I do a lot of 3D printing. Almost none of it is for replacement parts. Replacement parts sourcing has gotten extremely good online in the last 10-15 years. Need a recoil start handle for a Honda HRX 217? Dozens of vendors of the original part and more selling knock offs. Even as a Mech E and experienced 3D printer with multiple printers, it’s almost never worth my time to make a part that I can buy.
I had a 3D printer for a while but I just got so little use out of it. Designing anything was like an all day process and any time I found something I needed I would think "Do I want to spend the entire day to get this thing" and the answer was almost always no.
Fusion 360 is ridiculously good compared to anything i used previous to it. You have to spend a little time getting the basics down but once you do it is pretty damn fast. Plus you can import o part models from mcmaster carr, thingiverse, etc and tweak them. It really is better than it used to be imho
I think I was pretty proficient with my tools but most of the work was measuring out everything and then the first few prints either fail or were not designed correctly so it just becomes a big process that wasn't worth it if printing and CAD are not your passion.
I empathize with this... I designed and printed up a mating door bracket assembly . Lots of time spent measuring, designing, and multiple rounds of prototyping to get something that fit AND worked as expected. I was satisfied with the end product but not the journey to get there.
Liability is not a problem. If people get hurt using tools, it’s almost always either entirely their fault, or some rare and random case of very bad luck. Either way, you can have people sign 50 liability waivers before allowing them to touch anything, and buy liability insurance (paid for by member fees).
No, the real problem is not idiots hurting themselves, but rather them hurting tools. Many tools are easy to damage or destroy through misuse, which can be very costly. If people don’t own the tools themselves, they have much less incentive to take good care of them. All your cutting implements will be perpetually dull, for example, unless you hire someone to keep everything in a good order.
IDK. Tool rental companies existed for decades. I'm sure the fine print is so good that you're assuming all liability by merely thinking about using their tools
This seems to be a trend with American dysfunctions. Can't have nice things because of liability. Its pretty interesting to me that a society with such an emphasis on individualism is also the same one which legislated against personal responsibility when it comes to environmental hazards.
> 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.
My country is far from perfect, but the US simply culturally hates cyclists. I see outright dehumanisation - comparison to insects and the like - from US media on the regular.
It's extremely unattractive, and given the role of transport patterns in climate change - well.
It did seem strong, I edited it out. Generalising isn't my intention, but honestly, I don't know how to avoid it entirely without losing points worth making, and I'm not sure anybody does.
The point I was trying to make, in this case, is that in every culture you'll find some unpleasant sentiment condoned not just in the spaces you expect, but in the sort of cosy middle class spaces that are perceived (if they don't actively market themselves) as being inclusive and enlightened.
For sake of comparison, Wikipedia says Daybreak is over 4000 acres while Culdesac is 16. These projects aren't close in scale and I think the "neighborhood" in the marketing for Culdesac is misleading regarding what life would actually be like living there. There are several individual buildings in my neighborhood that house more people and I still need a car on a regular basis.
Agreed on some digging Culdesac is very clearly just a “rebranded apartment complex” their units are only for rent nothing like a stand alone house is available and as far as the retailers/restaurants the ones listed will occupy the only spaces built for that purpose… its an apartment complex
Agreed. If their residents don't all end up as students at ASU, then they are going to NEED cars as well. The light rail covers maybe 5% of the metro area and the bus service is terrible if you need to travel more than a few miles.
I'm not aware of any significant employers nearby, aside from the university and a lot of minimum wage retail jobs. I suppose airport workers could make this location work, if they can afford it.
I decided to take a look at Daybreak on google maps, but I'm having a hard time understanding how the layout is different than other developments. I do notice that the lane system looks nice as opposed to just having alleys. Is there other stuff you like?
It is utterly bizarre to read positive comments here then try to look at Daybreak on Google Maps. I see about 5 restaurants in a tiny town center, no convenience stores or grocery, just several square miles of small lot suburbs with dotted pools and tennis courts. Looks like the opposite of walkable to me. No biking infrastructure leading to that light rail station or evidence that anyone would walk anywhere for anything. Human-scale urban planning must truly be a foreign concept to Americans.
There are tons of cul-de-sacs (pro-car, anti-pedestrian) and huge parking lots at the shopping centers. This looks really as bad as some of the worst of American suburbs (edit: as a pedestrian! maybe its nice enough to live in for other reasons).
I’m not the OP, but I’ve seen Daybreak I think emphasis there is smaller single-family home lots, and lots of multi family buildings, all built within walking distances to amenities like restaurants, entertainment, grocery stores, clinics, the light railway station, etc. It kind of feels like a hybrid between large urban downtowns you might find in the US and elsewhere, and traditional American suburbs. Not remotely as dense or large scale as say NYC, but far more walkable and mixed use than standard suburban life.
I’m sure many non-Americans would fail to see what makes that unique, but for American neighborhoods it definitely is.
I couldn't see any real density from the satellite and streetview pictures. Looks like every typical housing development in Australia but with the laneway access for cars and more uniformity in terms of building design and fencing rules. No contemporary housing design that I could find. Walking anywhere (outside of strolling the neighbourhood) would be a longer undertaking, I'm guessing? Hard to see businesses or restaurants amongst the housing?
As a suburb, should look good once the street trees grow up though.
This is a masterplan of a typical Australian development:
https://brookmont.com.au/masterplan - in this case, has gardens and community spaces, but not walking distance to anything useful. There's a big hardware store nearby, but no one would walk to it.
What you're describing is pretty much exactly what every rust belt city that had no development from 1960 to present day is like. Of course everyone who works in an office turns their nose up at those kinds of places because "muh good schools" or something along those lines.
I'm not sure why this comment isn't up-voted enough. Not sure if the parent poster visited Europe or Asia (or most of the world really) but Daybreak, Utah is nowhere near walk-able except for some of the residents living quite near to the attractions (a grill restaurant or whatever); and these commerce already have many times their sizes in parking.
And cerise-sur-le-gateaux these are some of the ugliest buildings that I have seen. Unbalanced colors, indecisiveness between American/European styles, etc... It's really just your average American neighborhood or worse.
I know Daybreak is more advanced as a project and significantly larger, but Culdesac looks a lot more appealing to me if I were the target market. Lots of medium sized, social/public space spaces. Much more reminiscent of the old towns of European cities - Dubrovnik, etc - which are wonderful to wander around, find a small bar/restaurant/etc. I streetviewed one part of Daybreak and it looked very broad and less walkable.
That said, Culdesac might make for a pretty small neighbourhood? Is it replacing a trailer park, going by the angled concrete bits on satellite photos?
We have something similar here in South Australia, replacing a large industrial property: https://lifemoreinteresting.com.au/ It's not car free, but the parking affordances are very much minimised and designed to be trivial to walk/bike everywhere. It's centred around open spaces that are great to visit as an outsider and would be fantastic to live around: https://www.plant4bowden.com.au/ There are a range of architects and building styles so it suits more people - singles, couples and families. Get a townhouse without a car park. Get an apartment with three bedrooms and two basement car parks.
One thing it didn't seem to do when I visited was provide more in terms of ground-level commercial/retail tenancies. That would be the ideal scenario for a community, I think - small stores and businesses at ground level and living spaces around or above.
I know I’m an outlier but, in a city I feel generally safer riding on the road in traffic than on dedicated lanes and paths. In traffic with cars, everyone knows the rules, has the opportunity to see and use signals, and has regulated safety standards.
I’ve ridden on separated bike lanes that were so dangerous I opted to use the main road and still felt safer with people trying to run me off the road honking and screaming at me. I’ve ridden on highly regarded bike paths that are so poorly maintained trees are growing out of them, so poorly lighted that collisions are unavoidable, and mixed traffic with pedestrians in a way that makes tangling with cars feel a lot safer.
I know, I’m in the minority on this. But even after serious injuries in a bike accident sharing the road with cars… that still feels safer to me.
That’s because it doesn’t make sense? Even if you consider you might hit a tree, another bicyclist, or a unlighted lamp post on the regular, it’s still much safer than being hit by a two ton car just a single time.
Everyone knows the rules and uses signals on bike lanes as well.
I genuinely do not understand how you arrive at feeling a road full of cars is safer.
> Everyone knows the rules and uses signals on bike lanes as well.
… is not true. Mostly because I’ve been on too many separated bike lanes that really aren’t separated—in really dangerous ways—and can’t be without eliminating the car traffic entirely.
As an example: there is a separated lane in downtown Seattle. It runs along a one way road, on the left hand side. The road has frequent signals for left hand turns, with separate stop signals for cyclists and cars. The stop signals for cyclists are smaller and uncommon, so they’re easy to miss. And they’re timed in an unusual order that frequently confuses cyclists and drivers alike.
All of those things led to several cases where I was nearly hit by a car anyway, under conditions that just don’t exist in shared traffic.
And this lane like many others has a beginning and an end, where cars can and frequently do mistakenly enter.
If all of that is not enough, some parts of the lane also has parking to its right, with ramps on either side for pedestrians to access/exit their vehicle, which are often used for deliveries to local businesses, often large deliveries where the delivery person has limited vision.
All of those things are more dangerous, and more likely to result in collisions and accidents (at least in my mostly bike-friendly city) than just normal traffic flow.
Sure this example is particularly badly designed. But it’s not dissimilar to many others I’ve ridden.
This is all not to mention dedicated but non-separated lanes where getting doored by people parking is common and drivers frequently use as a passing lane.
In those cases, the otherwise well accepted (here) “if it’s unsafe beside car traffic, take the lane” is considered an affront by a lot of drivers who expect you to stay in the bike lane. So now you have the added risk of road rage for no good reason.
I can absolutely understand why anyone would prefer these trade offs. But to me they make everything about riding in mixed traffic more perilous, and I’d prefer the risk where I know everyone is following the same set of rules.
That said, I welcome communities without cars! And I definitely feel like those communities especially need dedicated bike routes to separate cyclists from pedestrians.
Your description in the beginning, sounds a lot like Europe. Hopefully planners start to reduce the footprint of future construction, so they are walkable.
I have a bit of subjective personal and professional experience with all of this (design, policy, politics, zoning, economics, etc etc etc...
It ALL comes to one thing: ECONOMICS.
And I don't mean a balanced budget - I am referring to greed and corruption.
One may thing that greed and corruption is rampant on a federal level; no just look locally: HOS and Municipal governments (city councils etc)
Did you know that many municipal government agents have been paid off by telco industry to literally write laws against a municipality installing their own data infra?
Alameda California is just one.
Did you know that a single family home must sit on no-less than a 2,000 S.F. lot regardless of size, and all homes (defined by the actual front-door-entrance), must have zero shared infra? (Sewer, water, power, etc)
The zoning laws are working actively against the building of smaller home-facilities -- and all the hedge funds are swooping in with dark money, dark legal and dark politics to fuck everyone over and in ten years we will see the actual impact - but it will be too late.
> all the hedge funds are swooping in with dark money, dark legal and dark politics
I'm concerned about this also. I wonder if this is something that can be mitigated somehow via referendum?
It seems wrong if the will of the people in a democracy has to take a back seat to hedge fund profits, especially when it comes to a place to live. it's tough though, current homeowners don't want there to be more houses...
Or maybe we'll luck out demographically, when the baby boomer generation dies they'll be less demand for housing.
It's more of a polyarchy. The U.S. system is unique (originally but unremarkable today) in two respects: written constitution, and not a monarchy. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. Madison
The argument against the first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, is that the federal government had essentially no power. The argument against the second, it it's effectively created a presidential democracy, or unitary executive. It's a model our diplomats expressly avoided when helping other countries write a constitution. It's fragile, and while it's so far been stable in the U.S. it's possible we've just been lucky so far.
But a polyarchy doesn't guarantee democracy, even representative democracy. It certainly wasn't pluralistic at its founding: white, male, land owners. It took a long time to unwind that and here we are with most states in one form or another trying to make it harder for people to vote. Can a democracy democratically undemocratize itself? Sure.
If it wants to weaken or even obsolete democracy, by any combination of action or inaction, that's what will happen. One of the classic examples is the principate period of the Roman Empire. It had the veneer of a democracy, including having a senate, but there was an emperor who had all the real authority. That period lasted over 200 years, so it's not like we'd necessarily see the end to elections, laws, casting aside the constitution, or any of the other institutions we think display proof of "democracy".
Recently I've been throwing around the word democracy as a way of calling out decidedly undemocratic political activity, because of the positive connotations the word has, given the narrative we're taught in this country that democracy is good, we are a shining beacon of democracy, spreading democracy to those who don't have it, etc. Perhaps trying to use the veneer were taught against those in power playing lip service to the will of the people? It's not as easy for people to shout down the idea of democracy as it is to argue with typical partisan positions.
I've been interested in Switzerland lately, where the people seem to have retained power over their representatives, being able to petition for referendums to add or remove any law they don't like, and with much smaller political structures, having cantons the size of U.S. counties that enjoy more independence than U.S. states.
I chose to buy a house in Ballard Seattle just so I could be near things and not have to drive (along with a bunch of streets shutdown for bike/pedistrian traffic + the Burke Gilman bike trail). It costs a lot more, and we don't have a huge yard, but you can get those things without going for a planned community if you don't mind some urban living.
When I lived in SLC I got most of the same thing (living near U of U in an old Victorian). Well, the biking was a bit harder, no trails, but it was easy enough (maybe I was just younger then, however).
I was in Utah for a while and thought Daybreak looked great. Glad to hear that residents like it there. If I ever move back it’s towards the top of my list of areas I’d be interested in.
Outside of a few neighborhoods in Salt Lake City, Provo, and rural areas, I feel like the vast majority of Utah is the epitome of American suburbs, and all the issues that come with that, so I can see why many Utahns might scoff at something different like Daybreak.
Bike commuting is amazing here, as it is in many parts of the US that have the population density and public funding to execute it.
Anyway, Daybreak sounds amazing, and yeah, communities like that will always get "bad raps" from locals outside of it. It's human nature:
These places are usually priced very high per square foot, due to the huge demand vs. supply of walkable neighborhoods. Locals outside of it see it as a luxury purchase, and then associate the residents with the most snobby behavior of the few snobs who inevitably inhabit it.
I'm going to take a wild guess that the locals outside of the community have stereotypical nicknames for it like "People's Republic of Daybreak" or "Bankbreak" or something like that, lol.
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.
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.
Some planning can be good. Chicago had the Burnham Plan; New York had Olmsted. (People like to cite L'Enfant's DC but I don't actually think that turned out as well.) And Oglethorpe's Savannah Plan was a wonderful thing.
And Poundbury in the UK looks like it might turn out well.
But the designer has to have taste, give a shit, and care about something besides money.
This isn’t a town, it’s an off campus dorm. Or at most a big apartment complex. A lot of ASU students and recent grads live in that part of town. I lived right down the street 7 years ago, it was a very party atmosphere. They also had a gym and a pool and right on a light rail stop with commercial space on the first floor. But they also had a giant parking garage and a public light rail park and ride (hint that’s where a lot of the residents will park their cars).
It’s an interesting concept, but it’s applicability outside of this location is not clear to me.
You move there to get laid, brah. Definitely not to have kids. But if last month's hot tub girl should text you with a baby emoji, don't, like, freak out and start saving money to buy a house. It's probably not your baby anyway. [/sarcasm, in case that was undetectable].
Yes, this place looks like its going to have an HOA with $472/month fee, a bunch of annoying people on a power trip to tell you how your house should look like.
I'd want more of an "ground-up" place, not "top-down" neighborhood. Independent people, businesses and families getting together in an emergent fashion without a planner.
I agree with (2) more than (1) because if you have (2) then you're free to replace a soulless building you don't like, so the architecture of the region will mature and diversify over time.
We really just need the rules. The rest will grow organically. Why is our legal system so crappy that this cannot happen? Our legal system has everyone's hand in the pot and we end up with cities designed to extract maximum profit from its residents.
Couple of thoughts; first, it’s kinda weird for you to introduce yourself as a ‘founder’ - I’ve been around developers and real estate all my life, and I’ve never heard anyone use that term to describe what they do. Makes me wonder if you see this as more of a housing subscription service than a community?
Which leads to my second thought - what’s the thought process behind this being a rental-only thing? Are there any accommodations for families? Your website doesn’t appear to address kids or families of more than 2 people at all. Without ownership and family support, this really feels like a place nobody will be invested in making their home.
Third, how do you plan to deal with the inherent monopolies you’re building to avoid a ‘company town’ situation? For example, if residents are not allowed cars and are mostly stuck with your handpicked grocery store and restaurants, what will keep those establishments from just slacking off on service and overcharging?
Wow, thank you for the questions! At first I thought “awesome, America is learning livable towns”, but living as a captive customer of a rent-only company town sounds like dystopian hell. Sigh.
@djrogers -- Ryan was also on the founding team of OpenDoor. I can promise you Steve Ross, Michael Fuchs, Steven Roth, and Jerry Speyer all describe themselves as founders. The greatest leaders in real estate do, because they have innovated to build something people want. And Culdesac is very much a startup.
As someone who has worked in both the tech startup world and as an institutional investor, I’m with @djrogers that it comes off weird. When I first read Ryan’s comment, I thought “ick, what a weird thing to call yourself a founder of a development.” I think the problem is the messaging—there is Culdesac the company and Culdesac Tempe the development, but for someone looking at this for the first time, it’s not clear that there are two entities. So it sounds like Ryan is saying he’s the founder of a development.
I spent a number of years as an institutional investor, and the people you mentioned would say they are founders of funds, firms, companies, etc., but they would say that they were the developer of something like Culdesac Tempe.
1. At least to me the name Culdesac is strongly/exclusively associated with suburbs, which is really the opposite experience of what your target market wants. I almost didn't click to learn more.
2. It'd be wonderful if the local businesses in the community were owned/operated by people who lived in it. Community is more than just living in proximity, its also the investment people put into the shared experience, the emergent behavior/ideas/infra, and the adaptability to changes over time. Having lived in a master-planned community once (Irvine), it was so corporate and top-down it felt both stale and even vaguely menacing, like being a hamster in a cage rather than a part of an organic and dynamic whole. I hope this is not that model just with less cars.
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.
Suffice it to say that stormwater management can be a Big Deal in Arizona as well. Even the DOT sometimes gets it wrong: when the news shows floating cars in Phoenix, it's quite often the I-17 where it crosses Greenway[1].
Fortunately for Culdesac, the area they're in is mostly flat and won't accumulate runoff from mountains, and is near canals and Tempe Town Lake (the Salt River), so they're probably pretty safe. Also developers were allowed to build Anthem about 45 minutes north in a wash. A coworker who just moved there mentioned today that he saw his neighbors' cars float by last week when it rained. So sadly your latter sentiment does seem to be in full force out here. But probably not in that area of Tempe.
Thanks for posting. I've been following you for the past year or so eagerly awaiting updates on your development. [CityBeautiful](https://www.youtube.com/c/CityBeautiful) sent out a survey today asking what interesting topics he should cover next. I suggested he reaches out to you connect and produce a video about the project. I think you should do the same. I think its a great opportunity to get exposure. Especially from a YouTuber that has a lot of my respect.
One small thing - you've got a link on your home page to your "Extend your home on demand" program. That link is dead (just goes to the blog homepage) which was disappointing because it sounds like an interesting concept that I'm struggling to find out about through other routes.
If you don't want to reinvent the wheel when it comes to managing the rentals, my company runs the back office to many of the Co living and property management businesses around America. Happy to help.
So I assume most people just park their cars at the giant park and ride at Apache and McClintock, or are ASU students that didn’t have a car anyway. Is this accurate or am I missing something?
I live in britian, so its odd and fun to see an american company making a carbon copy of a british 90/00's highstreet.
One thing I would like to point out is that you need better drainage and more trees in your shopping precinct. you have way more sun than us, so a vast expanse of brick will heat up and stay hot. putting in more planters for trees will cool the place down and make everything feel much more cozy/safe.
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.
Definitely agree! I would recommend the YouTube channel "Not Just Bikes" which has a series about the book Strong Towns and in general focuses on better city planning: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0intLFzLaudFG-xAvUEO-A
The terrible layouts of US cities and neighbourhoods are what keep me in Europe. There is nothing you can do in the US without a car because it's so car dependent and it wastes so much time compared to walking or biking places. The beautifully walkable cities you find in Europe are so much more enjoyable to live in.
A lot of East Coast US cities are a lot more walkable -- the image of the sprawling US city is mostly true of West Coast cities that underwent their primary growth after WWII and the ubiquity of cars. For example, I live in Washington DC (well technically a suburb, but near a Metro station) and don't drive. I have grocery stores and restaurants within walking distance and can take the Metro for other things.
Walkable yes, but often not safely bikeable, which unfortunately limits mobility options quite a bit. I live in Philadelphia and likewise have lots of options within walkable distances/a subway station nearby - that's a big part of why I live here. But here we only have two subway lines, going roughly north/south and east/west. If you need to get anywhere that's not well served by those, your main options are:
- Take a bus, most of which only come every 15 minutes at most
- Walk, which is doable bit adds another 20-30ish minutes to your trip depending on exactly where you're going
That would be more like 10 minutes max on a bike, which easily makes it one of the fastest ways to get around if you consider that you'll be spending several minutes just looking for parking if you were to drive. But the city still prioritizes cars above all else, making it not really a safe option. I absolutely would bike everywhere here if I felt safe enough to do so.
> 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.
This is what drew me and my wife to Portland OR to start a family, and ultimately, how we decided on the neighborhood where we eventually bought a house. The entire city feels this way: pockets of walkable neighborhoods, parks, small grocery stores, restaurants, and beautiful outdoor spaces, all very intentionally designed. We've lived here for several years now, and it still feels very refreshing and lively compared to the suburbs we grew up in. It's hard to overstate the importance of thoughtful urban planning and well designed outdoor spaces on quality of life.
A friend of mine just moved across the US to Portland because of all the hype and immediately left after being put off by what they described as a very public homelessness and hard drug problem.
That is anywhere with walkable, bikable, and dense living and temperate weather.
Without the ability to involuntarily commit people to mental healthcare facilities, or jail, the only other option is to live somewhere that is less hospitable to homeless people.
And building more to give free / cheap housing to the homeless people who do not need mental healthcare or jail is not going to work on a city or state level, especially in highly desirable areas due to induced demand.
I haven't read those, but I'll add a third book recommendation: A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al. It changed my way of thinking quite a bit about what makes a good house, or a good town.
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.
Having lived down the street from this site, I'm also skeptical. Tempe has some bike infrastructure, but the high temperatures four months of the year and the spread-out nature of the larger Phoenix metro makes a car a priority for most people, and cities (including Tempe and neighboring Mesa) design around that. There's a bike path to the west of this site that runs north-south but terminates after only a couple miles, at one of the many highways that define the larger metro area. And to the east is ASU's main campus...but it's two miles east, which is a long way to walk in May and September, at least.
There is a low-end grocery store a mile away (on a divided stroad) and nicer grocery stores within two or three miles. The main virtue is that it's along the Metro light rail line, so if you're really committed to using that, you're not in bad shape.
> [the climate/city layout] makes a car a priority for most people, and cities (including Tempe and neighboring Mesa) design around that
This gets the cause and effect totally backwards. Phoenix and the surrounding cities are all designed for cars at the expense of bikability, transit and walkability, and people need cars because of that. There are lots of walkable cities in places with more uncomfortable climates than Phoenix (ever been to Bangkok?). Walking in Phoenix would be a lot more tolerable if the city wasn’t so spread out and had better public transit.
People now want cars because of the nature of the city. Something can be both a cause and an effect at different points in time. The general pattern is called a feedback loop.
I went to ASU (in the 90s) and my family is still in the area, and I typically (and perhaps stupidly) visit in June... and when I go back to the old "neighborhood" I always see a ton of people riding their bikes around in the June heat.
You can definitely bike if that's your thing, I mean it's 35C right now, but there are a lot of times when it's 40-45C. Or occasionally 50C.
This could theoretically be good for someone who works from home primarily, but you really do need access to a car to get around Phoenix in general. Some day you're going to want to visit, say, the Renaissance Faire and biking from Tempe to Apache Junction is unlikely to be an attractive option for most people. And I pity any Uber drivers that get contracted to help get someone through the traffic jam for that.
There are a decent amount of bike lanes and whatnot, but the city was optimized for cars, which is why all the self-driving tests are there and you can see a Waymo every other day or so, including that new smaller car.
The light rail is great if you want to go to downtown Phoenix or the ball park and maybe for ASU, but a bit less attractive for many other destinations. Meikong Plaza and H-Mart on Dobson aren't very far from the light rail, but walking ~1 mile in 45C weather with groceries only works for the younger and healthier folks. Asiana or Fujiya are probably non-starters for someone using the light rail, being 2-3 miles away. Don't get me wrong, you can take your bike onto the light rail (or bus) and get there, but it's a significant effort and if it's one of those few days that hits 50C, most people's willpower will give out.
I'm surprised they don't compromise a bit and have a handful of community cars that are shared by some agreement. Then again, I suppose that Uber/Waymo can take over there. It honestly looks pretty cool, but we tend to use the cars a lot and outdoor stuff is only attractive between October and May or so.
> I have not biked in 50C weather but I have to say this: Going fast on a bike has a cooling effect.
Only if air temperature is less than your body temperature, which is not the case when it is 50C outside. Going fast in 50C would feel like blowing a hairdryer in your face.
The air in Phoenix is dry enough that you get cooling from your sweat evaporating and the only humid days come after rainstorms which themselves cool things down.
But my point was more that this is only doable for the younger and healthier types. A lot of the people who go to live in Phoenix are retired midwesterners.
I have friends who only travel by e-bike. The maximum distance they will go is about eight miles, but they average about six miles a day in hot weather. Their batteries are removable so they can go something like 40-50 miles a day if they needed it. My point is that they don't travel very far in their respective communities.
Not sure how long it's been since you've lived in Tempe, but the entire downtown area has been completely revamped and revitalized. The emphasis on bikes, walkable restaurants, and light rail access on Apache itself make this not an overall bad location. Your other points about the rest of PHX metro area outside of Tempe are true though. Neighborhoods for blocks for miles, but Tempe, especially downtown Tempe is trying hard to change that.
I'd taken up biking during the pandemic, and for a while was doing a loop from south Tempe to Tempe Town Lake and back. In a 4 month period, I was almost run over twice biking through downtown Tempe. Both times from right turning drivers where I had to swerve out of the way before they finally noticed me.
Regardless of the infrastructure, which is just passable by US standards in the downtown area, people just are not expecting cyclists.
I was biking along Apache within the last 18 months. Apache itself still isn't [/wasn't] especially bike-friendly. McClintock is worse, and Price is even worse.
I love Tempe, though, might hope to move back, have several siblings and surviving parent in the area. My wife's family is in North Carolina (moved here 8 years ago after 21 years in Silicon Valley) but some day ... might head back.
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*.
Not only for the US, I live in a car free zone in Europe. Residents are allowed to drive there, but you wouldn't notice that. It is nice and quiet, but it didn't reduce overall cars owned in the slightest. You cannot even see a change in the statistic when the policy was introduced, it is still a steady and slow growth, traffic has just shifted a little bit outside.
I own a car and while I don't use it to go to work (1km distance), I wouldn't want to miss it. The urban center is also car free aside from buses and taxi. Still, cars are extremely practical, there is just no denying it and I doubt we will go back from individual traffic any time soon.
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.
The apartment complex that I lived at in 2009 had a fully furnished 1br apartment available to rent nightly by tenants for their guests. I used it a few times and it was very convenient to have guests stay there onsite instead of at a hotel. Definitely agree it is a great amenity for them to advertise.
Bike infrastructure is great but like any pavement it has lots of long-term cost. You ever seen rust-belt potholes? Drainage issues. Erosion. Tree roots. And you have to tear it up sometimes to do water, sewage, and utility projects.
Trimming back of trees too. Theres a cycle way that is an old railway line near me that gets well maintained by the council. They can do this, because they've laid tarmac wide enough to drive a works vehicle down to maintain it.
Maintenance is essential, otherwise you end up with overgrown hedges; fallen trees and uncomfortable riding surface from tree roots.
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.
From a marketing perspective, it confuses me that the main rendering on the front page of their car-free neighborhood prominently features a food truck, and most of the visible words in the picture are "truck."
I get that you want to depict walkable attractions, but couldn't it have been a small pop-up stand or some other kind of thing that is not a car?
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.
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.
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.
That is odd to me too. Wouldn't many high-rise apartment buildings in a downtown corridor have more mixed-use/retail/office options as well as a thriving downtown area to walk to?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The site only lists rents for studios/one-beds, but the application plan approved by the Tempe City Council includes a number of 2br apartments and a handful of 3br. The mix is as follows:
41 du/ac / 636 units
- 456 one bedroom
- 134 two bedroom
- 8 three bedroom
- 38 live-work one bedroom
Disappointingly, it shows some 152 vehicle parking spots on-site — it seems the exemption they got only applies to the residential parking requirements, and the commercial spaces are still fully parked.
The reduction to three stories (from five) also seems like a shame — the added shade and density from taller buildings would likely have made it a more livable site.
I'm personally tired of only having a choice of multi-bedroom apartments wherever I go. I would love to get a small one bedroom loft thats cheap and low maintenance but all the housing is setup for families.
Given the sprawl in the Phoenix metro area, this is utterly unsuitable for families who need to shuttle kids to school. Arizona has flexible school choice and people aren't tied to their neighborhood school.
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.
>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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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).
> 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.
... you clearly don't know much about construction laborers.
Construction laborers (in the U.S.) typically make fucking bank, as it's impossible to hide the fact that they're ruining their body doing the work.
This is where the stereotype of construction laborers driving brand new stupidly large lifted trucks comes from. They have money.
Given the fact that "Wealthfront helps you build wealth by doing nothing. We make it easy to maximize your returns, lower your taxes, and grow your money effortlessly." Is the first thing to come up when searching for your employer, I guess it's not hard for me to imagine the source of your disconnect though.
$30K / yr. That's a perfectly fine starting point, on par with what I made in the Marines. So I have a pretty good idea how much money that is, and it isn't anywhere that you are thinking about renting an apartment that has an actual marketing department and gets discussed here.
Except, one doesn't need a Tesla to drive a new electric car. I don't think the analogy holds up. The car industry is now switching to electric cars, but this is not a new approach. There have been multiple attempts since the 1990s to get them to change to electric, and it is only now actually happening. We should expect everyone to drive one once the switch is complete, so there's nothing delusional about it. What /was/ delusional, was the response I got from the GM salesperson in 1997, when I tried to buy the EV1 off a dealer in San Bruno. He said, "no, I can't sell you this car, it's lease only."
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The undercurrent behind 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.