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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 "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.
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?
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.
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
[+] [-] jrsdav|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Thorentis|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nwallin|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rblatz|4 years ago|reply
It’s an interesting concept, but it’s applicability outside of this location is not clear to me.
[+] [-] bpodgursky|4 years ago|reply
It's pretty telling that not one of their CGI promotional images includes a family, or even a child.
[+] [-] goodpoint|4 years ago|reply
Spot on. Like a town from Greece or Portugal, Spain, Italy, Mexico... but with a dystopian feel.
[+] [-] systemvoltage|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] helen___keller|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snarfy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway0a5e|4 years ago|reply
2 is doing to doom it long term though IMO
[+] [-] ryanj20021|4 years ago|reply
Our vision is to build the first car-free city in the US, starting with the first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US.
Join our waitlist at culdesac.com. We open next year! If you want to visit in the meantime, drop me a note.
Hiring-wise, we're hiring in Tempe or remote. Our top hiring prio is to lead product design. https://www.culdesac.com/jobs
Here's our insta, which has lots of construction updates https://www.instagram.com/liveculdesac
Here's our tik tok https://www.tiktok.com/@liveculdesac
Here's our twitter https://www.twitter.com/culdesac
Here's my twitter where I also talk a lot about ebikes https://www.twitter.com/ryanmjohnson
Here's our intro article https://medium.com/culdesac/introducing-culdesac-3fbfe7c4219...
Here's a longer piece on us https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/business/culdesac-tempe-p...
[+] [-] djrogers|4 years ago|reply
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?
Thanks for stopping by!
[+] [-] npunt|4 years ago|reply
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.
Good luck on the build out!
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] foofoo4u|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nick007|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rkangel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanj20021|4 years ago|reply
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScVzmWiEIoNsJiV7aPn...
[+] [-] taylorhou|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattcantstop|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] _huayra_|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hamburgerwah|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CobrastanJorji|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] mattcantstop|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trynewideas|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boatsie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshspankit|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baby|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
Culdesac: Building car-free neighborhoods from scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21600773 - Nov 2019 (9 comments)
Culdesac: Car-free neighborhood built from scratch in Tempe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21574850 - Nov 2019 (136 comments)
[+] [-] jseliger|4 years ago|reply
Other background on Culdesac: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/business/culdesac-tempe-p...
[+] [-] Animats|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://earth.google.com/web/search/2025+E+Apache+Blvd,+Temp...
[+] [-] starkd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazcarl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zeperoni|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ericmay|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bakies|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway0a5e|4 years ago|reply
Looking at the rents I think their prospective clientele will be able to handle it no problem.
High time or monetary cost of travel which causes one to do more business (buy food, get a job, etc) more locally is a classic poverty trap though.
[+] [-] dkhenry|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eikenberry|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hermannj314|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] paxys|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] munificent|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jborichevskiy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scrumper|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] truenindb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noduerme|4 years ago|reply
Wait, what am I saying. Americans want to retire to somewhere like this too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villages,_Florida
"Urban" my butt. Still, beats the hell out of North Korea.
[+] [-] renewiltord|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] truenindb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Causality1|4 years ago|reply