Culdesac’s immediate neighbors include an R.V. But outside the campus area, it is very much a part of the region’s autoscape. To be fair, Tempe, the home of Arizona State University, gets high marks for bike friendliness and has seen a recent boom in high-rise construction. Culdesac says it expects the first residents will be able to move into their apartments next year, with the larger site completed by 2023 - a pedestrian oasis in the megalopolis known as the Arizona Sun Belt.
2020 vision tempe driver#
“If something is described as ‘car-free,’” Car & Driver wrote, “we’re generally not interested in reading any further.”Īlthough Culdesac was devised before the coronavirus emerged and has experienced some construction delays, the project could end up benefiting from the pandemic, as more Americans consider working from home indefinitely in cheaper cities. Others preferred to simply ignore Culdesac. Urbanists cheered it as a bold and important step toward a future with fewer cars, while suburban developers said the concept could never work on a large scale. Started in 2018 by two native Arizonans, the company announced the project last year to a mixture of curiosity and doubt. The people who live there will be contractually forbidden to park a car on site or on nearby streets, part of a deal the development company struck with the government to assuage fears of clogged parking in surrounding neighborhoods.Ĭuldesac Tempe is a proving ground for a start-up also called Culdesac, which was founded in San Francisco and moved to Tempe during the pandemic. Currently a mess of dust and heavy equipment, the site will eventually feature 761 apartments, 16,000 square feet of retail, 1,000 residents - and exactly zero places for them to park.
The development, Culdesac Tempe, is a 17-acre lot just across the Salt River from Phoenix.
The Phoenix metropolitan area is, in other words, the last place you would expect a real estate developer to spend $170 million creating what it calls the first-ever car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the United States.
2020 vision tempe plus#
The Walk Score index ranks the place as the second-worst big city in America for pedestrians, and traversing it has been described as “ a slog through a desert, plus the occasional McDonald’s.” Phoenix, that featureless and ever-spreading tundra of concrete, has been called “ the world’s least sustainable city.” It has been characterized as a “ sprawling, suburbanite wasteland” and “ a monument to man’s arrogance.” The Onion has darkly predicted that by 2050, “ most of Earth’s landmass” will be swallowed by the encroaching Phoenix exurbs.
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