Robert Chaffeur, a retiree living in the suburbs of Tacoma, was looking for a new place to live three years ago when he saw an ad for Culdesac Tempe.
Billed as “the first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the U.S.,” the development in Arizona checked all the boxes on his wishlist: Chaffeur wanted to move somewhere warm, walkable and that wasn’t a retirement community.
The advertisement had found its target audience. Culdesac’s founders were planning to build about 700 apartments on a 17-acre lot in Tempe — a suburb of nearly 200,000 on the southeast edge of Phoenix — along with a restaurant, grocery store, coffee shop and other retail. There would be shady courtyards, ample bike parking and a stop on the Valley Metro light rail, a 30-mile tram system connecting Phoenix, Tempe and Mesa.
There would not, however, be a single parking spot for residents. In a sprawling metropolis known for its strip malls and scorching hot summers, Culdesac aimed to be an oasis for 1,000 people ready to live car-free.
“I bought the concept hook, line and sinker,” says Chaffeur, 74, with a ponytail, white beard and the svelte frame of a dedicated runner and cyclist.
At the end of 2020, Chaffeur put down a $300 deposit at Culdesac and moved to Goodyear, a suburb on the other side of Phoenix. The plan was to spend six months there before moving in at Culdesac, but after two years he’s still waiting.
In May, Chaffeur had just finished touring the unfinished one-bedroom that’s now slated to become his in October. Two weeks ago, he moved his things to a storage unit near Culdesac, wearing a wet handkerchief on his neck to fend off Phoenix’s record-breaking heat. To fill the next few months, Chaffeur is embarking on a trip in a camper he plans to sell when he gets back to Tempe. But for all the setbacks on the road to Culdesac, he’s had no second thoughts.
“Ask me again in a year,” Chaffeur says. “I’ll tell you if it is what I was looking for.”
Built for drivers
Like many American cities, Phoenix and its suburbs were built for drivers. Public transit is treated as a last resort, its limitations the price of being unable to afford a vehicle. To walk the city sidewalks is to be exposed to speeding traffic and, during months like this one, an increasingly dangerous heat. Cars, one of the main engines of climate change, also serve as a refuge from its effects. Culdesac is a bet on breaking this vicious cycle.
The startup, led by co-founders Ryan Johnson and Jeff Berens and fueled by $47 million in venture capital, aims to demonstrate that car-free living is both greener and better — even in an Arizona summer. Following years of delays, Culdesac Tempe’s first residents started moving in this spring. But the project has already become a poster child for the movement to abolish parking minimums, rules in many U.S. cities that force housing developers to include space for cars in their plans. As work continues on the $200 million Tempe complex, Johnson and Berens are planning to build more like it in other cities, creating a branded empire of car-free housing.
“There’s going to be millions of walkable homes built in the coming years,” Johnson says. “Culdesac wants to be a meaningful portion of that.”
Former roommates at the University of Arizona, Johnson and Berens founded Culdesac five years ago. Berens, 39, had been working as a public sector consultant at McKinsey & Co. in Boston. Johnson, 40, was on the founding team at Opendoor Technologies.
A house-flipping startup that uses consumer surveys and market data to identify neighborhoods on the upswing, Opendoor buys houses by the thousands, fixes them up and, if all goes well, sells them for a profit — a practice known as iBuying. While at Opendoor, Johnson noticed that walkability was a highly desired trait, and one where supply didn’t match demand.
“People don’t just come out and say, ‘I want to live in a walkable neighborhood.’ They describe the attributes of a walkable neighborhood,” Johnson says. “The word that they use the most is cute. They want something cute that’s near a coffee shop. As you dive into the data, you realize that even though most people want that, only 8% of people have it.”
At the start of 2018, Johnson and Berens took $150,000 in seed money from a small group of angel investors and set out to start building cute neighborhoods. They named the company in honor of Johnson’s nostalgia for a cul-de-sac near his childhood home, where kids would play in the street unbothered by traffic.
“The greatest policy failure”
The first step was finding a location, a process Berens describes as “sleuthing on Google Maps” for large parcels of land near public transit. Hunting in the Phoenix area, they came across a block on Apache Boulevard about 3 miles east of downtown Tempe, on the outskirts of Arizona State University’s main campus, with a light-rail stop on one corner.
During its postwar heyday, when Apache Boulevard was part of the state highway system, roadside motels and diners sprouted along the route. In the 1970s, Arizona started building a freeway to the south — robbing Apache of much of its traffic — and the area began a long slide into blight. The spot that Berens and Johnson found was mostly home to empty lots, mobile homes and derelict housing. “That’s a phenomenal parcel,” Johnson remembers telling Berens. “That would be amazing to be able to get that.”
It was also spoken for. In 2016, Tempe had granted approval for another developer to build a trio of seven-story apartment buildings there. That complex, which would have included more than 1,000 parking spots, was part of a broader project put together by DMB Associates, an Arizona developer known for gated homes and golf courses. After decades of moving outward, DMB had decided to try its hand at building within existing city limits, but by the time Culdesac came along, it was already reconsidering.
With the backing of Sunbelt Holdings, a longtime Arizona builder that became Culdesac’s co-developer, Johnson and Berens persuaded DMB to part with the land. They had the site for their car-free housing experiment; the next hurdle was persuading Tempe to approve it.
Tempe has parking minimums baked into its building code. As in many U.S. cities, the ratio varies according to dwelling size and style. But in essence, Tempe requires an off-street parking spot for every bedroom, following the basic assumption that most residents will have a car and need a place to store it.
Over the past 20 years, a growing chorus of urban planners, led by Donald Shoup of the University of California, Los Angeles, have called for abandoning such minimums, arguing that built-in allowances for cars perpetuate their dominance in American cities — adding to congestion, road deaths and carbon emissions — and sap resources from more sustainable modes of development. Seattle and other Northwest cities have reduced parking requirements, though they still persist.
“All cities should allow developers to build without parking if they want to,” says David King, a professor of urban planning at Arizona State University who calls parking minimums “perhaps the greatest policy failure” in city planning.
In November 2019, Berens went before Tempe’s Development Review Commission to sell them on Culdesac. Taking the podium after an applicant looking to build a fast-food restaurant in a strip mall and a homeowner seeking permission to add a two-car garage, Berens spoke to a mostly empty room. Transportation, he told the commissioners, is one of most people’s largest sources of carbon emissions. By making it possible to live without a car, Culdesac could help its residents to cut those emissions in half. “There’s lots of fantastic places for people to live who want to have a private car,” Berens said. “This is meant to offer a new option.”
When Berens finished, Don Cassano, a now retired former transportation commissioner for the city of Tempe, quizzed him about backup plans. “Not to be negative,” Cassano asked, “but what if the project doesn’t lease?” Berens assured him that Culdesac would be built in phases and could adjust its parking plan if need be.
Tempe ultimately approved Culdesac’s proposal, marking the first time that the city agreed to a housing development without parking for residents. According to the parking management plan in Culdesac’s development agreement, residents must “disclose and register any car they own, control, or purchase,” as a condition of their lease, and cannot park on surrounding streets within a block in any direction — an area that Culdesac agreed to help monitor.
Car-free, by design
With no need for parking garages, Culdesac breaks its housing into three-story, white stucco walk-ups arranged around interior courtyards with narrow passages between them. There are fewer bedrooms than in the earlier DMB design, but more green space. (Eliminating garages also saves about $20,000 per space in construction costs.) The buildings are set at odd angles to create distinctive crannies and views — a design that Dan Parolek, founding principal at Opticos Design, the master planner on the project, calls “Mykonos desert modern.”
“When you take parking out of the equation, you’re able to design for people first,” says Anders Engnell, Culdesac’s director of planning and construction, during a tour of the site in May. A lanky and boisterous 27-year-old with a scruffy beard, Engnell leads the way through a nearly finished “pod” of nine buildings scheduled to open in the fall. The Greek inspiration, he explains, is about more than aesthetics. The white stucco reflects heat, while the courtyards and narrow pathways provide shade and help tunnel breezes. (There’s not a single drop of heat-trapping asphalt at Culdesac. Even the guest parking lot is mostly brick.)
“We expect the pods to create a bit of a microclimate,” says Engnell. To demonstrate, he leaves me standing in the sun as he talks. It’s a relatively mild morning, with temperatures headed to the high 90s, but still warm enough to get me sweating under my safety helmet. “The temperature drop is meaningful,” Engnell says. “You actually feel a little bit of a breeze here even on what is a pretty calm Phoenix day.”
Later, he pauses at a bike repair stand, where residents will be able to inflate tires, make minor fixes and charge e-bikes, then moves into a courtyard with an outdoor kitchen, tables and a fireplace. “This we will train to grow right over the patio,” Engnell says, pointing to a palo verde tree. “You’ll feel ensconced by nature.”
A cooling market
Depending on your perspective, Culdesac’s timing has been fortuitous or terrible. The Tempe site broke ground in November 2019, a few months before the outbreak of a pandemic that drove booms in remote work, e-bikes and car-free streets — trends that play in its favor. The movement to abolish parking minimums has also gained momentum since 2019, with Minneapolis and Ann Arbor, Mich., joining a growing list of cities that have eliminated blanket rules. In 2021, Culdesac and its partners Sunbelt and Encore Capital Management secured a $50 million loan for the first phase of construction.
Since then, however, interest rates have risen sharply, venture funding and real estate lending have largely dried up and the rental market in the Phoenix area has cooled following a glut of new construction. According to real estate analytics firm Green Street Advisors, apartment asset values have fallen by 30% in greater Phoenix from their peak in late 2021. Meanwhile, investors are starting to take notice of long-term concerns over water supply in the region, according to Green Street analyst Ryan Miller.
Culdesac’s original schedule called for first move-ins by the end of 2021 and completion by 2025. The pandemic and supply chain disruptions that followed have set that back. The first residents, co-founder Johnson among them, moved in May, taking 16 apartments above what will be a grocery store in one of two mixed-use buildings. An additional 98 units, including Chaffeur’s, are slated to open this year, followed by 174 more by the end of 2025. It will be years, if ever, before the site — much of which remains a dirt lot — houses a thousand nonparking residents.
Culdesac’s website shows 27 available apartments, with rents ranging from $1,420 for a one-bedroom to $3,060 for a three-bedroom. Those rates are roughly in line with Green Street’s effective rent estimate of $1,730 for the North Tempe market. At La Paloma Apartments, an unremarkable complex built in 1985 just to the west on Apache Boulevard, a one-bedroom goes for $1,335.
“Culdesac hits a whole bunch of philosophical and ideological buttons,” says Mark Stapp, a professor of real estate at Arizona State University. “Cities and towns love it and it sounds sexy to certain investors, but what we don’t know is how the market in general is going to react.”
Berens says nearly 10,000 people have put down their names as interested in living at Culdesac and close to 400 have made $100 refundable deposits. “We’re going to have all these buildings full before they open for the rolling schedule for years,” he says.
ASU’s King says that, in the long run, high-density projects like Culdesac can actually facilitate the stay-indoors strategy. “The trick to managing the heat, and this is something that Phoenix has not been good at, is to reduce exposure,” he says. “We want to put more people close to the places that they want to go.”
Tempe Mayor Corey Woods is hoping Culdesac draws many more like Chaffeur. “They’re going to be here adding to the sales tax base,” he told me during a visit to his office last summer. “But they’re not going to be adding to the traffic congestion.”
In an effort to build goodwill with neighbors — and create buzz — Culdesac has been hosting a regular open-air market called Little Cholla since the early days of construction.
During a visit in May, the market featured dozens of vintage clothing vendors selling bell-bottom jeans, graphic tees and flowery sundresses on the main plaza. By 6 p.m., hundreds of people, mostly 20-somethings, were milling among the racks and drinking free cans of yerba mate. Cars streamed into Culdesac’s 100-spot guest lot until it overflowed and visitors began to park on nearby streets — turning Tempe’s first car-free neighborhood into a minor traffic jam.
Visual media produced in partnership with Outrider Foundation.
