Where we’re going, we don’t need roads

Late last year, Gabriela Vargas was apartment hunting with her husband in Tempe, a midsized city in Arizona, when she came across a new development called Culdesac. “I fell in love with the layouts,” she says, sitting in the complex’s beer garden. As they were about to sign the lease, her husband asked her what they would do about their car: the lease specified that Culdesac was a walkable community with no provision for parking. As the mother of a two-year-old with another child on the way, Vargas was reliant on their vehicle. “OK,” she said, “let me think about this.”

It’s a decision that most Americans never have to make. According to data from the US Census Bureau, 92 per cent of households in the country owned at least one car in 2023. Nationally, there’s an estimated seven parking spaces for every automobile. Meanwhile, only 12 per cent of residential blocks are in walkable neighbourhoods.

Ryan Johnson, the co-founder and ceo of Culdesac, says that the development is “the first car-free neighbourhood built from scratch in the US”. When it opened in May 2023, Johnson was its first resident. About half of the seven-hectare site has since been developed; when all 760 units are completed, Culdesac will be home to about 1,000 people. It’s fast becoming a proper community and a prominent case study for a style of living – walkable and less reliant on driving – that opinion polls show is desirable among buyers but is vanishingly rare in the US market.

According to Johnson, among the reasons why there aren’t more walkable neighbourhoods is that zoning mandates have separated the places where people live from where they work and shop; meanwhile, rules for “parking minimums” have created islands of developments surrounded by vast car parks. It’s almost “illegal to build them”, he says. Culdesac obtained exemptions from sympathetic city officials.

Apart from an area near the entrance that accommodates visitors’ vehicles, there’s “not a drop of asphalt” on the site, says Johnson. Instead of conventional streets, little paths of crushed gravel lined with cactuses and succulents wind between the low-rise buildings, which are painted white to reflect the sun. The structures are also set close together to provide shade, which is welcome in a state where you can expect more than 300 days of sunshine a year. Meanwhile, packages and letters are delivered to postboxes near the gym, rather than to residents’ front doors. This has led to plenty of spontaneous socialising as people pick up their mail. “A lot of Americans want to live this way,” says Johnson. “It is legislation that holds them back.”

For Europeans familiar with Italian village squares or Dutch woonerfs, what’s happening in Tempe might seem unremarkable. But in the US, where a third of Sun Belt cities are covered in car parks (with their attendant “heat island” effects and flood risk), this looks like a quiet revolution. Creating walkability in US developments often requires extensive retrofitting or building from the ground up – even if the bones of an older, more pedestrian-friendly urbanism are still there, buried beneath years of car-centric planning. Culdesac is now bringing a version of its Arizona model to other states across the US, while similar pedestrian-focused communities are popping up in Texas and California.

For Vargas, who ultimately signed the lease, other benefits have more than made up for whatever she lost from giving up her car. She says that there’s a feeling of connectedness at Culdesac, where residents participate in everything from outdoor markets to Friday-night cornhole games.

While there are whispers that a few of the residents keep cars off-site, the people who monocle speaks to say that they rely on a variety of transportation options to get around. Most notably, there’s the light rail system, with a stop just outside the complex (Culdesac successfully lobbied Phoenix City Council for discounted passes for residents). The first 250 residents were given an e-bike from Lectric, one of the US’s largest manufacturers, which is headquartered in the Arizonan capital. There are discounts for Lyft’s ride-share cars while, for grocery-shop runs, an electric vehicle in the car park can be rented by the hour. Mobility “isn’t just about how a person gets around but how things get to them too”, says Johnson. Culdesac residents are “power users” of delivery services such as Instacart.

All of this is a boon to residents such as Electra Hug, a 24-year-old high-school guidance counsellor who has a very real need for car-free living. “I lost my vision at 16 and have never had the opportunity to drive,” she tells monocle. She moved to Tempe from her home state of Michigan (“Everything back there is just cars and highways”) in search of freedom and independence. “I wanted to be able to do things on my own terms,” she says. For her, that meant easy access to light rail and Culdesac’s other transport options. While the car has long been a symbol of freedom and independence in the US, Culdesac offers an alternative vision: freedom from owning a car, the independence to get around in other ways.

Despite Culdesac’s futurist zeal, much of it is arguably a throwback. The light-rail line that runs outside the complex recalls the Phoenix Railway Company, a streetcar network that ran in the city until 1947 when it (and similar systems across the US) was scrapped in favour of automobile-oriented development. Culdesac’s mix of housing and retail, its “gentle density” and desire to create moments of neighbourly serendipity come from the postwar playbook of one of Johnson’s heroes, urbanist Jane Jacobs, who eschewed large-scale planning in favour of a more organic approach, comparing city street life to a “ballet” full of improvisations.

So far, it seems to be working. One measure of that success is all of the development that’s taking place in the surrounding area. “People want to live in a walkable neighbourhood and they also want to live next to one,” says Johnson. But David Levinson, a professor of transport at the University of Sydney, believes that projects such as Culdesac will be hard to expand widely in the US, more because of “in-built market preferences than regulations, though these matter too”. Still, he says, “I like market-based experiments and it will never expand widely if it is never tried.”

The promise of Culdesac, as well as its potential limitations, can be seen in a new project not far down the road in Mesa. Site 17 is a notoriously bleak area that has been vacant for decades. The company has inked a deal to redevelop it into 1,000 residential units and up to 4,645 sq m of retail space. This proposal is not car-free but “car-lite”, with just 800 proposed parking spaces. On the other side of the country in Atlanta, the company has two “pocket-neighbourhood” townhouse projects under way. It had also been tapped for the redevelopment of an eight-hectare  site adjacent to the city’s Beltline, a 35km loop of connected walking and biking trails, but the agency funding the project recently pulled out.

Property development is already a tough game and swimming against the current can make the task feel Sisyphean. Yet Johnson is undeterred. He tells monocle that he used to get “laughed out of the room” for his vision of car-free living but, these days, he’s invited to conferences where developers listen receptively when he tells them, “Building structured parking is a mistake.”

The transition from car dependency to walkability won’t happen overnight, he says, but prioritising motorists isn’t the best investment in the long run. He gestures broadly at the community forming around him in the desert. “This is something that’s built for where things are going,” he says. “It’s built for what people want.” — L
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