Check out what we’re doing at Culdesac. We build cities for people, not cars.
We’re building a 1000 resident car free neighborhood in Tempe, AZ. It is under construction now. Over 25 buildings are vertical and the first residents move in later this year.
No, you're building an off-campus college dorm for ASU. Calling that development a city is a joke. You have fewer amenities within walking distance than the apartments closer to the campus, which have parking.
I was interested in the concept and applied for a position on the team but was rejected without a phone screen. Thought my enthusiasm would at least warrant a preliminary discussion.
Superblocks have much potential. And in general there is so much potential to build cities for people instead of cars.
Check out what we’re doing at Culdesac if you want to see how we’re approaching the opportunity. We’re building the first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US.
I’m the CEO of Culdesac. 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. That’s Culdesac Tempe, a 1000-resident neighborhood that is under construction now. Residents move in next year.
Join our waitlist at culdesac.com. If you want to visit in the meantime, drop me a note. We have something exciting happening on site next month that is open to the public.
Hiring-wise, we're hiring in Tempe or remote. Dm me on socials if you can’t find something. https://www.culdesac.com/jobs
So FYI, this is really off-putting. You've got a few sentences that I might be interested in (but not really, there's nothing about how this is actually going to solve the problems except for "if you build it they will come"), and 4x that amount of CTA and social media spam.
I'd much rather read a substantive comment about how your neighborhood is going to solve the challenges of being car-free, how it's going to interface with the rest of Tempe, etc. Directly on here, not just a link to your website and definitely not via a Medium or AMP link. A couple of links for further reading would be plenty.
"Culdesac" sends the opposite message to what most of the Strongtowns crowd believes in: a proper grid where everyone takes their share of the cross-town traffic, instead of selfish suburbia that funnels everyone onto highways.
I'm raising this point because it seems like an idea that's mostly targeted at a very specific HN subculture. The shared area in the venn diagram of people who want to live without cars and people who want to live outside the urban core of a large city is quite small.
While it's great there are efforts here, it looks like it's being over-architected, over-engineered, such that people don't own it. This leads to uneasy privacy concerns and dystopian feels. I'm not sure what the solution is, and at least this is an attempt, so at least there is that.
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.
tl;dr David Brooks is all about Arizona State University.
“Everything is on a mass scale. A.S.U.’s honors college alone is bigger than Stanford’s entire undergraduate enrollment. It graduates more Jews than Brandeis and more Muslims than Jews.”
Outstanding work. SQL was the gateway drug to coding for me and I wish this was around. SQL is my top recommendation for people looking to become more technical, and this will likely be what I send them first.
