Yesterday we talked about Tesla, the company leading the race to replace polluting combustion engine cars. Today, an even more radical idea, what if we remove cars from our day to day lives all together, and not just to be green, but to be free of the hassle and cost of a car centric existence. Bloomberg's Era Boodwet writes about one
place that's trying to do just that. It's a car free apartment community under construction in Tempe, Arizona, and it's designed around walking, biking, and public transit.
I think this can be something that is preferable, that this is a better way to live that you save on all the expenses of an automobile and enjoy all the things that come with being a pedestrian and using public transit.
I'm West Kosova today on the big tag no Parking any Time.
Hey Iira, how's it going good.
I've been looking forward to talking to you about this really interesting story. Why did you write it?
I was interested in this development from the first time I heard of it. First of all, because I'm from Arizona. I went to high school in Phoenix, and it struck me as kind of crazy as a place to begin a project of car free living, Phoenix seemed like maybe exactly the wrong place, and that made it interesting, and I think maybe it was partly what they were trying
to prove that you could do it anywhere. And also selfishly, I love reporting trips to Arizona because that is where my parents still are, so I get to go visit them while I'm working.
You said that it's seemed like a strange place to put it in the middle of Arizona. Why is that? Why is Arizona such a strange place next and sunny warm? You think you could walk easily.
Like a lot of American cities in the Sun Belt, it is built for drivers. The public transit system is kind of a last resort. It's largely for people who can't afford a car. Nine out of ten households have a car, and it's designed to go from place to place in a car. And so while that is somewhat changing, and there are pockets in areas that are a bit more walkable, it is not a city that you would place high on the list of walkability.
You talk about the heat, there is one reason where people always want to be in an air conditioned environment, like where they are and in between where're they are exactly.
And you know, the automobile is driving climate change for a lot of people. It's one of the biggest sources of our carbon emissions, and it is a refuge. You know, this is one of the ironies of climate change. In so many cases, the things that we do that make it worse are also the things that we do to adapt to it and deal with it.
So you went out there to see whether we're doing. Tell us about this development. It's called could de Sac.
Yes, it's cul de Sac Tempe.
So. Tempe is a suburb of Phoenix. It's where Arizona State University is. It's part of the contiguous Valley of the Sun, that big metropolis there. And they I've put this on a seventeen acre plot next to a light rail stop. So a few years ago Phoenix started building out a light rail that runs from Phoenix to Tempe to Mesa. And it's not a complete system. It's not like the subway where you can get anywhere you need to go in New York City.
It's kind of just a spine.
It's a useful way to get to major locations, the airport, downtown and so forth. They picked this spot right on the light rail in Tempe that was underdeveloped.
It was mostly a.
Dirt lot, and they thought, we'll put here a community for people who will not have parking spots. If you are a resident there, you don't get a parking spot and you have to promise not to park in the neighborhood. And instead they want to help you use the light rail, ride your bike, ride haile, do all the other alternative ways of getting around. And they think that this can be a better way to live, even in Phoenix.
And who are the people behind it?
So this was founded by Ryan Johnson and Jeff Barns. They were roommates at the University of Arizona. They both grew up in the Phoenix area. Ryan Johnson was on the founding team at open Door, which is the house flipping company that buys houses in mass and thinks that they can figure out the price using data so that they can make an offer just below market value and sell it just above or make a margin that way.
He was working there and one of the things he noticed while working there, as he puts it, was that people really valued walkability in their neighborhood because they were constantly looking at the data about what people want in a home and in a neighborhood, and he saw that people didn't outright say I want walkability. They didn't use those terms, but they said I want a cute neighborhood.
And what cute meant was where.
I could walk to a coffee shop, where I could walk to a grocer, where I could walk to a park. And so what they were really describing was walkability, and that this was something that when you looked at how often people said they wanted it and how often it was available, there was a huge mismatch. And so they decided that they were going to try to build from scratch walkable neighborhoods, and they were going to start with Tempe.
They had to go to the city of Tempe and convince them to let them build without parking because in Tempe, as in many US cities, there are parking minimums that demand if you're going to be putting bedrooms in, you need to put parking spaces so that people aren't parking on the nearby streets.
It's interesting because we started out talking about how cars are big drivers of climate change, which we now, but it seems like The idea behind this development wasn't kind of save the planet so much as it was giving people the lifestyle they wanted, which just happens to coincide with reducing emissions.
The way they.
Talk about it is it is mission driven. When they were selling it to the city, they did say this is a way to help people reduce their carbon emissions, but they don't want this to be just for people who have a kind of missionary zeal or who are really interested in cutting out the carbon emissions in their lives.
They think this can be something that is preferable, that this is a better way to live, that you save on all the expenses of an automobile and enjoy all the things that come with being a pedestrian and using public transit, and that you get a bunch of things in the housing itself the way that they've designed it that you would not be able to get if you're dedicating all the space to parking garages.
And who are the people who want to move in? How many are there so far?
When I was out there in late May, they had sixteen units open, so this is sort of their soft opening.
They're going to have about one hundred more coming by the end of.
This year, and so it was really the early movers that were there. I spoke to a couple who'd already moved in, a guy who's moving in in the fall. The founder, Ryan Johnson, co founder, is also one of the people living there. They're all in a single building that's open, that's going to have a grocery store just beneath it. So some of the buildings are excuse some are pure residential.
One of them was.
A woman, Vanessa Fox, who was living in Phoenix and wanted to maybe move to San Francisco or New York City because she wanted to live without a car.
She didn't like.
Driving, and the pandemic came. She started working full time remote and she heard about this development and she said, Oh, I can live that lifestyle that I'm looking for without leaving Phoenix, and so she's moved in there. Another woman came all the way from Pennsylvania, Sarah Joy. She heard about the concept at an event, an online event where
talking about social entrepreneurship. Somebody from cul Deesac was on it, and she was just sold on this idea because she had lived elsewhere Sweden, Korea, Moldova with the Peace Corps and lived without a car, and she really liked that. She liked the serendipity of it, she liked the lifestyle, and so she thought, oh, I can get that back. And she's another person working remotely full time. So she said,
why not, I'll go out there. The weather's nice, and then you know, turned out she got there at a time when the weather was not so nice. But she is so far happy with what she's found. Broadly speaking, it's mostly sort of pre and post family that is probably going to be you know, sort of school age kids would be tough or even toddlers necessarily in this kind of arrangement, especially in Phoenix, So there aren't a
ton of three bedrooms floor plans in their setup. And it's working professionals who maybe have yet to start a family. And then maybe people like this retiree Bob Schiffeur that I spoke with, who is empty nest and looking for a place to spend the sunset.
And are they looking to create like a very diverse community.
Tempe is really interesting.
Tempe has the university there's on a state university as sort of its core driver of its economy in downtown Tempe, and this is not too far from that. It's on the skirts, so I suspect you will get grad students and maybe even professors. They I think want all comers. You know, they have to of course take all applicants, it's part of fair housing. But they are looking for a diversity people, and I think there's no reason to
think they won't be able to do that. Right around there are neighborhoods that are pretty well established, old neighborhoods with a real mix of Latino and white populations. And then the immedia environment has kind of been run down and was starting to enter blight, which is partly why Tempe was willing to try this experimental thing on that site.
So can you describe what this community looks like, because it really does make a difference when you don't have to have cars and parking and driveways, all these sorts of things in the way they were able to put it together and arrange the buildings.
There was a plan before cul Deesat got there to do a very traditional three towers with parking garages attached them on this same lot. That's partly how they were able to get this project going, as somebody had already identified this lot for development and even gotten approved for development, and they took the land from them because they decided they didn't want to do that after all, and so they took that plan and switched it out and made their own.
And when you.
Take away the parking garages, you're basically able to get in the same number of bedrooms. You know, they're thinking maybe a thousand people will live there when this is all done, but instead of space for parking, you have a lot more green space. And they have set these up as three story walk ups that are not necessarily arranged totally symmetrically. They have these odd angles that create these nooks and crannies that help provide shade.
And every pod.
Of sort of eight six, seven, eight nine buildings is around an interior courtyard that will be shared among residents and that those will be sort of gated access, and then there are outside of each pod there are public walkways where there will be coffee shop, bike shop, there's a restaurant and public events. So that's sort of a mix of public and private. And they've done it with the heat in mind. So the buildings are white stucco
and they don't use any asphalt. There is a small parking lot for visitors, people who come to the retail, people who are visiting residents.
That's brick, not asphalt.
They're doing everything they can to sort of reduce the exposure to heat, and these narrow passageways that they creator meant to tunnel breezes. The master planner on the site calls the style that they used Mikinos Desert Modern, So it's inspired by kind of Mediterranean Old World and it does look that way, you know, it does look like maybe you've stepped into a version of Greece or Morocco in the middle of Phoenix.
So what does it cost to rent there? Is it more expensive to live there than it is in other places in the area.
They are roughly in line with the market at the moment. You know, a one bedroom is around fourteen hundred. Last I checked up to about three thousand a month for
a three bedroom. And in poking around, I walked over to a just a regular old apartment complex, like a couple doors down on Apache Boulevard where this isn't Tempe, and there's a building there where a one bedroom is about thirteen hundred, and you know, it's just a regular old apartment building, so they are not charging a huge amount more than you can find in that area where there's also just plenty of building going on at the moment.
And in addition to your living space, with your rent, you get this basket of transportation benefits, including a free pass to the Valley Metro that bus and light rail system, discounts on lift, ride hailing, on bird scooters, and moving services, and they have an evy fleet on site that you can rent by the hour or the day. You know that rent also is probably you should know, includes more than just the space to.
Live after the break. Why is it so hard to get rid of parking spaces? Hiray? You mentioned earlier that cities are so built around car culture that it was kind of novel just the concept of building an entire apartment community that didn't focus around cars.
In tempi as in many cities, there are these things called parking minimums, and these are a really big bugaboo among urbanists now because they think they perpetuate car dominance in cities. By forcing developers to include parking, you make it so that you perpetuate the fact that cars will be the mode of transit for everybody, and don't allow
for more sustainable modes of development to get built. So they had to go to the city and say, we would like you to zero out the parking minimums for this development, and we believe that we can make it work through the way that we design it, through its location, and through the other transit benefits that we're going to
offer residents there. And the city agreed to it. It was a little bit contentious, but ultimately, I think because they were in a site where there wasn't much development happening, they said, let's give this a shot.
And you right that the people behind this project, they went before the Development Commission and they really had to overcome a lot of skepticism and kind of promise them that this was going to work.
Yeah, there was skepticism, and the main question was this all sounds great, but what if it doesn't lease. You know, what are you going to do if you can't find enough people who want to live this way or who will pay market rate for these apartments. And their answer was essentially, look, we're going to do this in phases, and so if we figure out after phase one or phase two that it's just not working, then we can
switch it up. We'll come back to you and we will say, hey, you know, theoretically they could throw a parking crush in the last few acres if they need to, or make a different plan, and that was enough to get over those concerns. And you know that is still open question. They are still in the early parts of this. A lot of the development remains a dirt lot. If it doesn't work, then you could see this become five ten years from now just another apartment complex and tempe.
But when it got that approval, yeah, a lot of attention right away, especially among urban planners and academics, that this was a really big deal.
Yeah, because they became the poster child for this movement to abolish parking minimums, which is growing, and there are cities that have just said, we're not going to make this a must. We're going to take every development as a one off and decide what's rational and look at how they plan to deal with transportation needs.
And you have seen even in the Phoenix.
Area what they call transit oriented development where it's like we're near the light rail, will go lower than the established amount of parking that you typically need for this many bedrooms, and sometimes those work and sometimes they really don't. Sometimes people put in a restaurant and they say, we're near the light rail, we don't need our own parking lot. People are going to come to us on public transit.
And then you find out three months later when the restaurant opens that the people are parking all over the surrounding neighborhoods, and the neighbors are really upset, and you wind up going and buying and putting in a surface lot. So parking is just this really contentious part of all development right now. But this got a lot of attention because it was the first time that TEMP said we'll go to zero. We're not going to have a parking
minimum for this development. And I think that kind of absolutist approach and the fact that they were first made them really notable.
The other thing, too, is Arizona is just unbearably hot. Of course, we're going through a whole big heat wave everywhere, but man, are they bearing the brunt of it? Is that an advertisement for this place or is it something that will make people think twice about not being able to get into a cool car.
I think that it will cut both ways. I mean, broadly speaking, you see the beginnings of real estate investors looking at Phoenix and going, We'll wait a second, we're really going to be able to supply water. There is this really a livable place long term? In the short term, like a lot of cities, it's got more people looking for housing than it has houses, and so there's demand. And I think, you know, whether it's better or worse to live this way is what they're trying to prove
right now. I think their idea is that, look, you can do a thousand and if this one works, maybe ten thousand at a time. Of people like this, and it's sort of an incremental change, and this is also a way to create a different kind of housing that we think is highly desirable. That people want to live this walkable lifestyle and they just need someone to help them do it.
You mentioned that other cities started really looking at this. What other places are considering similar sorts of things.
Minneapolis and Arbor have done away with their blanket minimums, and there are a lot of other cities that. You know, it really depends what was the rule in the first place and how much do you want to tweak it. But if you look in Portland and cities all over the US, you are seeing parking minimums be reconsidered in one way or another.
You mentioned earlier that people who live there aren't allowed to park, you know, anywhere in the area, so it's not like you can't kind of like hide a car. But they actually have to do more than that to meet the requirements. Is that right?
They have to promise that they will disclose any car that they own or control or purchase while they're there, because they want to know what the license plate and the make of that car so that they can keep track of anybody who is parking on the neighboring streets and kind of trying to break the rules. They promise to help monitor the area around the site for that.
I think mostly it will be self policing because they are selling this so much to people who want to try this car free lifestyle that it would be weird to move there if you were intending to park. Whether there's slippage over time would be interesting. It was one of the people I spoke with, Bob schaff for the retiree who's going to be moving in in October. He has a truck with a camper on the back, and he told me, I'm going to keep it for a lot little while. I'm not telling them where I'm going
to park it. You know it's going to be far away, but I just want to make sure this works. Ultimately, he decided he is going to sell it when he moves in, but for a while he was not totally sure, and he was thinking, I'm going to just have this car park somewhere in the meantime. So it's not that you can't own a car, it's that you can't store it really anywhere near the site.
It would be really inconvenient to do that.
When we come back. Tempe's the first to do this, but the big question is will other cities follow. I wrote you said earlier that there's a handful of people who've been able to move in kind of the earliest adopters, but a lot of the plays really is yet to be built.
Yeah.
I mean, their original schedule was to start moving people in twenty twenty one, basically, and the pandemic and the supply Chaine disruptions and everything that came with that have set them back. So they've just had their first move ins. They want to do their grand opening, as they call it, this fall, and they're going to have one hundred more units coming this year, and then over the next couple of years a couple hundred more in the final fruition.
You know, this is supposed to be about seven hundred units, and that's years away.
You know.
They broke ground in November of twenty nineteen. So much has happened since then, as we all know. But the climate for housing development in the market where they are has gotten a lot tougher. It's tougher to borrow for building. There's a glut of new constructions, so the value of new apartments has come down, and the interest rates at which you would have to borrow have gone up. So they facing a lot of challenges and bringing this to completion and to be what they originally envisioned.
You said earlier that this has become the kind of poster child for this car free way of living. Are there other developments like this anywhere in the country? Is this the only one?
There are other places that do infill projects and that sort of specialize in walkability.
What is infil so.
Infil is when instead of building on a lot that wasn't housing before, you know, whether that was just an open lot or it was being used for something else
on the outskirts of a city. That's typically how you get suburban sprawl, and how places like Phoenix have developed for decades is primarily you keep going outward and then you find that a lot of what you're leaving behind in the center of the cities sort of can fall into disrepair, or that those markets can become depressed, that housing stock gets old, and so infill is when you reverse that and you go back and you say we're going to build close to the center of the city,
and we're going to rebuild there, and we're going to find pockets of space there to do projects where we create housing, and that is something that you're seeing in Phoenix and elsewhere more of that, and those in projects have to think about parking really deliberately. It's not just here's your driveway next to your detached house or here's the garage. They're space limited or they're near transit. It cost them twenty thousand dollars a spot roughly to put
up a parking garage. So if they can save on that, they would love to. But then they also have to find people who want to move in. So in terms of you know, marketing themselves, as car free, as building car free neighborhoods from scratch, which is how Cold Sac puts it. I haven't seen that exact approach elsewhere, but there are certainly lots of other developers who are saying, we're building walkable developments, we're doing infill, we're focusing on
transit oriented development. You're seeing it in Phoenix. You're seeing it, really and any city that has kind of started to reach the limits of going out, you're seeing it even in cold weather cities, you know, Milwaukee and elsewhere that people want what New Yorkers have in many cases are people in San Francias in some cases have, which is a life that doesn't depend on a car.
And the difference there though, of course, in cities is you walking on the street there's a lot of restaurants and businesses and all kinds of things going on, Whereas this place, you know, there's a restaurant, right, and there's a market, a gim a coffee house. Is that enough to sustain that kind of community where you don't want to get in the car and go all the way into Phoenix for more variety.
Yeah, I think that is going to be the real trick so they have tried to put on site everything that they think residents will need so they don't have to leave as often. You not only have to have the people who live there frequenting those places, but for those businesses to survive, it's not enough for the residents to be the only customers. They need people coming from all around the neighborhood. And where they are do they have the density of sort of pedestrianism. Is the light
rail enough? Will enough people come to make that a go? And the more projects like it that you have around, the more density you have, the easier it is to do. But they are sort of pioneers. The neighborhood that they're in. To the south is a ups shipping center. To one side is an old hotel being used as a homeless shelter by the city. To the other side is a tire shop. So it's not like you can just stroll outside and be in the kind of West Village walkable
neighborhood that people might imagine. So they are definitely trying to make a go of it in a place where it's not all there yet. That said, hop on the light rail and you're in, you know, the downtown Tempee area, which is kind of that walkable neighborhood full of bars and restaurants in less than ten minutes.
You know, if you catch it right.
Or you're from Arizona, you spent time there walking around, taking a look at the places themselves and the community. Is it nice? Would you want to live there?
I think if I were at that phase of life. I have two kids now, I can't quite imagine making this work with an eight year od than an eleven year old, but in that phase of life, right, if I'm a grad student and I live in the area, this is something I would definitely consider. There's a lot of ways in which I could see this being really attractive.
But certainly it's less convenient than anytime I want to go anywhere, I step outside, I get in my own car, and I go there without having to make any other planning or thought to it. And that is the default mode in Phoenix, and that is what they're competing against.
Hira, Thanks so much for coming on the show, Thanks for having me, Thanks for listening to us here at the Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio, app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Ergalina. Our senior producer is Catherine Fink.
Frederica Romanello is our producer. Our associate producer is Ze Obsidiki. Raphael mcili is our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidron. I'm West Kasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another Big Take