Back in 2021, we wrote about Culdesac Tempe, a car-free community under construction in Tempe, Arizona. And we don’t mean car options either. Residents are “by contract prohibited from parking within a quarter of a mile of this location.” Instead, the development is dense, walkable, and provides access to a number of alternative transportation solutions.
Fast forward to today, and Bloomberg report that residents will begin moving into the first building in May. Meanwhile, restaurants and farmers markets have opened.
“Most Americans want to live in neighborhoods where there are no cars,” Ryan Johnson, Co-Founder and CEO of Culdesac, says Bloomberg. “We haven’t built them since the car came out. Walkable areas become more expensive, driving demand higher.”
But Culdesac Tempe isn’t the only car-free neighborhood built in America. The idea has already been implemented in a number of cities around the country, including those traditionally dependent on cars like the Sun Belt and the South. For example, Charlotte and Houston are also seeing their own car-free communities emerge. And while that idea sounds like something only the wealthy can afford, it doesn’t have to be. These neighborhoods are said to be cheaper to build and therefore have lower rents.
A big part of that savings comes from the lack of parking. According to an estimate cited by BloombergThe average cost to build a parking space in the US is $25,700. So even if the buyer doesn’t own a car, a two-bedroom apartment can easily cost $50,000 more just because it includes parking. And that estimate is the average for the whole country. In cities like Los Angeles, building a parking space will be significantly more expensive than a parking space in Topeka, Kansas, for example.
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“Our product offers lower rents to residents, $100 to $200 less than our competitors, and is the best product on the market because we can reinvest some of our savings. from parking,” said Harrison Tucker, CEO of the recently launched company The Joinery. in Charlotte, say Bloomberg. The economic case is very strong.
Unfortunately, despite the high demand, these types of developments are generally not legal to build in much of the country due to the required parking minimums. If the law requires you to have at least one parking space per bedroom, you must comply with the law. And that’s assuming it’s legal to build anything other than single-family homes, which often isn’t. Thank youIn full, some cities have begun to abolish parking minimums and single-family zoning, which ultimately gives people who want to live a car-free lifestyle the option to do so.
As Michael Rodriguez, research director at Smart Growth America, put it Bloomberg, “Walkable urbanism is making economic sense to communities across the country, and whether you want it or not is just a choice. A lot of cities make development too difficult and that only exacerbates the problem of price pressures.”
