Development near Phoenix tests whether car-free living is sustainable in sprawling cities

Transcript

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Amna Nawaz: The sprawling metropolis of Phoenix is an unlikely place to build an apartment complex without parking for residents. Car dependency is just part of life for most people there. But a new development in the suburb of Tempe is providing a blueprint for more environmentally-friendly and car-free living.

Stephanie Sy has this report for our Tipping Point series and our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Stephanie Sy: The vast suburbs of Phoenix make driving a necessity for most people who live here.

Ryan Johnson, Co-Founder and CEO, Culdesac: There’s not a drop of asphalt in the project.

Stephanie Sy: But developer Ryan Johnson, who grew up in the area, has a different vision for its future. And it starts with this apartment complex in the city of Tempe.

Ryan Johnson: It’s a 1,000-person neighborhood where it’s the first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the U.S.

Stephanie Sy: Car-free meaning no parking spaces for the more than 300 residents.

Ravan Ross, Culdesac Resident: I love it so far. It’s done wonders for my lifestyle.

Stephanie Sy: Ravan Ross, a full-time artist, moved to Culdesac last February. When residents sign a lease, they agree to not keep a car at the property.

So how has it been being without a car?

Ravan Ross: So I take public transit now. So sometimes my bus stop can be like a 13-minute walk or it can just be a two-minute walk. So just having that walking time every day that I probably wouldn’t normally get if I had a car has been a benefit.

Stephanie Sy: The savings from not having a car can be up to $1,000 a month. And Ross has lost 25 pounds since moving here.

Aracely Delgadillo and her family are big on bikes, even the 5-year-old rides. How do you take a watermelon back from the grocery store on a bike?

Aracely Delgadillo, Culdesac Resident: Well, we actually — well, I don’t think we have tried that yet.

(Laughter)

Aracely Delgadillo: Just the little ones, but not the, like, super big ones. But we have a cargo bike for that now, so probably would work.

Stephanie Sy: She and her husband sold their cars in home to move to Culdesac last July.

Aracely Delgadillo: We used to have to commute 26 miles every day, twice a day, five times a week. It was just so rough on me. So I’d always sit in the passenger and I’d look around and I’d just see everybody kind of like a zombie.

Stephanie Sy: Like, miserable And in traffic.

Aracely Delgadillo: And in traffic.

There we go. Nice.

Stephanie Sy: Now she bikes or takes the light rail to get her and her son Leandro to and from Arizona State University during the week. They have given themselves a year to see if a car-free lifestyle is sustainable, relying on the rentable e-cars that Culdesac provides on site to visit family on the weekends.

Aracely Delgadillo: I just enjoy being outside more and making it part of my day versus being stuck in the car for those hours and then just getting home and being too tired to do anything.

Stephanie Sy: Besides e-cars, residents have access to e-bikes and scooters and are frequently seen getting into Waymos, the driverless electric cars that seem to be everywhere in the region these days.

The city of Tempe’s existing infrastructure is what makes developments like Culdesac possible. There’s already a mix of public transportation, bike lanes and wide sidewalks friendly to walkers that makes car-free or at
least car-light living possible.

Eric Iwersen, Transportation and Sustainability Director, Tempe, Arizona: We have separated the bike lane from the road here, added plants, tried to add shade.

Stephanie Sy: Eric Iwersen is the director of transportation and sustainability for Tempe.

Eric Iwersen: We have been a little bit on the leading edge of how you urbanize and grow a city in this region. Many cities, especially the ones that are kind of in the older parts of the valley, have been confronting this too, and seeing that density and maybe a car-free lifestyle is an attractive option for many people.

Stephanie Sy: One of the keys to car-free development is actually parking-free development, says David King, a professor of urban planning at ASU and a former student of Donald Shoup, who died last month.

While at UCLA, Shoup wrote the groundbreaking 2005 book, “The High Cost of Free Parking.”

David King, Arizona State University: Parking is, as Donald Shoup says, a fertility drug for cars.

Stephanie Sy: He explains the basic thesis.

David King: What cities do is that they require a certain amount of parking for everything that’s built. So if you build an office or an office building, you have to supply something around three parking spaces per 1,000 square feet of office space. Or if you’re building an apartment complex, you have to supply one or two parking places for every unit that you’re building.

So with all this parking that’s required for everything that we do, parking becomes ubiquitous, it’s free, and we all expect free parking everywhere we go, and because of that, we all drive everywhere.

Stephanie Sy: The parking requirements started in earnest before World War II, and by the 1950s had become commonplace in American urban planning. The result in Phoenix is not only sprawl, but heat.

Climate change has led to record-breaking summers in the Valley of the Sun.

David King: One of the reasons that Phoenix is continuing to get hotter and hotter, especially in the summer months, is that it’s the overnight temperatures that are really rising, and a lot of that is heat that’s trapped in our roads and our parking lots that is just being released overnight.

Stephanie Sy: With a mind toward climate change and sustainable development, Tempe’s parking policies are evolving.

Eric Iwersen: So we have reduced our parking requirements, especially if you’re attached to a major public transit route, for example. We have made it easier to have less parking. We have also made our buildings face the street, face the pedestrian environment, face public transit, rather than being — having a building separated by a large parking lot from the street.

Stephanie Sy: Developer Ryan Johnson is also a Shoup-inspired urbanist, generally averse to parking, although there is a lot on his complex reserved for retail customers.

Ryan Johnson: What’s interesting is if you ask people to visualize what the heat of Phoenix is, it’s not 100 or 110. It’s when they went to the grocery store, they walk back to their car in an asphalt parking lot that’s got the greenhouse gas effect and they walk in, it’s not 110. It’s 175 and they might burn themselves on the seat buckle.

Stephanie Sy: When he was conceiving of Culdesac, Johnson sought ways to bring down the heat.

The desert-adaptive architectural style is meant to make it feel 15 or more degrees cooler in the apartment complex. The overall vibe fills European with walkable pathways and a plaza with dining and shopping.

Artist Ravan Ross was attracted to all of that.

Ravan Ross: I felt like I was in like Rome or Italy. The place is very colorful, bright, which reflects a lot of how I create my paintings. They’re full of color and light.

Stephanie Sy: Culdesac is currently 85 percent occupied and there are plans to build hundreds of more units on the 17-acre property.

Ryan Johnson: It’s better to build walkable neighborhoods. It’s better for climate, it’s better for health, it’s better for happiness, it’s better for low cost of living, it’s better for low cost of government. It’s a better way to build cities and it makes for a better life.

Stephanie Sy: Whether the concept can be replicated elsewhere and whether there is political will to is an open question. For now, Culdesac is a tiny oasis in a vast desert of suburban sprawl.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Stephanie Sy in Tempe, Arizona.