Can Car-free Living Make You Happier?

As he slathered SPF 30 onto his left calf, Ryan Johnson looked back at me and issued a warning: expect honking. I hadn’t been astride a bike in six years, but here I was on a brutally hot late-October afternoon in Arizona, an e-bike beside me, preparing for a ride. Our destination was a cycling path along the Salt River, which bisects Tempe, a city of 189,000 people about ten miles (or 60 minutes by bike) east of Phoenix. Tempe is home to Arizona State University, and it’s also the place where Johnson is currently running a grand residential experiment.

Johnson is the cofounder of Culdesac, a real estate development firm that wants to flip the script on urban living. In May 2023, he became one of the first tenants of Culdesac Tempe, a new complex taking shape on an otherwise inconspicuous tract of dirt. More than 225 people have since moved into apartments located inside a tight grouping of white stucco buildings that might be described as Santorini lite, with trendy balconies, spacious courtyards, and inviting patios shaded by trees.

Similar to those pseudo-urban enclaves situated outside America’s metropolises where residences and retail commingle, Culdesac has its own grocery store, gym, café, and mail service. There’s a bike shop on the premises, as well as a clothing consignment store, a plant emporium, an art studio, and a wellness boutique that offers IV hydration. A coworking space is located above the gym. Cocina Chiwas, the restaurant on the corner, combines craft cocktails with its own take on Mexican fare. This past May, the restaurant’s owners opened up Aruma, a coffee shop across from the restaurant.

Once construction is complete, which will take several years, Culdesac Tempe will comprise 760 units total, ranging from studios to three-bedrooms and housing approximately 1,000 residents. The catch: not one of those units will come with a parking space. “We’re the first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the U.S.,” says Johnson.

Virtually every residential development anywhere in this country includes parking, a requirement common in city building codes. At Culdesac, if you do own a vehicle, it’s a condition of your lease that you refrain from parking it within one block, in any direction, of the community. “We can’t tell people that they can’t own a car,” says Johnson, a tall, lanky 41-year-old. “But if people want to have a car, there are other great neighborhoods for them.”

The thought made me shudder. Where I live, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., about an hour from the city, a car is practically a prerequisite for getting to the grocery store, the barber, the doctor’s office, the liquor store. Bike lanes are sporadic. There aren’t many bus stops within walking distance. Taking a rideshare to visit family, an hour by car at least, seems more than a little silly. While I typically work from home, when traveling I drive to the airport—in the Ford Bronco my wife and I bought last year. (And if I can be frank: I just want a vehicle.)

“I had an SUV in high school,” Johnson, who hasn’t owned a car in 13 years, told me when I met him. “I just didn’t know any better.”

The e-bike ride was my first lesson in automotive deprivation. I had flown here to try out a one-bedroom apartment at Culdesac and experience carless living for several days. There’s a light-rail stop one street over, but early Culdesac residents received a complimentary electric bike, which is Johnson’s favorite mode of transportation. (He owns about 70 of them, most stored at his company’s main office downtown.) Plus, I was told that a ride on the Salt River bike path, 100-degree weather be damned, would provide unobstructed views of the mountains framing the city’s skyline.

We just had to get there first, which involved traveling on streets lacking any bike lanes. The speed limit on our route was 25 miles an hour, but my e-bike maxed out at 20. Barely ten minutes into the journey, I heard the first honk.

Ditching cars entirely might seem crazy. (In nearby Phoenix, once described by The New York Times as an “ever-spreading tundra of concrete,” they’re more of a necessity than a luxury.) But what Culdesac is attempting to accomplish is a revision of city living, where the pedestrian, not the automobile, is more valued. To Johnson, Culdesac is an oasis in a desert of car-fueled aggravation—a walkable community that’s safe, entertaining, better for the climate, and better for the individual. And he believes that if he builds it, people will come.

The idea for Culdesac crystallized in 2018, when Johnson was working for Opendoor, an online real estate company that bills itself as the stress-free way to sell a house. (You sell it to Opendoor for cash; Opendoor sells it to someone else.) He was among the startup’s founders in 2014 and became vice president of operations. Before that he spent a year with New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, bookended by stints as a business analyst at McKinsey and Bain Capital.

When I first met Johnson, he looked like he could pass for someone who spends his days hauling coolers full of beer to the beach. His uniform in the Arizona heat was a short-sleeve button-up, shorts, a pair of Allbirds, and a Culdesac-branded baseball cap. Two weekends before I showed up, he was at the Phoenix Raceway for the Goldrush Music Festival, jumping around to EDM with a group of friends—and his mother—while dressed as an astronaut.

At Opendoor, he says, he had a eureka moment. Johnson recalls how homebuyers, more often than not, desired houses in what they called cute neighborhoods, with retail, restaurants, and a sense of community. “We saw so clearly in the data that the majority of Americans want to live in a walkable neighborhood, and so few do,” he says.

Using money he acquired by selling his stake in Opendoor (along with funding from venture-capital firms), Johnson teamed up with Jeff Berens, another McKinsey alum and a former roommate from his undergrad years at the University of Arizona, and founded Culdesac. The idea the two shared was straightforward enough: create communities across the U.S. where walkability isn’t an amenity but an organizing principle. The tagline on the brochures for the Tempe development is “Life at your front door.”

Settling on Tempe was partly by default. Johnson grew up in Phoenix and had moved back to be closer to family not long before he and Berens set up the new venture. But the conditions there also made it a good test environment. Parts of the city are dense and bustling, and college students mix with young professionals (the median age is 29). According to realty surveys, that younger generation prioritizes walkability over car ownership. Tempe is 40 square miles in size, small enough to make the notion of navigating by foot, bike, bus, or light-rail possible and even preferable.

“We’re the only city in the state that has full transit coverage citywide,” notes Eric Iwersen, Tempe’s transportation and sustainability director. Within a quarter-mile of any residence, there is at least one public-transportation option, plus 300 miles of bike lanes the city has built since 1996, when he joined the city government as an intern.

Finding the land for a residential development was next. Through a Google Maps search, the cofounders located a 17-acre parcel, which at the time was home to a rundown auto shop. The site turned out to be ideal: it was on Apache Boulevard, a major thoroughfare that in recent decades had been transformed. Apache used to be six lanes wide. Today there are just four, with light-rail tracks in between.

To date, phase one of the project has been completed: five apartment clusters with enough units for about 250 people. Phase two will be in place later this year, with several new apartment buildings to “meet the huge demand we’re seeing,” says marketing head Rob Maloney. Once phase two is done, the rest of the development will unfold in three smaller sections, with apartments being built and groups of tenants moving in until the entire development is complete in 2028. All told, the project will cover 17 acres—by comparison, the ASU campus is more than 700 acres—at a cost, according to Bloomberg, of $200 million.

Building without meeting the city’s parking requirements turned out to be the easiest piece of the puzzle. Tempe’s seven-member city council voted unanimously to eliminate the requirement for residential parking at Culdesac after the company presented its plan in November 2019. Under Iwersen’s leadership, first as transit manager and now as sustainability director, the city was already expanding its public-transportation capabilities, which include a new downtown streetcar line completed in 2022. But Tempe was also hopping on a trend that has slowly emerged over the past two decades.

Cities like Minneapolis, Buffalo, and Portland, Oregon, have all eliminated parking minimums from their zoning codes. In November 2023, Austin became the largest city in the United States to nix them. The housing crisis that has made renting and buying increasingly unaffordable in U.S. metropolises is one reason for this trend. A single surface parking space can contribute $20,000 to housing-construction costs; garage spaces can add between $50,000 and $100,000.

Cities that go cold on parking are borrowing from the playbook of Donald Shoup, a University of California at Los Angeles urban planner and the author of the 2005 book The High Cost of Free Parking. Shoup’s money quote: “Parking is a fertility drug for cars.” A case study of New York City conducted in 2009 by Rachel Weinberger, a former professor of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania, demonstrated that vehicles were more abundant where garages and driveways were in abundant supply.

There’s also a more obvious factor at work. “Things that are built as parking means that nothing else can go there,” says David King, an ASU professor of urban planning. (King’s PhD adviser at UCLA was Shoup.) “Everything we do to make it easier to drive makes it harder to get around by any other mode.”

With Culdesac, Johnson is looking to upend that prioritization, albeit in a single location. Eliminate parking and you eliminate cars—or, at the very least, an enabling condition for owning one.

I arrived at Culdesac on a Tuesday afternoon, after hailing a ride from Lyft at the Phoenix airport. I soon learned that Lyft rides are 15 percent off for all residents. A nice perk and a frank admission, I thought: sometimes a car really is the best way to get from A to B. (It’s also worth noting that John Zimmer, a Lyft cofounder, sits on Culdesac’s board of directors.)

There is parking at Culdesac, but the 100-spot lot is reserved for guests, restaurant workers, and other employees who commute from out of town. The lot, like the pathways throughout Culdesac, is made of crushed stone and pavers, while the sidewalks are concrete—materials that retain less heat than blacktop.

Apartments are organized into collections of two- and three-story buildings opening onto courtyards equipped with various amenities and design features: fountains, park benches, grills, bicycle parking, and bike pumps. The only way into and out of these hubs are smartphone-controlled gates. (If you lose or forget your phone, the leasing office can verify your residency and provide a temporary fob.)

The unit I rented during my stay was a typical Culdesac one-bedroom: dark vinyl floors, comfortable furniture, ample natural light, two smart TVs, a modern kitchen with a large island that looked like it had been installed by the host of an HGTV show. Snacks and drinks awaited me on the dining room table, along with a Culdesac ball cap and tote bag. (The company provides short-term rentals à la Airbnb; my three-night stay cost a little more than $400. Lease prices are market rate: studios and one-bedrooms start around $1,250 per month.)

Once you exit your hub through the gate, the place feels like a small slice of an urban downtown. The name was born from memories of Johnson’s childhood, hanging out with friends in the neighborhood cul-de-sac. “We call it Mykonos-
inspired desert modern,” Johnson says. Everything I needed was a five-minute walk from my apartment.

After I checked in, Erin Boyd, Culdesac’s city-government liaison, showed me around. I saw the state-of-the-art gym, the row of shops, and Street Corner, a grocery store resembling a small Whole Foods. Inside I found organic fruits and kombucha, tea tree toothpaste, various cleaning and household supplies, frozen pizza and fresh salads.

I stopped in at Archer’s Bikes too, on the bottom floor of my apartment building. Co-owner Jess Archer, 35, recently moved into a unit above with her husband, Dustin, who had resolved to sell his car. “I know all my neighbors’ names already,” she said, echoing a common refrain among residents. “I’ve lived in apartments my whole adult life, and never once have I wanted to know my neighbor.”

In Happy City, urbanist Charles Montgomery lists one’s confidence in retrieving a lost wallet as a key function of urban cheer. The proximity created by a place like Culdesac makes that easy. Not having a car is by nature a limiting function, one that seemed to bring residents closer together in the figurative sense as well.

“Because I was working remotely before the pandemic, living by myself for a lot of the time, I forgot what it was like to interact with people every day,” said 34-year-old Alexander Chang, who was among the first to move in at Culdesac, in May 2023. “Here I couldn’t help but interact with people.”

Culdesac struck me as a city within a city. I liked how compact it felt. I liked living so close to a grocery store, a gym, and a nice restaurant. I liked that I could walk around and strike up casual conversations.

Still, I was skeptical even after my tour with Boyd. Was the camaraderie Chang felt due specifically to his inability to park on-site? I wasn’t convinced the car-free lifestyle Culdesac promotes—its marketing literature includes the slogan “Cities for People Not Cars”—was driving social interaction. Friends of mine in D.C. who live in a high-rise apartment (with parking), in a building packed with stuff to do—basketball court, golf simulator, rooftop pool—have no problem interacting with their neighbors.

“Design does influence how we behave,” says Katrina Johnston-Zimmerman, an urban anthropologist and lecturer at Drexel University in Philadelphia. “But design alone is not enough to change culture.”

It seemed to me that it wasn’t the lack of parking or cars that attracted people to Culdesac. ASU’s King agrees. “Once you lay everything out and start describing it in general terms, Culdesac isn’t that revolutionary. It sounds like any new development,” he says. “What sets it apart is that they’re selling a lifestyle. They want you to be social with your neighbors.”

There’s a certain type of person who will choose Culdesac, the type who, upon exiting their high-rise apartment, isn’t compelled to lower their eyes and make a beeline for the elevator. From that perspective, the ability to live car-free is merely a bonus.

“I like hearing the effluvia of humanity around me,” Dresden Truesdell, a 35-year-old transplant from the Lake Tahoe area of Nevada, told me. “The thought that I can get somewhere without needing a car—I think that’s fun.” Then she added: “I don’t think it will work for everyone.”

A prescient statement, I thought some months later, when I learned that elements of the Culdesac I saw were no longer in place. In February, Street Corner had moved out and was replaced by a Korean grocer. When I asked CEO Vikram Dhillon why, he said they’d “simply decided to part ways.”

Truesdell and Chang, too, had left, under somewhat curious circumstances. When I met them last year, they told me that they had plans to go into business together. But after failing to get their own retail concern up and running—a shop for yoga supplies—they broke their leases early.

Other tenants I spoke with over the summer registered complaints. One resident, who has lived at Culdesac for nearly a year and wanted to remain anonymous, was especially critical, rattling off a list of grievances: a neighbor’s toilet broke and was unusable for a month; the obnoxious ongoing construction; and pipe leaks in the apartments.

“Culdesac keeps claiming it’s growing pains,” the resident said. “It may be a new concept, but this is not the first apartment complex ever created.”

When I presented this information to Johnson, he said that “any maintenance issues we ran into were fairly typical for a new construction development.” He added that Culdesac’s maintenance team responds “as fast as they can,” usually on the same day.

“Our residents are happy. We have a strong sense of their needs,” Johnson says.

Other residents who’d also been at Culdesac for a year seemed to agree, and said they’d only grown fonder of the place.

“It’s been great. I’m still enjoying it and getting to know my neighbors better,” said Sara Hoy, a 41-year-old consultant who extended her lease beyond the May 2024 end date. The opportunity Culdesac created for her, she explained, kept her entertained. “It allows me to be active and be outside more,” she said. And car-free living? Hoy hasn’t owned one since 2013.

When it comes to parking, at least, city planner Jeff Speck is adamantly in Culdesac’s corner. He insists that the development is different from other places that mix housing and retail together with amenities and services. Speck, the author of Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, told me that Culdesac’s layout, unburdened by municipal decree to include parking, was the major distinction.

“Embedding a parking lot or parking structure in the middle of a block means that it has to be big,” Speck says. “The blocks at Culdesac are tiny. That’s one of its most walkable and social features.”

I asked Johnson what made Culdesac more than just a stylish apartment complex sans parking. He, too, brought up the idea that the design of the place helps bring people together. “The community kind of shapes itself,” he told me. “We create the environment that we think enables community.”

At the end of my first afternoon at Culdesac, the place started to feel like the quad of my small liberal-arts college: enclosed and close together at the same time. Then, as if to drive home his point, Johnson took me to Cocina Chiwas for dinner, so short a walk I didn’t have time to wonder how long it would take. We ordered potato tacos, beef empanadas, and quesadillas crisped in the restaurant’s brick oven and served like pizza. We drank Manhattans and old-fashioneds, unconcerned by the prospect of driving home. A few times every hour, I heard the chime of the light-rail.

Because irony knows no bounds, it was a couple of bike mechanics who designed the first gasoline-powered vehicle built in the U.S. That was in 1893. General Motors and Ford were founded the following decade. By 1920, registered drivers in the U.S. numbered eight million. Yet cars were still very much an anomaly.

“In 1920, the streets—officially, legally, and according to social norms—belonged to everybody, including people who were walking,” says Peter Norton, a transportation historian at the University of Virginia.

The rules of the road were simple: don’t endanger anybody, and don’t be a nuisance. Drivers were expected to move slowly and avoid parking in one spot for hours, hogging curb space. As the Roaring Twenties wore on, though, 15 million more Americans became licensed to drive. Cars flooded U.S. roads, which led to traffic jams and pedestrian injuries. Some cities instituted parking restrictions. One popular proposal involved installing mechanical devices that kept drivers from accelerating beyond a certain speed.

Carmakers, fearing the marginalization of the automobile, fought back, Norton explains. Member groups of the American Automobile Association took over safety education at hundreds of schools, informing kids that they had to stay out of the street and make way for cars. The Department of Commerce, following recommendations of the National Conference on Street and Highway Safety, issued the Model Municipal Traffic Ordinance in 1928. The ordinance, which was adopted by more than 100 cities that year, was a set of legal guidelines that, broadly speaking, favored drivers over pedestrians. For instance, what we now call jaywalking—prevalent before the age of the car—was no longer allowed. Pedestrians were expected to cross only at intersections and to defer to drivers. Auto-industry groups, in the name of promoting traffic safety, advocated for car-only roads that could accommodate more and faster vehicles.

All this ensured the supremacy of the automobile in the ensuing decades, especially during the rapid suburbanization that followed World War II. “Any place built in the postwar period,” says ASU’s King, “was built around the automobile.” In 1956, when President Eisenhower signed legislation to fund construction of the Interstate Highway System, his defense secretary was Charles Erwin Wilson, former president of General Motors. “What was good for the country was good for General Motors,” Wilson once said, “and vice versa.”

Culdesac, in essence, is a rebuttal to more than 100 years of car-centric urban development—one that, in Johnson’s telling, reflects a far more mainstream desire than society is willing to let on. Four in ten Americans, according to a Pew Research Center survey, want smaller housing that’s closer together, with stores and restaurants within walking distance. (The rest want bigger houses, farther apart, with schools and other conveniences a short drive away.) Urban planners like Speck are extremely bullish on the Culdesac concept.

“They tapped into this latent market that I would argue exists in every major metropolis,” he says. “There’s a lot of people who don’t own cars, or don’t want to own cars, and who would love to live in a place that has all the benefits of car-free living.”

Owning a vehicle is expensive—about $12,000 annually, according to AAA data. Research also supports the view that long commutes by car erode our happiness and mental health and increase feelings of boredom and social isolation.

Justin Hollander, a Tufts University urban-planning professor, led one study in 2023 that used biometrics and expression-tracking software to follow the eye movements of 51 people. The results?

“People tend to rate their sense of community much higher if they’re more in touch on a face-to-face basis with their neighbors,” he says. “The person that spends their time walking around, biking around, is going to be better connected.”

Perhaps the clearest sales pitch for such a place is the transportation-preferences survey, something the National Association of Realtors conducts every three years. The results from 2023 show that nine in ten people who are either millennials or members of Gen Z are willing to pay more for a home in a walkable community. That preference held, to a lesser extent, across generations, with more than half of the Baby Boomers surveyed saying
they’d prefer a walkable neighborhood. Yet lots of people don’t actually end up living that way.

“The trends are showing that young people are driving less or not at all, and there’s an economic incentive to capture that budding market,” says Drexel’s Johnston-Zimmerman. “One neighborhood is a good start, and I hope it sparks change, but the real work will be in retrofitting our existing streets to accommodate all people instead of just cars.”

Culdesac itself isn’t a wholly original idea. Mackinac Island, east of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, banned cars in 1898. (Hence Johnson’s caveat that Culdesac is the first car-free place “built from scratch.”) More recently, cities in the U.S. and Europe have experimented with the “15-minute city” concept, coined by professor Carlos Moreno in Paris in 2016. In such a place, essential services and amenities are within a 15-minute walk or bike ride—much like how towns predating the automobile were laid out. After all, not everyone who needs groceries, medicine, or clothing can afford to own a car. But the idea became the subject of conspiracy theories, with critics arguing that such a concept portends a dystopian future that restricts freedom of movement.

Whether a development without residential parking will translate widely across the country is an open question. Culdesac realizes that what it’s doing in Tempe won’t work everywhere. One upcoming project is in Mesa, a community roughly seven miles (30 minutes by bike) to the east. In October, the month I visited, the city decided to partner with Culdesac on a plan that calls for 1,000 apartments and townhouses. There will be at least 25,000 square feet of retail space, and another 25,000 square feet for residential amenities like the ones offered in Tempe.

But the plan also includes 800 parking spaces in what Culdesac is calling a “car-lite” concept. Even Johnson and company know that not every development they build can be completely free of automobiles.

“I don’t think that diminishes it at all,” King says. “A car-lite development is certainly better than a development that offers each unit two places to park.”

On my bike ride with Johnson, we were joined by two employees firmly committed to the Culdesac vision. Sierra Ross, a new ASU graduate with a degree in sustainability, recently rode her e-bike to a Pink concert in town. James Graef, Culdesac’s special-projects manager, who lives in the Tempe complex, had disconnected his e-bike’s speed wire, allowing him to zip along at 25 miles per hour.

The initial burst of honking that Johnson warned me about didn’t last. In 15 minutes, the four of us were cruising along the Rio Salado pathway to Hole in the Rock (exactly what it sounds like: a rock formation above town with a big hole in the middle). Along the way, we crossed a bridge over the Salt River. The bridge itself ran parallel to light-rail tracks and a separate set for freight trains—which, Johnson told me, was responsible for carrying cars to area dealerships.

At Hole in the Rock, I poked my head through to get a broad view of Tempe. In the background was Phoenix, a city where the car rules so supreme that Johnson and a group of roughly 50 friends once required a police escort to bike to a Macaroni Grill. (The occasion? A ride with one of the founders of Lectric, the e-bike manufacturer headquartered in Phoenix.) In the foreground was Tempe, his own city on a hill, where he hopes his urban laboratory will become the reference for how to develop walkable neighborhoods in the U.S.

Having finished at the giant hole, we decided to ride to the closest light-rail stop and take the train back to Culdesac. The four of us crammed into one railcar with our bikes. Three guys with electric scooters were on our left. To our right, two other people with bikes.

At the next stop, an additional cyclist tried to board our car, only to realize that it was packed with two-wheeled transport. He made his way to the next one. Johnson leaned toward me. “That guy,” he said, “saw us and probably thought, Too many bikes.” Then, before the thought lingered, Johnson added, “Just kidding. He was probably like, That’s the world I want to live in.”

Want more of Outside’s in-depth longform stories? Sign up for the Long Reads newsletter.