A Discourse On City Planning: The Culdesac Tempe-l

Utopia is like Heaven: it has no place for the unbeliever.

I found some brochures-slash-news articles for Culdesac, a showcase Hive being built in Tempe, Arizona, a land of still-Americans but with Jew-controlled government. An ideal location to build a Potemkin Village showing us deplorables what we’re missing out on by not worshiping the Climate Change! And you know what? It really does show us what we’re missing out on.

We’re missing the chance to be parasitic livestock living between Armpit Hair Karen and the trendy cubicle-for-rent that you’ll need for telecommuting. You don’t need to own a car! Everything you need is a short walk away! (Also, you get government-subsidized metro and Uber vouchers. Because not everything is a short walk away.)

Culdesac Tempe is a car-free housing development for the ‘post-car society’

By Jonathon Ramsey, 1 December 2019

San Francisco-based developer Culdesac has broken ground on what it calls the first dedicated, car-free residential development in the United States. Culdesac Tempe is a $140-million mixed-use neighborhood that will house up to 1,000 residents in 636 multi-family units laid out on 16 acres.

That’s a population density of 60 people per acre, or 38,400 people per square mile. A typical definition of “high density” is 10,000 people per square mile. In 2015, New York City was about 28,000 people per square mile.

NYC is not a strong comparison, since we’re speaking of one housing development, but it’s relevant because Culdesac is described as mixed-use. I like the idea of mixed-use myself, of the first floor of a building being commercial and the upper floor(s) being residential. However, mixed-use doesn’t work with high population density because there aren’t enough jobs for the residents. You’re still going to have a lot of commuting, which is the main problem that mixed-use zoning is meant to solve.

Speaking of commuting…

None of those residents will be allowed to drive or park personal cars on the property, and they can’t park in the surrounding areas, either.

Behold the Original Sin of city planning: planners deciding what they want the little people to want, instead of giving the little people what they want.

The best definition of government that I’ve ever heard, is “the largest supplier of coercion in a society”. Some coercion is needed for city planning, but the operative word is “need”. Where I live on the Pacific Rim of Fire, everybody NEEDS to build for earthquakes… civilization will literally end if they aren’t forced to… but everybody doesn’t NEED to build for, say, my preferred lifestyle of ammosexual.

Although crime would become much less. Developers, please consider accommodating the special needs of us heavily armed rednecks.

Ryan Johnson, a Culdesac co-founder and its CEO, told the Wall Street Journal, “Transportation has changed a lot over the last decade and real estate hasn’t kept up. Now there’s the chance for us to build the first post-car development.” Transportation options on and off the development will include a light rail station across the street, scooters, bikes, ridesharing, and a few spaces for carsharing vehicles.

That wouldn’t work for a retirement home, or in rainy climates, or if the next stop on that light rail system is a ghetto. The automobile is what makes modern America work because 1. it’s a source of mobility for all persons and 2. you DON’T enjoy the companionship of your next-door neighbors. In our multicultural society, the way we avoid the inevitable social friction of diversity+density is not needing social spaces at all.

As a long-term strategy, avoiding socialization opportunities is going to fail USA. But we cannot do better until our government allows freedom of association once again.

Did you know that planned communities such as Culdesac here, used to have explicit racial standards on who was allowed to be a resident? Those restrictions ended in 1965. SecTrans Petey Buttplug cries about rayciss roads, but it wasn’t the roads that were racist. It was YOUR PROPERTY DEEDS.

Eliminating a huge chunk of space normally used for roads and resident parking pads makes wholesale changes to the habitat; according to the co-founders, “half of the land area will be covered in landscaping, public courtyards, and greenery,” which it says is three times the typical share of green space for an urban development. There will also be room for traditional amenities like a pool, a gym, and communal fire pits, and luxury touches like plazas, green spaces, a human park and a separate dog park, and shared working spaces (think WeWork).

Does it have a church?

…

Yeah, didn’t thought so. It has all the amenities of a one-star Extended Stay in (ahem) Phoenix.

“Half of the land area” means 50% site coverage by buildings. That’s not much open space when you deduct walkways and storefronts.

WeWork was a Jewish scam to inflate property rents. They rented unused space from property owners, then rented the space back as needed. This created an artificial shortage of rental space, which allowed owners to jack rents enough to turn a profit. Meanwhile, WeWork tried to make a side gig out of ‘shared working spaces’, which meant “you rent a cubicle in order to do your job, except there’s no cubicle and you have zero privacy from your boss”.

At least the”knowledge working” inmates won’t have to commute from their pens to their pods. Fine as far as it goes, this is only one subdivision, but none of these 15-minute cities offer shop space to the inhabitants. What are my options, as a resident, if I want to do a little woodworking on the weekend? Where do I park my work truck if I work-from-home as a roach coach chef?

When the development opens in the fall, rents are planned to range from $1,400 to $1,500, only slightly above the average Tempe rent of $1,360.

Most newly built subdivisions can charge higher-than-average rents. These people aren’t even going to try? Does it not have any luxury spots? That’s one way that subdivisions try to meet government mandates for low-income units, by offering enough desirable units to offset the lost income.

And since most of the units will be one-bedrooms, there will be private guest suites for visitors so that “living space won’t be wasted on rarely-used extra bedrooms.”

This is a dormitory, not a residential development. This is not how Americans naturally live.

It will be interesting to see who moves in. Culdesac says it has “enormous” demand for the units already.

“Everybody wants to live here! Our rents will be exactly median.”

That could be aided by the fact that Tempe’s a college town built around Arizona State University and the median age there is under 30, even though reports show millennials buying cars in the same numbers as the previous generation.

Under 30 is important because that’s the mobile young adult, no family demographic. They aren’t dumb, they’re building this “college dormitory-like housing” near a college. But those kids like cars as much as anybody else, so…

The goal is to create a city where everyone can access jobs and amenities without feeling like they need to own a car.

…the goal is to sell a city where everybody can be a good wage slave without being allowed to own a car. Until the dream fails, then they’ll rent to college kids.

Is the scam convincing anybody yet? Four years later?

‘People are happier in a walkable neighborhood’: the US community that banned cars

h ttps://www.theguardian.com/cities/2023/oct/11/culdesac-car-free-neighborhood-tempe-arizona

By Oliver Milman, 11 October 2023

On a 17-acre site that once contained a car body shop and some largely derelict buildings, an unusual experiment has emerged that invites Americans to live in a way that is rare outside of fleeting experiences of college, Disneyland or trips to Europe: a walkable, human-scale community devoid of cars.

They left out Soviet gulags. Those factory-prison complexes became so profitable that dissidents were manufactured just to keep those 15-minute camps staffed. As always, the demand for Nazis greatly exceeded the supply.

Culdesac ushered in its first 36 residents earlier this year and will eventually house around 1,000 people when the full 760 units, arranged in two and three-story buildings, are completed by 2025. In an almost startling departure from the US norm, residents are provided no parking for cars and are encouraged to get rid of them. The apartments are also mixed in with amenities, such as a grocery store, restaurant, yoga studio and bicycle shop, that are usually separated from housing by strict city zoning laws.

Four years from groundbreaking to first tenants, and another two years to finish the job? Fifteen minute cities aren’t going to happen. Too much red tape, too many bribes, not enough skilled labor to make it happen fast. There’s not enough time left before the Dollar Collapse. Assuming it happens sometime this century, ha!

The $170m Culdesac project shows “we can build walkable neighborhoods successfully in the US in [the] 2020s,” according to Ryan Johnson, the 40-year-old who co-founded the company with Jeff Berens, a former McKinsey consultant.

Speaking of college, the two were college roommates. Speaking of McKinsey, I notice there’s no (formal) pharmacy. An oversight?

Segue

h ttps://www.cnn.com/2021/02/04/business/mckinsey-opioid-settlement/index.html

McKinsey & Company, one of the world’s largest consulting firms, will pay nearly $600 million in multiple settlements over its work consulting for drug companies that states say fueled the nation’s opioid crisis.

McKinsey reached the agreement with a coalition of 47 attorneys general, the District of Columbia and five US territories. The company settled separately with the attorneys general of Washington and West Virginia.

The $573 million multistate settlement, announced Thursday, “resolves investigations by the attorneys general into the company’s role in working for opioid companies, helping those companies promote their drugs, and profiting millions of dollars from the opioid epidemic,” according to a press release from the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Way too cheap a punishment for the damage done… but now that they aren’t literally poisoning you, McKinsey & Scum is building concentration cam… dormitories for you.

End segue

So, who are the lucky new tenants?

If this is a trend, then McKinsey is building a 15-minute brothel. The center visage is the camp commandant, excuse me, government and external affairs officer. But she’s also a client!

“It’s positively European, somewhere between Mykonos and Ibiza,” said Jeff Speck, a city planner and urban designer who took a tour of Culdesac earlier this year. “It is amazing how much the urbanism improves, both in terms of experience and efficiency, when you don’t need to store automobiles.”

A lying sack of shit tells us how happy we’ll be after we own nothing. I haven’t shown pictures of the complex because there’s nothing to show. Dense white buildings, sterile as a surgical ward.  It’s positively Mediterranean, somewhere between Gaza and Tripoli. Which is appropriate for Phoenix, Arizona, I guess, but I’m still not inspired.

Speck said that he expects closer relationships to form among residents. “We will soon have Culdesac babies,” he predicted.

In single-room apartments with no visitors allowed overnight? Speck must not have noticed all the research papers confirming the obvious, strong, inverse correlation between population density and fertility.

Also, between socialism and fertility.

Driving to places is so established as a basic norm that deviation from it can seem not only strange, as evidenced by a lack of pedestrian infrastructure that has contributed to a surge in people dying from being hit by cars in recent years, but even somewhat sinister.

Why would there be a “surge” in pedestrian deaths? Because cars are suddenly popular, because Venezuelans don’t know what cars are, or because Buttplug is cooking the stats?

People walking late at night, particularly if they are Black, are regularly accosted by police – in June, the city of Kaplan, Louisiana, even introduced a curfew for people walking or riding bikes, but not for car drivers.

Gosh, black people should be allowed to own cars, then.

Et tu, Speck?

A smart city planner would look for ways to remove the need for transportation. He would not outlaw private transportation while subsidizing public transportation. What they’re doing here is banning cars then subsidizing Corprat-operated alternatives to cars on the transportation-as-a-service model. There is literally no appeal being made, to live in Culdesac. Everything about this place is for stakeholder benefit. You can’t just build a dog park and expect people to enjoy it.

The only people getting into the pods, thus far, are post-fertility feminists wanting to be enrolled in the only harem that’ll still take them: Uncle Joe’s Corporate Laundromat, funneling welfare money to cronies for kickbacks, proudly financed & presented by the people who brought you the opioid epidemic. Why would they want to leave? They have no families, no God and no future once the gubmint checks stop.

This forced proximity is going to fail as soon as vibrant anarchists get housed above the Starbucks.