How Culdesac Tempe Develops Freedom, Revenue, and Belonging, With Ryan Johnson

Chuck sits down with Ryan Johnson, the founder and visionary behind Culdesac Tempe, the first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the U.S. They discuss the realities of living in and developing a community like Culdesac, from transportation costs to working with local government. Ryan explains how they maintain walkability in an Arizona desert, how they successfully nurture small businesses, and how they encourage people to embrace co-ownership of the community.

• Click here for the transcript. (Lightly edited for readability.)

  Chuck Marohn 0:00

  Hey, everybody. This is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns podcast. Culdesac, the development in Tempe, Arizona, is described as the first car free neighborhood built from scratch in the US, I have to say, a place that I have not been, a place that I have found intriguing from a number of ways. And finally, I think, after, you know, not his fault, but probably dragging feet on our part, I have the opportunity now to chat with the founder and visionary behind this project, Ryan Johnson from Culdesac. Welcome to the Strong Towns podcast.

  Ryan Johnson 0:47

  Exciting to be on.

  Chuck Marohn 0:49

  It's exciting to have you. You've done something that has a lot of people talking. And as I was telling you, you know, off air, my daughter is now going to go to the University of Arizona in the fall. So I'm I have had Culdesac on my list of places to explore for a long time, and I feel like I'm gonna have a few more opportunities to be I mean, certainly Tucson is closer to you than than Brainerd, Minnesota, is. So I'm hoping to get there. Here's the big question that I have for you that I want to start with. Walk me through the first meeting that you had with someone where you were pitching this, not like a Pal or a friend, where you're like, you know, throwing ideas around, but like, you know, I put on a tie or whatever, I dressed up, and I went to a meeting and I was going to pitch someone seriously on this idea. What, what was your thought going in and how did that meeting go?

  Ryan Johnson 1:43

  Early on, we got laughed out of the room quite a bit. People said you're not going to get entitlements, and the demand is not going to be there. And what do you mean that driverless cars are about to change everything? They're not even going to happen at all for many decades. And so that was always an uphill battle, and we had to find the right audience and also come prepared with the the right plan that people could get behind and believe in.

  Chuck Marohn 2:13

  You brought up driverless cars, and I feel like part of the idea of Culdesac as a car-free place is maybe an error or a ascription error from people who have not been there, who don't understand it. You're not saying that the people who live there never get into a car. We're saying that the place is not designed to accommodate individuals who own cars, are going to park cars there, all that. Describe the nuance of what car free means.

  Ryan Johnson 2:42

  Yeah, we say we're the first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US, and each word of that sentence matters. This is not about not using cars at all. In a place like Phoenix, which is the heart of sprawl in many ways, we can't retrofit the full city, and so part of the reason this works is that residents use a portfolio of transportation options, and they can use the best mode for a given trip. And the light rail is the most popular mode, but also there's Lyft and there's Waymo, and there's electric bikes and electric scooters and hourly car rentals. And different ways of getting around work better for those different trips, but it's important to utilize all of those.

  Chuck Marohn 3:28

  So if I live in Culdesac, I'm gonna take the light rail sometimes. I'm gonna walksometimes. I'm gonna get on a scooter sometimes. I'm going to jump in a Uber Lyft, a Waymo sometimes, I'm trying to describe a life that would be relatable to people because I think a lot of people, when they think car free, they think like, well, that would be impossible given my circumstances. Is it the transportation options that make this a possibility? What is it that makes this viable?

  Ryan Johnson 4:03

  We're entering a new era where these emerging transportation technologies- So the type of neighborhoods that we're building, these are walkable neighborhoods. These look like the neighborhoods that we built 100 plus years ago. And it's not a coincidence that those neighborhoods are what's in demand. It's where people want to live. And we're building neighborhoods like that again, but we're using modern technology. And there's been big evolution in transportation technology in the last decade, or the last couple decades, and there's a lot more ahead as well, where now you can open up your phone, press a button, and the driver will come pick you up and take you somewhere conveniently and at low cost. There's driverless cars that are going to -- Avride hail specifically -- that's about to do that, and at a much lower price point and in a far safer way, that's going to make it easier to get from place to place. Our residents, on average, spend several hundred less than the average American. Average American spends over $1,000 a month on the vehicle now, and the average price of a new car is about $48,000 and that creates a lot of budget for more housing, and that creates a lot of budget for more mobility services. So that's why this works in this way now.

  Chuck Marohn 5:18

  I was looking at some of the things that have been written about you and your development and written about the ideas that encompass and envelop what you're doing. It reminded me of the Google Microsoft paradigm in early 2000. And I want to lay this out for you and then have you react to it. In the 1990s, when Microsoft was dominant and Google had not yet been invented, the scarcity was memory on a computer, the idea that you could store stuff. And so Bill Gates and the people who ran Microsoft were hyper sensitive to programming that would take up a lot of code, a lot of space. The Google people had a totally different paradigm, and they were looking at, you know, space doubling every certain number of years, how storage space was becoming much and much cheaper. And so I think, like the the explosion point was when Gmail offered a gigabyte of storage, and like, Yahoo and hotmail were offering one megabyte or two megabytes. And I remember it was like this explosion, like, how could you do that? That's impossible. Their underlying business model was that no one's going to need a gigabyte, and by the time they do, the storage is going to be so cheap and it's going to be there. How much of your business model, how much of your vision, how much of the viability of a place like Culdesac is dependent on, in a sense, like the market developing, as you build this out? How much of it is kind of dependent on, hey, we think these new technologies are going to change the world, and we're basically going to be, like the first position to do something with that?

  Ryan Johnson 6:57

  It's a good question. We believe in these trends and this technology. And it's not just that the technology is going to get better -- and it is, if you think about Waymo today is the worst it's ever going to be and I believe it's still growing faster than Moore's law -- but it's also about more people using it. So I've been car free for 15 years, even though I live in Phoenix. For me, that's just normal, but it is a big mental shift. One of the biggest challenges in getting more people to go car free is changing mindsets, and even just doing math. A lot of people are surprised at how viable it already is, even before Waymo is widespread, even if they don't live on the light rail, to live a car-free life and to take Lyft everywhere. You know, $1,000 a month is quite a bit, and there's this cultural thing. If you go to a dinner party and you show up in a Lyft that cost $25, people are going to lose their minds and say, What? What are you doing? It's $25 each way. But how many dinner parties do you go to each month? And really, that opens people's eyes. And the more people try it, because people usually try it when they go out to restaurants and they want to have drinks and drive safely, and then it's not that many steps before they realize they can actually do that for everything. And going back to your question about saying that people are still using cars, it's really about not having car dependency, and it's really about not needing parking places everywhere, because by some estimates, Phoenix has eight parking spaces for every car. And that really influences the urban form. And it's the classic Donald Shoup cycle of if you require people to build parking, then people need a car, then they use a car. And so then we look at that and think that people want it, but they actually just didn't have a choice. And so we've mandated building car dependent spaces, and that's what we're changing.

  Chuck Marohn 8:49

  Talk a little bit about the design flexibility you get when you don't have to build around cars. And I'm particularly interested in the experience that you're able to create for people who live in Culdesac. How is it different from the subdivisions, the developments that we might be used to, even dense developments where you have, you know, apartment buildings or what have you? What is the experience that the typical Culdesac resident gets or enjoys that we might not see in other places?

  Ryan Johnson 9:23

  So for one, it feels 15 degrees cooler than a typical apartment complex, and that's because there's no asphalt, there's lots of shade. Our design also has white buildings that reflect heat. There's also 55% landscape space, and there's more landscaping and open space than there usually is. And there's also wonderful amenities, and we have vibrant local retail. We actually have 22 local retailers. That's just as important a part, usually, the thing that's been themost noteworthy part that gets the most attention is this car-free part. But we think of it as transportation freedom, and thriving local retail is another big part, and also a culture of belonging.

  Chuck Marohn 10:08

  You said three things. I want to drill down on each of them because I find each of them to be fascinating. First of all, we're having a heat wave here in Minnesota. It's going to be 80 degrees today, and I feel like I'm dying. You're like, over 100 today, something like that?

  Ryan Johnson 10:23

  Yeah, and it's a dry heat, and part of it is the diurnal temperature range is 33 degrees, so early morning and late night is actually not bad. It's also around 80, even when it's over 110 here. It's not humid. And so if you go to Miami or something and it's 90 degrees. 90 degrees and humid is a painful day. 90 degrees in the desert feels nice.

  Chuck Marohn 10:47

  So one of the things that I have experienced is, when you're in the desert, when you're in the sun, it's very different than when you're not in the sun. And I think, you know, to me, when when people said, Okay, we're gonna have a walkable, car-free development in Tempe. I gotta tell you, Ryan, the first time I heard that, I'm like, that's insane. I've walked around in Tempe. It is brutal. It is not fun. I don't enjoy it. I've seen the renderings. I've seen the photographs. It feels like you've tried to build a little bit of a lush forest, a lot of shade, a lot of ability to be in shade. You said, 15 degrees cooler. Can you like illustrate this for people? I'm asking you maybe to be a little bit poetic about the experience that I would have. As a Minnesotan, why should I not be afraid to come visit you, even in the summer?

  Ryan Johnson 11:41

  My family was born in Minnesota -- I wasn't -- and moved here.

  Chuck Marohn 11:44

  Seriously?

  Ryan Johnson 11:45

  My dad grew up in St Paul, and the family was like, it's too cold here. That's a story for many.

  Chuck Marohn 11:53

  That's a common Minnesota story, by the way. Which, the only thing I can take from that is that we like extremes, so, yeah.

  Ryan Johnson 12:00

  It's interesting. And also, sort of, our sister company is electric. It's the number 1 ebike company. They're now selling over a quarter of ebikes in the US, and they also are led by two founders that moved from Minnesota because it was too cold. There's a long history of wonderful Minnesotans coming to Arizona. But here's how I would think about it. So let's start with what the baseline expectation is. So first of all, people have been living in the desert for millennia, even before air conditioning. It's not a coincidence that the population of Phoenix exploded after air conditioning started. But there's lots of ways and adaptive ways to build that that people have been doing for millennia, going back to Native American settlements and things like that. But if you think about today, what's the experience in Phoenix, especially for a visitor, it's this: They go to the grocery store in their rental car, and they shop, and they come back and their car has been baking on an asphalt parking lot, and it has the greenhouse gas effect. And that's not 110 degrees. That's like 175 degrees. And you might burn yourself on the seat buckle. When you instead get out of that car, get out of that greenhouse gas effect, and you get into shade -- and we have decomposed granite paths instead of asphalt paths -- it feels very different. And to your point, direct in the sunlight versus shade really matters.

  Chuck Marohn 13:20

  You talked about the retailers, and I'm going to draw a little bit from my experience with new urbanist developers who try to do mixed use, walkable neighborhoods. And they will say the hardest thing to do is the retail, because you have to have a certain amount of people to support the retail. But the retail is an amenity, in a sense, of the lifestyle. How did you guys pull that off? Do you have any insight that you would share that says, here's here's how we made this viable immediately, or here's maybe where we struggled, or here's how it became viable over time? Because 22 retails. I mean, how many residents do you have living in Culdesac?

  Ryan Johnson 14:01

  We have over 300 now.

  Chuck Marohn 14:03

  Okay, that ratio doesn't work in like a normal situation. How do you make this stable?

  Ryan Johnson 14:10

  So if you think about normally for retailers, they need to open up in a strip mall, which is an uninspiring place that people don't want to visit and don't want to spend time in. And the lease might be $5,000 a month for many months, and it's a very scary proposition, where if your store isn't succeeding, you might be filing personal bankruptcy. Here, we have a wonderful place to visit and it's a place that their customers want to be in, and we also have a more accessible path towards entrepreneurship. So let's take Sew Used, they're a vintage clothing store here. I know you're a big vintage clothing fan, you could check it out when you come. They started off with a table at our night market, and that went well. At the time, it was sort of a hobby for them, these vintage clothes. And then that gave them the confidence to open up a brick and mortar store in these live-work spaces that we have, about 500 square feet. And that went really well. And then they signed a full commercial lease in a bigger space, and they're still growing from there. I'm not sure that businesses like that would have happened if step one was sign a long term, scary lease.

  Chuck Marohn 15:19

  No, you would have ended up with Jimmy John's and Verizon Wireless. What is the mix of the 22? I mean, is it a high proportion of these, Hey, we incubated this small, we moved up? I'm sure you do have a mix, right?

  Ryan Johnson 15:34

  It's 100% local retail, and many of them started at our night market and worked up from there. And others saw this as an opportunity to open their first place, or another place from a local retailer. Our restaurant is Cocina Chiwas, and it's a wonderful husband and wife couple, and it's the restaurant that they always wanted to build. They hadn't had another restaurant first, and this was the the dream that they had, and now they've won a James Beard Award for it. And so that's an example of of a local business that got to the next level via Culdesac. There's different stories. There's the barber shop that they've been part of the Tempe community for 30 years. And they were in a strip mall that the city owned, and the city wanted to redevelop it, and they were the last tenant. And so we worked with them and with the city to give them a great new home here at Culdesac, and that's where I get my hair cut now. There's another one, Ito Brand. It's a fashion brand started by a college student that's studying fashion, and this was a place that he could open up a store in a small way to get some business experience, and he's a big up and comer. 90% of businesses are led by underrepresented groups and women entrepreneurs. It's something we're proud to support and grow.

  Chuck Marohn 16:48

  Okay. Well, I'll note that you have better hair than me, so you got that going for you. It's an endorsement of your local barber. Okay, I asked you at the beginning about, you know, the reaction when you started to pitch this idea. Let's go to the permitting part of this, because I'm assuming at some point you had to sit down with people in Tempe and say, Hey, this doesn't mean any rezoning codes, are you in? What was that conversation like? And I'd actually like to get us to any lessons that you learned. Or, you know, if there's another group of people out there going, Hey, we think this is a great idea, what do you need in a local government partner to make something like this work?

  Ryan Johnson 17:35

  So the way that I think about it is this: It's that so many people think, I care about this area and I want to do something in this area. The way that we thought about it- So our company started in 2018 in San Francisco, and we decided very quickly to not pursue something in San Francisco or basically the state of California, and instead be willing to go to a place that had the right conditions to succeed. And one of the most important things is, as we say, a place that welcomes growth. And so we looked all over the country. You need the normal things that a ground-up project, requires, especially a bigger one. You need to have the kind of job growth and the population growth. You need to have the right construction cost mix and all these things. The forward looking politicians was a key thing, and that led us to Tempe, where we found a wonderful piece of land right here on the light rail, and we talked with local city officials and understood what were the things that they cared about. It's a very multidisciplinary thing. You talk to the fire department, different community groups, etc. And we felt that we could bring forth a plan that could let us do something wonderful that people could get behind. We could have done this in San Francisco or California, but we just wouldn't be open today. And we wanted to get this open to show the world that you could build walkable neighborhoods again in the US in the 2020s. It's a huge plus that Tempe and Phoenix is the first market for Waymo, and it was almost poetic that the month our first residents moved in is when what I consider the real launch of Waymo, which is their Jaguar platform, in May 2023, was the same month. Now this is a place that people can visit, you know, other developers to gain the confidence. It's such a challenging business to be a developer. And also cities to get the confidence that this is going to work. Not only are the neighbors not going to be upset about it, they're going to love it. And our neighbors love coming here to shop, they love the open space, and people walk their dogs here and things like that. And it's so different from a lot of the places that we build in the US, where it's a gated community that doesn't add amenities and it adds lots of traffic.

  Chuck Marohn 19:42

  What were the conversations with the fire department like? I've seen so many of these go poorly, where it's like, Okay, I gotta have 40 foot clear zone to drive through here. You can't put a tree there. You can't put bollards there. I've gotta be able to, you know, access this and access that. It becomes very rote. I feel like that is even more true in the places that the chassis of the community, the DNA of the community, is kind of pure post World War Two development. You know, if we go to the northeast, the fire departments there are kind of used to having to have flexibility, because they've got to fit in the spaces. But when I go to the south, the southwest of the country, pretty much everybody there is like, All right, here's our here's our street section. We've bought the equipment to work in this area. If you want to do something weird, something different that doesn't fit this kind of standard cookie cutter model, we're going to have all kinds of problems. What was the fire department conversation in particular like?

  Ryan Johnson 20:44

  The fire department, along with other departments, has more questions when you're doing something different. That's part of the hard part is that people have more questions. But the way we thought about it is we listened to them first and understood what mattered to them, and took that into account for our design. So for example, right down the middle of our community is our central spine. We call it the Paseo. And other than the fact that it doesn't have normal cars, to the fire department, it looks like a normal road. And we say that it's only for food trucks and fire trucks, and there's some fire lanes and pull ins and things that that give them the the space that they need to to pull in that, you know, if that wasn't a concern, you might have built those paths in a more narrow way. We also have a very different type of access system. We have a ladder system that we brought over from Europe, that collapses. They understood and looked at it and and realized that it was a good solution. And so now they're happy with the design, and we still were able to build something beautiful. The fire department, the sanitation department, all of the different groups in these type of things are going to implement the design. And that's part of what makes it complex and hard, but with being really thoughtful and working through each of the challenges, you can make wonderful things in the US.

  Chuck Marohn 21:58

  So no hard nos, but you did have to, like, in a sense, accommodate their high-level concerns.

  Ryan Johnson 22:06

  There's lots of inputs that that matter to the fire department. You know, it was really interesting. So there's another project that that we're working on that we're excited to share more about soon. But the day that the meeting with the fire chief was was like the day that the LA fires had gone big, and it was really a reminder that, you know, if nothing's going wrong, you don't hear a lot about the fire department, but they have to think about all the worst case scenarios. And so you have to really respect what they do. And also, now that people can see this, so that same fire chief looked at this and actually looked at those fire lanes and said, that might be able to be a bit more narrow, right?

  Chuck Marohn 22:41

  Wow, okay.

  Ryan Johnson 22:43

  Right, because the the first one, you know, when we were doing Culdesac Tempe, it was this radical thing and we got laughed out of the room sometimes. And now that people can look at it, we've made it less radical, and that lets people think more about what else can be different.

  Chuck Marohn 22:57

  One of the critiques that I have heard, and I want to share with you, and let you talk about it, is that this could only happen in a college town. Arizona State, which I've been led to believe I'm supposed to dislike now for some reason, because my kid is going to go to Arizona? I don't know, maybe you can give me the local, cultural lay of the land. But Arizona State is, what, a mile and a half, two miles away, the campus is?

  Ryan Johnson 23:25

  Yes, a mile and a half. And I actually went to University of Arizona.

  Chuck Marohn 23:29

  Oh, you did?

  Ryan Johnson 23:30

  I did, yeah. And I grew up in a split household. My mom went to ASU, my dad went to U of A so it's a very intense and important rivalry, but there's also so much friendship there.

  Chuck Marohn 23:39

  Well, apparently you can overcome it in a marriage.

  Ryan Johnson 23:44

  Yes. And also, I think that the president of ASU is, is probably the best university president in the country. It's kind of a widely held opinion. And like I said, I went to the rival school, so that says a lot.

  Chuck Marohn 23:53

  Cool.

  Ryan Johnson 23:55

  And they've really grown Tempe and used scale as a force for economic growth. So about 15 years ago, they moved over 10,000 students from their Tempe campus to downtown Phoenix, and that really catalyzed the boom in downtown Phoenix that we see today. They've now built one building in downtown Mesa, on their way to building more, and showing the growth there while still growing the core here in Tempe. And they also built a large online school. While Harvard and MIT were doing edX, which was trying to make online education elite, they said, We don't care about the rankings. We care about educating people, and that's our goal. That's really transformed Tempe, and it was paired with this project to build a lake in the middle of a river that now is this booming place and has a wonderful bike lane, the best in the state. The dynamic is, there's lots of there's lots of students in the area, but we see a broad set of people that live at Culdesac Tempe. I think we may even have more ASU employees than students, and that reflects the broad demand that we see for walkable neighborhoods. The National Association of REALTORS does this study every three years now, where the majority of every generation would pay a premium to live in a walkable neighborhood, including 92% of Gen Z. And we see that in the demand here, where we see all demographics here.

  Chuck Marohn 25:18

  I was reminded of when I was young, there was this car company called Saturn. I don't know if you have ever heard-

  Ryan Johnson 25:25

  I remember Saturn.

  Chuck Marohn 25:26

  You do remember Saturn! Okay.

  Ryan Johnson 25:26

  And the accidental ad about car dependency, is that the one?

  Chuck Marohn 25:30

  No, I was- Okay, when I graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1995 and I had income. I had grown up on a farm. We had never had cars that were reliable. I had junky cars all through college, you know, it always quit when you were going to the job interview or doing the like thing you needed, right? And I thought, I'm a professional, I'm going to get a car, like I'm going to get a real car. And I kind of bought into this idea that cars made by hand, by, you know, Americans, the Saturn company. We love our cars. We care for them. I feel like the fascinating thing about Saturn, or the instructive thing to me, because it went away. It didn't work. It was, you know, it was killed off finally in the Great Recession. Saturn was a movement of people to purchase this thing that ultimately was a functional car, but also kind of a lifestyle thing. And it was weird, because driving around in a Saturn, people in other Saturns would honk at you, wave at you, all that. There was a community around it that I've not had, you know, with my Honda or whatever. How much of the appeal of Culdesac is belonging to something new, something edgy, something trying to do something different? And how much of this is just people making a choice in a marketplace like, Hey, I'm I want to live in this area. I'm looking for a place. There's one available here. Boy, I like this. The economics works. How much when you're talking to people, when you're moving in people, when these units are going, how much of it is, hey, you're a you're a pioneer, doing something heroic? And how much of it is, hey, this is just like one option of many but here's the advantages? What's the vibe?

  Ryan Johnson 27:21

  Having a car isn't freedom. Car dependency is the opposite of freedom. Freedom is being able to get around your way and to choose the right method for a given trip. We're all about transportation freedom. It's one of the biggest things here. We have families who value safety. They love the light rail and they love the biking. Also, let's not forget about people who can't or they're not able to drive. We have a resident who's who's vision impaired, who says it's the first time she's lived in a community that felt like it was designed for her. And people also want to have a sense of belonging, and they want to know their neighbors. That's one of the biggest predictors of happiness in communities. And it's a tragedy that we've got this loneliness epidemic, and a big reason why is that we're building two kinds of housing. We're building sprawl, where it is lonely and has a painful commute, and then we're building apartment buildings where you don't say hi to people in the elevator and it's got double loaded corridors, and it's somehow both lonely and claustrophobic. People prefer to save money and spend on other things. Saving over $1,000 a month can allow for the freedom to do lots of other things, not being forced into a car.

  Chuck Marohn 28:31

  Does your thing feel like a startup launch? Does it feel like a movement that you're building? Or are you just a developer? I'm just building I'm just building housing that is not available in the market.

  Ryan Johnson 28:44

  It's a movement. This is something that goes back to college. I was a kid that grew up in the suburbs of Phoenix and had an SUV and lived on a golf course, like the full Phoenix stereotype, and I'd only been to the beach in Mexico. When I went to U of A, it was on this scholarship. I turned down MIT for this very generous scholarship. Part of it is that I use that money as the seed capital to get into real estate. Part of it is that they sent the class abroad, and so they sent our group of 20 to Budapest. And I said, Wow, this is a much better place to build a city with great transportation and the vibrancy on the street and the energy of all the people there. And then I saw lots of other cities and went to 60 countries, you know, before I was 30, and lived in a handful. And saw lots of different inspiration of different pieces that that can help make a place great. And wanted to bring those back here to the US. And also wanted to to start a movement to show people that we can build walkable neighborhoods again in the US in the 2020s. And the impact that these things have is so great. So you know, pick your favorite social impact metric. Whether it's climate, health, happiness, loneliness, low cost of living, low taxes, across a broad spectrum of things, helping more people live in walkable neighborhoods really moves the needle on those. And I had spent time, I interned at the World Bank, and cared a lot about these different things. I worked for the New York City subway for a little while. And I found it hard to move the needle, at least for me personally. But the wonderful thing is that if we could build walkable neighborhoods again, and people will actually pay a premium, and when something works, it will scale. And so this is meant to not just show that this works for us and we have ambitions to build more, but also to show other cities and other developers that they can build like this and it will go well, because that's where we're going to get the huge impact. We need to build many millions of new, walkable homes in the US.

  Chuck Marohn 30:38

  I have heard that you're generous with your time, in the sense that you want to build more of these and build more like this. And I've even heard in different cities and different locations, maybe you can elaborate on that, but I've also heard that you do want people to copy your model, like, there's actually a intent that you have that like, Hey, I don't want to be the only one doing these. Is that a fair assessment?

  Ryan Johnson 31:02

  Absolutely, and we spend a lot of time. We get visitors from other cities, whether it's politicians or other developers, and we want to show them that this works and they can have the confidence, that they can use this as a reference project. The scale of this industry is so large. I mean, real estate is such a massive industry, and we need to be building many millions of of new walkable homes. And Culdedac wants to build lots of those, but we also know that lots of others should can and should be building them as well. It's so much bigger than a single project. It's about sharing the kind of housing Americans want and deserve.

  Chuck Marohn 31:42

  You blew my mind in the sense that you put this in the desert. Because if you would have said first car-free city in the US, I would have been like, okay, it's not going to be in the desert. As you look at new sites, new locations, new places to do this, what are the criteria for you that would make a really good location for Culdesac number two, or someone who would want to copy your model?

  Ryan Johnson 32:08

  The more area is already walkable, the easier it is to make something. To make huge shifts, and the larger something is, the more you can really shape that area. And the elephant in the room is that the US forgot how to build new cities, and there's no reason why. And as part of why our cities have become stagnant -- you know, I think the villages in Florida is, you know, the only notable scale city that's been built in the last 75 years, or something like that, depending on how you how you judge it. And as a result, our cities have become stagnant. They're not using the latest technologies. We can build new cities significantly better. So the US needs to restart that engine at some point. But right now, there's things at neighborhood scale that can make a big difference. And there's also smaller infill things. We have a couple pocket neighborhoods that we're building in Atlanta that are showing a different way, and we've got other projects. Because of what we built in Tempe, we've had lots of people visit and asked us to build in in their area.

  Chuck Marohn 33:11

  Well, this was going to be my my follow up question is, what should existing cities take away from this? Because it's one thing to build a new place. We have, you know, millions and millions of of acres of neighborhoods that need love, need rehab, need thickening up, need maturing. How do the the lessons that you've learned here translate into places like that?

  Ryan Johnson 33:36

  So for cities, it's to stop making it illegal to build the kind of housing that people actually want that will move the needle. In lots of places, there's simple policy ships that will unlock a lot of different supply. For developers, it's to not mistake the lack of options for demand, right? If you see people that are not living in a walkable neighborhood or not going car-free, don't just assume that that's because they don't want to. Assume that there's a good chance that they just didn't have a good option for them, and if you build it, they will come.

  Chuck Marohn 34:05

  Does there have to be a scale of it? I live in a walkable neighborhood. I go long stretch of time without driving. I drive to the airport because it's two hours away, but I can pretty much live my life here without driving. But I'm like a weird anomaly. I've told this story a few times, where I was going to meet my neighbor at the park, and it's two blocks away, and I walked and my neighbor drove. There's a culture here. Do you have to reach a certain scale? Is there a certain amount, or just start where you're at?

  Ryan Johnson 34:40

  There's not a magic number.

  Chuck Marohn 34:41

  Yeah.

  Ryan Johnson 34:42

  So, people want to live in walkable neighborhoods, and they also want to live next to a walkable neighborhood. So there's been lots of housing built around us, and those projects list us as their amenities. So we're unlocking even more development. If you build something bigger, you can do more interesting things, but small projects work really well also. In areas that are already working, allowing for more density can move the needle.

  Chuck Marohn 35:09

  I have seen stories of people who live in Culdesac. What we would say, from a Strong Towns perspective, is co-owning the place. Doing their own stuff with the public space, you know, putting out bike racks, planting gardens, that kind of thing. Can you elaborate on that? Because I've just, I've seen the stories, and I've heard the vibe. To me, this is one of the more exciting aspects of building a community, is when people who live there don't think, Hey, I'm paying rent or I bought a unit and therefore provide me service, but I co-own this space, and therefore I'm going to assert that ownership. Talk about how that is maybe different in Culdesac than you'd find in your typical American suburb.

  Ryan Johnson 35:58

  Well, a lot of people don't know their neighbors. You know, we have residents that say that they've made more connections at Culdesac living here six months than 15 years living in the suburbs. And that creates a lot of positive things. And they host different events, and they join other events. The retail has the opportunity to have things that create more connections. There's lots of different creative spaces and creative ideas and traditions, and there's new ones happening all the time. I went into the gym the other day, and they had done a pet rock garden to just add a bunch of character there. There's things like this that are that are happening all the time. And also in the broader area. So this has become a contribution not just to Culdesac Tempe, but to the broader neighborhood. It's been support systems for families -- we've had, you know, the first baby born a Culdesac -- and group workouts. There's group bike rides. There's, you know, a resident that wanted to show more people how to be confident getting more places on a bike and has organized recurring rides. There's walks. There's lots of spontaneous things, and you can't plan these things, right? If we had guessed what would resonate. And we throw some events ourselves. Some do really well, and then some we some would go back to the drawing board. But over time, a picture emerges and that bottom-up energy creates something special.

  Chuck Marohn 37:15

  You said you've been car-free for 15 years.

  Ryan Johnson 37:18

  Right.

  Chuck Marohn 37:19

  How has your life changed now that you live in Culdesac? What's it like for you?

  Ryan Johnson 37:26

  Yeah, this is a place where I would want to live, even if I wasn't doing Culdesac. So in that sense, it's, you know, I knew that I would love it. I feel free, and I choose the different trips. I love getting around on ebikes, and there's lots of great places to go nearby. Ebikes are a sneakily important technology because you can go so much farther than bikes.

  Chuck Marohn 37:50

  They are wicked, yeah.

  Ryan Johnson 37:52

  It works especially well in the summer. So you know, it's over 110 in Phoenix right now, and ebiking you get a nice breeze, to different places. I also I'll take Lyft or Waymo to go to any of the places that I normally would go, or for a longer trip, I'll rent a car. Sometimes you can take long Lyfts, and the math actually works better than flights, but that's another story. I'm happier. I host friends. I'm part of the resident events. There's lots of exciting retail things. We have a beer garden that I invite friends to. And it's really inspiring and exciting to watch the small businesses thrive. We love our small businesses, and we love when they become medium sized businesses.

  Chuck Marohn 38:34

  Let me ask this as a final question, and this might be unfair, because I'm guessing, you're a young guy, you haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this. But you're doing something different, something unique, something that I think, you know, you would even acknowledge is groundbreaking, in a way. I'm guessing you haven't spent a lot of time thinking about your legacy, but if you had to, if you said, Okay, someday they will write about the movement that I've started or the things that come after, and they'll point to Culdesac as being a turning point. What do you hope that people say? What do you hope that comes of this in a bigger sense?

  Ryan Johnson 39:15

  That we brought walkable neighborhoods back to the US, and we showed people all the benefits from them. That they make people happier, healthier, they lower taxes, they lower cost of living. It's a great thing for climate, and it's what we used to build, before cars. And then there was this era in the US where we built not the right things, as demonstrated perhaps no more clearly than in Phoenix. And we brought that back, and then it made the country and world a better place.

  Chuck Marohn 39:48

  Ryan, you're you're a peach of a guy. I knew I would like talking to you. I'm excited to come visit at some point, and now I'm even more excited. Ryan Johnson, with Culdesac, thanks for taking the time to chat with us. And thanks for being brave and stepping out and doing something a little bit different, and for being, you know, a lighthouse for people to see. So thank you so much.

  Ryan Johnson 40:12

  Thanks for having me on and you should stop by Culdesac when you're when you go to Parents Weekend at U of A.

  Chuck Marohn 40:18

  Well, the way flights are, we might be flying into Phoenix. So that could work. Let's figure it out. Do I have to take the light rail? Because I think I have to rent a car to get to Tucson? So maybe we'd have to, we'd have to figure that out. You'd have to give me some advice,

  Ryan Johnson 40:34

  As long as you try a Waymo while you're here.

  Chuck Marohn 40:37

  I have never tried a Waymo. It may shock you, but we don't have them in central Minnesota. We don't even have Uber or Lyft in central Minnesota where I'm at. So, you know, we're getting there. We live the slow life here. You should come back to St Paul and come up here and visit someday. Come in the winter, and we'll have a good time.

  Ryan Johnson 40:58

  All right, the winter.

  Chuck Marohn 41:02

  All right. Ryan Johnson with Culdesac, thanks everybody for listening and keep doing what you can to build a strong town.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• Learn more about Culdesac.

• Chuck Marohn (Substack)

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