Did Silicon Valley Reinvent the Apartment Building?
Culdesac is a terrible startup: a deep dive into some techbros trying to build car-free cities and failing to deliver
There is a startup called Culdesac. It claims to be in the business of building car-free neighborhoods with supporting amenities in sprawling, car-dependent cities. Sounds great, right?
Except what it actually ends up building is a large apartment complex that lacks the crucial supportive amenities that were promised, that ends up being incredibly car-dependent as a result, and just generally doesn’t do (and can’t do) anything Culdesac says they want to do.
All of this is to get in on the walkable cities / anti-car grift that’s become in vogue lately. You know the one, hell, that’s how all of this started – with Elon trying to reinvent a damn bus.
You see, after almost a century of booming growth, it appears that the tide is finally turning on the automobile. Gas-powered cars are responsible for almost a whopping 20% of America’s carbon emissions. They are dangerous to operate and deadly for pedestrians, bicyclists, and drivers alike, leading to tens of thousands of Americans dying in car crashes each year. Their exhaust can cause numerous negative health consequences. They are inherently inefficient and cause us to choke in ever-worsening traffic. They gobble up prime real estate in cities for the most stupid reason – parking, space that the pandemic has taught us could be used for eating, drinking, partying, or just hanging out. The list can go on.
In short, the car is the new black sheep of transportation, and the idea of recentering our cities away from the automobile is increasingly gaining steam, and everybody is trying to get in on the action. In any event, enter Culdesac – a startup that aims to build car-free neighborhoods of up to 10,000 residents from scratch, and prioritizing their interventions in the most sprawling cities in America.
To anyone interested in creating less auto-centric cities, this sounds great. To create entire car-free neighborhoods is a tall order, and weaning some of the most auto-centric places in America – the motherland of strip malls – even more so. To see a startup taking on such an ambitious mission is almost heartening. In fact, at first glance Culdesac’s mission and approach seem nothing short of revolutionary.
Unfortunately, if you take a closer look, everything falls apart.
Is It a Neighborhood or an Apartment Building?
You see, this is the startup world. Just because it’s part of the stated vision doesn’t mean it’s going to be implemented in practice. Culdesac’s first “neighborhood” in Tempe, Arizona, if it can even be called that, is only supposed to house “up to 1,000 residents” – a far cry from the original concept of 10,000 residents. It is unclear when, if ever, they could get enough funding to do a full build-out of a 10,000-resident neighborhood.
You might be hesitant to criticize Culdesac for building a scaled-down prototype – I mean, after all, prototyping is part of the design process. But, the problem here isn’t that the first neighborhood is smaller than they promised, it’s that it’s functionally impossible to create a “car-free” development if it doesn’t meet a certain size threshold.
Obviously, being “car-free” isn’t just about getting rid of your car – after your car is gone, there will still be places you need to go and things you need to do – things like going to the store, going to work, running errands, and just random, general outings, and the whole point of designing a car-free community – or really just reducing car usage in general – is making as many of those trips doable without a car as possible. If this sounds like a tall order, it is because it is, which is why car-free zones are generally proposed or tried in either places like the city center of Berlin, served by dozens upon dozens of subway, train, tram and bus lines and so are in no shortage of alternative modes of transportation; or geographically compact places like Pontevedra in Galicia, where almost the entire city (and all the things one can do in it) can fit in an easily-walkable one-mile radius.
The Phoenix metro area, of course, is nothing close to either of those situations. In fact, the closest grocery store to the Culdesac “neighborhood” is a shopping plaza with a Safeway and an H-Mart. It is 1.7 miles away, and not even in the same suburb as the neighborhood itself (in Culdesac’s defense, you could take the light rail train for that journey. In my defense, it only comes every twenty minutes when it’s not rush hour, and you have to cross a 10-lane arterial plus a sea of parking lots to get from the station to the store. Other essential services can be even further away.
This is why when designing a car-free neighborhood, it’s important to build as many accompanying amenities and services as possible so that the neighborhood can be self-sustaining in a way, thereby replacing residents’ would-be vehicle trips to services miles away from the neighborhood with short, car-free trips within the neighborhood. And to Culdesac’s credit, they seem to recognize this in principle, and has set aside commercial space in their “neighborhood”. And, if the neighborhood had had anything close to 10,000 residents, it could easily support a grocery store. But, because the “neighborhood” is so small, none of the services the residents need can be viable there. The grocery store that Culdesac has promised over and over to be part of the development has turned out to be something called a “Street Corner Urban Market”, which self-describes as “a notch… above your typical convenience store”. A quick Google Images search will reveal to you that it’s… not. To save you the pain, I’ll just tell you that it’s a gentrified liquor store with kombucha on tap.
Replacing the promised grocery store that’s supposed to be a key piece of how you’ll support your “car-free” neighborhood with a yassified liquor store is perhaps the most hilarious part of this whole exercise. Not only is this so-called market completely useless for anyone who actually needs groceries, for whom the closest options are still, if you remember, 1.7 miles and a town away; but, it’s also intensely ironic considering that having only a liquor or convenience store to rely on for groceries, as opposed to a full-service supermarket, is a common definition of a food desert, and “Did Silicon Valley Reinvent the Food Desert” is obviously comedic gold.
But, at the same time, it’s also the only sound business decision that can be made here. A population of 1,000 can’t support a full-sized grocery store, period, and this was their only option short of just opening one and subsidizing its massive losses indefinitely as the cost of doing business and, well, if they had that kind of money, they’d just… build a bigger neighborhood to begin with.
It’s Not Really Car-Free, Is It?
So, by any stretch of the imagination, Culdesac has failed to build a “car-free neighborhood” – it seems all but certain that its residents will still need to use a car for many, if not most things they do in daily life. And, it seems like Culdesac knows it too. They’ve sneakily rebranded their definition of “car-free” from what the assumed definition to be – not needing a car – to something hilariously pathetic – not owning a car, but needing one to get around anyway.
Ok, fine, I added that last part, but that is what their actions are implying, because they’re now promising every resident a premium Lyft membership so they get 15% off on the many, many rides they’ll need to order to get around. They’ve also brought in a fleet of cars for residents to use as a carshare. In other words, their definition of “car-free” isn’t about being able to go places and do things without a car – you still need a car for everything, they’ve just made it so that you’re using a car that you don’t personally own.
Sure, Culdesac would probably argue that their definition of “car-free” – that is, not owning a car, and only accessing a car through carshares or rideshares – is technically correct and/or logically consistent (which it is), but that’s not the point. If the goal is to reduce car usage, ownership of the car really doesn’t mean anything, and you’d much rather have someone who has a car parked in their driveway that they drive for 20 miles a month than a guy living in Culdesac’s “neighborhood” taking 10-mile Uber rides every other day.
Oh, and the thing about rideshares is that they’re actually incredibly, monstrously bad at reducing car usage, because the research shows that in American cities, on average, almost half of all the mileage incurred by Ubers and Lyfts are done while they are carrying zero passengers. That’s right: Ubers and Lyfts are just driving empty half the time. Of course, this makes sense when you think about how a Lyft works – there are a lot of inefficiencies in the process: when you call the car, they first have to come to you (while empty), then they’ll maybe have to circle the block a few times (while empty) because you weren’t ready at the curb to get on the car the first time, and then once they drop you off at your random destination where it’s highly unlikely they’ll find another rider in the immediate vicinity, they’ll have to drive somewhere else to start the whole process again (while empty). The research just quantifies just how much these inefficiencies add up, and the answer is, well, a frightening amount. Basically, for every 10 miles of an actual Lyft ride you take, Lyfts have to be on the road for 9 more miles. So, by not using your own car to take a trip and calling a Lyft instead, you’re actually adding to – nay, practically doubling your car usage. To promote Lyft rides to residents in a community that’s supposed to be about reducing car-usage is a joke, and to suggest that Lyft rides can somehow be part of the solution to becoming car-free is sheer lunacy.
Oh, did I mention that the President of Lyft is on the Board of Culdesac? Because of course he is.
And finally, for the cherry on top, Culdesac built a parking lot in their neighborhood. They’re claiming it’s just for visitors only which, like, sure, Jan. All of these are just embarrassing admissions of defeat and failure. Their prototype straight up doesn’t work, and even they know it.
And to be completely fair to Culdesac, this is not all their fault, it’s an issue that plagues all startups on account of how the industry runs. It requires startups to vastly overstretch and propose big, flashy ideas in order to get attention and, by extension, funding, but those ideas are by their very nature unimplementable, especially at the beginning. It’s a formula that all but guarantees overpromise and underdelivery, but it’s just a lot worse for Culdesac because they’ve proposed an idea that basically can’t work unless implemented at scale.
Wait, It’s All Real Estate Developers?
So, to sum up, we have a startup that claims to build car-free neighborhoods with supporting amenities in sprawling, car-dependent cities, but ends up building is a development for 1,000 residents in 761 units, which is more like the size of a large apartment complex than the neighborhood that was promised; it lacks the crucial supportive amenities that were promised; it also isn’t actually car-free as promised because it’s actually incredibly car-dependent. It literally doesn’t do (and can’t do) anything Culdesac says they want to do.
So, at the end of the day, what do we really have here with Culdesac (besides, you know, a massive scam)? To answer that question, we need to talk about Skye at McClintock Station. What? You haven’t heard of Skye at McClintock Station? Of course you haven’t, and that’s the point, because I literally just scrolled around on Google Maps for big-ish, new-ish apartment complex developments near the Culdesac site, and Skye at McClintock Station was the first one I found, just a couple blocks down the road from the site. You shouldn’t have heard about it because there’s nothing special to hear: it’s just a new luxury apartment complex with 423 units, a pool, and some other resident amenities, much like the hundreds, if not thousands, of developments like it under construction all over America as we speak, and it would be insane to claim that this very generic apartment complex development is somehow worthy of national attention.
And yet, at its core, there’s nothing different between what Culdesac is building and Skye at McClintock Station (or any other apartment complex in Tempe). At its core, Culdesac Tempe is just an un-noteworthy 761-unit apartment complex in the Phoenix metro area. But, instead of just being a real estate development, it has branded itself as a startup, and instead of developing a run-of-the-mill apartment community with a few commercial spaces, it has marketed itself as a “car-free neighborhood”, all despite that claim being, as we’ve discussed, laughably untrue.
It’s easy based on the fact that their “car-free neighborhood” is neither a neighborhood nor car-free to mistakenly conclude that Culdesac is a failure. And, sure, if you treat them as an urban planning startup, then you’d be right. But – and you can probably guess where I’m going with this – they’re not one. Rather, they’re a real estate developer pretending to be an urban planning startup for marketing purposes – specifically, so they can exploit the unearned hype and uncritical media coverage (which is functionally just more hype) that startups get. In this context, it doesn’t matter that the urban planning ideas that underpin their whole message doesn’t work, and could never work, because all that actually matters is that they parrot the message for long enough to get treated like an innovative startup and get the press coverage that comes with it – you know, the kind of press coverage that a shitty apartment complex in Tempe, Arizona would never get (and has no business getting).
And, in that respect, they have absolutely succeeded. The fawning national media coverage Culdesac received not only translates to what must be millions of dollars’ worth of free publicity, but also implicit legitimacy from some of the biggest media names in the space that allows them to continue to proselytize their bogus ideas in urban planning. Sure, those ideas might be an utter joke, but they’re nothing but the window dressing of what the actual substance of the Culdesac business is – developing and marketing real estate. And the fact that we are here, talking at-length about a project that could easily have just been a random real estate development in suburban Phoenix so unremarkable that might not even make the local news? That shows you just how brilliant this marketing strategy has been. What Culdesac here has been truly ingenious – a masterclass in “innovation-washing” – you know, greenwashing, but for innovation.
I know, it’s a dumb word, but that’s the world we live in.
So, after all of that, it would probably not surprise you that if you check the “Meet the Team” section of the Culdesac website, you’ll find that it’s just choke-full of real estate developers which, yeah, because it’s a real estate company, plain and simple. Of course, there are some non-real estate folks too – programmers, customer relations managers, etc. But, curiously, no urban planners or designers, which is a pretty odd thing to find for a company where the urban planning concept is so integral to its identity. Hell, you’d think they’d have one there, if only for show. But, no. The only person in the list of names with urban planning or design listed in their short bios is a guy whose specialty is “Urban Planning & Construction” – and if you read his bio, you’ll find that he is actually a “real estate development and construction manager” which, absolutely nothing wrong with that but, again, real estate company. Oh, also, one of the founders worked for with the MTA for less than year, right after working as a McKinsey consultant and right before working for Bain Capital. Also, instead of using his college scholarship money to, you know, pay for school, he used it to become a landlord. So, yeah, super reassuring resume.
At this point, you might logically ask: if they don’t have a single urban planner or designer on staff, who did all these nice-looking renderings of the neighborhoods they’ve put out (or, you know, the architecture design that they show)?
There’s a simple answer to that - they were done by Opticos Design, an architecture and urban design firm based in Berkeley that they just hired to draw these. To be clear, I have nothing against Opticos – in fact, I have tremendous admiration for them. They’re the folks that first came up with the concept of “missing middle housing”, which has become one of the biggest hot-button issues in urbanism today; they do amazing, pioneering work all over the country, and these designs for Culdesac Tempe are no exception. If we just consider these designs in a vacuum as the plans for a generic mixed-use residential and commercial development on a site in Arizona, they’re top-notch.
And we can probably just consider the designs in a vacuum, too, because that appears to be in the environment in which they were made. See, on a webpage documenting an award Opticos won for the design, the roles were described as follows:
Opticos Design: principal firm, architecture and planning
Culdesac: client, developer
Basically, Culdesac, a real estate company with no experience in urban design, paid some smart people money to come up with a design for them to make their idea look less stupid, in the same way the bad guy billionaire in Glass Onion paid for some puzzle boxes to be made.
And the conspicuous absence of urbanists at this startup is almost certainly no coincidence. This is perhaps the most grotesque aspect of this whole thing: remember, in order for it to succeed, Culdesac needs to convince everybody that their idea works, but it does not have to make their idea actually work. And once we remind ourselves of this fact, it becomes clear how unnecessary urbanists would be to the Culdesac team: they don’t need to rely on urban planning expertise on how to make the car-free neighborhood work because they don’t need it to work, and having people on the team who can easily understand and explain, as I just did to you, why their idea won’t work while they’re trying to trick people into thinking they will? Well, that’s just a liability. In fact, it is difficult to not come to the conclusion that Culdesac, the startup that’s supposedly all about better urban design, is actually better off having no one on staff who knows urban design. The urban design is all just a marketing prop for the real estate development: and the fewer people know that the prop isn’t actually real or functional, the better.
Please, for the Love of God, Stop Tweeting
The tendency to focus on large, expensive overhauls and undertaking over small, unflashy solutions and routine maintenance is a problem that plagues most industries – it is human nature at work: we like shiny new objects. This is why healthy, robust discourse in the public forum can sometimes be good and sometimes even transformative for an industry when it can help focus attention on the things that matter, and set the agenda through the discourse by making people talk about the important stuff.
Or, you know, it could go terribly wrong, and the discourse gets taken over by dumb distractions that happen to be bigger, newer, or shinier. The problem is especially dire in the field of urban planning and design because of just how much of the arsenal of proven solutions are from the small, unflashy bucket – things like slightly more frequent bus service, a physical separator for the bike lane, or a parking space turned into an outdoor dining space. Things like these are the unglamorous, unsung heroes of urban design: they are easily and quickly implemented, shown to work, and cost next to nothing to put in place when compared against the hundreds of millions Culdesac has devoured. But, one can see why these can sound less exciting than the Culdesac social media accounts (and the media they’ve tricked into uncritically reporting their nonsense) yelling “car-free neighborhood built entirely from scratch in the sprawliest place in America” at the top of their lungs.
Culdesac isn’t guilty for having a social media presence – of course, they should be allowed to promote their business, show off their progress, spotlight members of their team, what have you; and they do a lot of that on their Twitter. But those aren’t the tweets that get engagement: it’s the other ones we talked about that do: the ones where they share stale urbanism content, or retweet cool urban designs they didn’t create (and are never going to create), or where their aforementioned McKinsey- and Bain Capital-alum founder shamelessly tries to make their cumulative one (1) year’s experience (or, if you’re being exact, ten months, but who’s counting) working in jobs that are even remotely related to urban planning less less pathetic than it actually is. None of these, of course, are tweeted out for fun. It’s just another aspect of the greenwashing or innovation-washing or whatever you want to call it. See? We’re urbanists! See? We have progressive ideas about car-free cities! See? We’re credible! And now that we have your attention and convinced you that we are legitimate, here’s a totally bonkers idea about a car-free neighborhood in Arizona that’s really just a large apartment complex that isn’t actually car-free.
And that is the biggest (and perhaps only) point here. Because for all of its wrongdoing, Culdesac didn’t force anybody to buy what it was selling – its fans and supporters did that themselves, and that is a troubling thing. Culdesac is a valuable lesson and a teachable moment to anyone existing in the world today, where capital (to which a real estate startup headed by a Bain Capital alum probably has a lot better access than you) can effectively purchase legitimacy, and the barrier to entry for claiming expertise online has fallen to virtually zero. In other words, with enough money to back up enough social media presence, you could make significant amounts of people buy into claims you have no professional qualifications spreading. But, with enough money is really the key point here: what Culdesac pulled off here is only possible because it has access and proximity to capital. Being labeled an innovative start-up is integral to Culdesac’s success, which is already a hint that the label is not for everyone: for example, a two-bit Phoenix-based apartment developer (which is, again, what Culdesac essentially is) that registers an LLC won’t ever be called a “start-up”: it’s just a company, maybe a small business, if it’s lucky.
To be a “start-up”, however, is to be a part of the in-group, the weirdly cultish social network centered around Silicon Valley that the entire ecosystem revolves around. To be a “start-up” implies having social capital that being in the start-up ecosystem gives you. That social capital comes in the form of having your founder be a Bain Capital alum, or having the founder of Lyft be on your board, or being backed by an accelerator like Y Combinator – all of which Culdesac has. All of these things is what gave the operation legitimacy and credibility that then allows them to be newsworthy, allows their staff to be assumed to be innovators who know what they’re doing, allows their ideas to be thought of as new and ingenious as opposed to previously untried because they’re stupid and, of course, allows for them to have the funding to spam-tweet out things that, owing to the previous three things, are assumed to be legit. And given all of that, it’s much easier to lie than to fact-check, and it is much easier for Culdesac to keep tweeting out untrue boasts of what its glorified apartment complex can do in under 280 characters or less than for me to delve in-depth into why these claims are false or misleading.
(And hey, while we’re at it, don’t take my word for it on anything, either – it’s why I’ve included links to sources and numbers and calculations for how I get to these conclusions: but those are all things that won’t fit into the 280-character limit for a Culdesac tweet, I suppose.)
In many ways, what we’re talking about here is conceptually not too different from any of the other sorts of rampant disinformation we see in the world today (see: 2016 election, 2020 election, Covid vaccines). Granted, a random real estate startup doing bad urbanism isn’t as important as Covid or the future of American democracy, but this whole thing should nonetheless serve as a reminder for us in the present age: to treat substance over fluff; to separate real experts who come from a place of cautious humility from attention-seeking charlatans promising the stars but only end up delivering a real-life demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger Effect; and to distinguish real knowledge from unproven marketing dressed in that sheep’s clothing called “innovation.”
With that said, Culdesac is still undoubtedly culpable for its spamming. To have the finite attention of the industry distracted from these things that actually work and matter to a miracle cure-esque urban planning hot take desperately trying to conceal how bad it truly is by spamming urbanist Twitter with non-original content is bad enough. But, to have the whole operation to all be a gimmick to market shitty real estate in suburban Phoenix? That somehow feels worse, and more insulting, and more exploitative.
And it might seem harsh to call it all a gimmick, especially when you’re looking at all the pretty renderings their account won’t stop tweeting out at every opportunity. Surely, they’ve done at least something halfway decent here? It has to be better than nothing, or better than the status quo, or a step forward in the right direction, right? But the answer is, painfully, frustratingly, maddeningly: no, it’s not even better than nothing.
Culdesac has at this point blown over $200 million on this idea and their “neighborhood” that houses 1,000 people that isn’t actually car-free. Frankly, if they were serious about the mission of getting people car-free, they’d be better off literally just dividing that cash a thousand ways and paying $200,000 in cash to anyone who’d be willing to give up their car. Hell, I’d take that deal, wouldn’t you?