EMERGENCE CANNOT BE NUDGED.

There's an interesting planned use development called Culdesac, which is itself an ironic choice for a development that has none, in the midst of an Arizonan transit desert.

We’re building the first car-free city in the U.S., starting with our first neighborhood - Culdesac Tempe. Located 2 miles away at 2025 E. Apache, it’s a 1000 resident car-free neighborhood that is the first of its kind.

We’re dedicated to building people-first cities by combining technology, real estate, and human connection to improve our quality of life. By removing parking and shifting towards micro-mobility, we create ample space for people to experience life at their front door and live in a vibrant community designed specifically for them, not cars.

The "first of its kind" refers to the car-free by design, such as it is.  It's possible to live car-free in a major city, and to some extent in the right kind of smaller town.  Strong Towns contributor Edward Erfurt notes that point, as well as several other objections.

Culdesac has drawn disproportionate criticism from two groups: those who can't imagine a car-free community in a city like Phoenix, and those who dismiss the project as more of a playground than a practical, scalable model.

It’s easy for those accustomed to car dependency to question a development that intentionally removes cars from the equation. What happens when you leave Culdesac? How do you get around then? But these questions aren’t unique to Culdesac; they’re asked in cities like New York, Boston and Philadelphia, where many people navigate daily life without a personal vehicle.

As for those who think Culdesac is just a flashy experiment, there’s a good reason Culdesac is in a league of its own: Developments like it are nearly impossible to replicate. Creating something like Culdesac requires reforming parking mandates, relaxing zoning restrictions to be more permissive, and challenging the entrenched systems that prioritize stroads, strip malls and parking lots. Without those changes, the process would be prohibitively expensive. Those added costs don't just burden developers — they are ultimately passed on to future residents, who pay the price for restrictive policies.

Well, yes, the best thing for government to do in many allegedly collective action situations is to do less, as Mr Erfurt noted to begin his story.

For the past 80 years, development in North America has been shaped by a suburban experiment so pervasive that it now feels like the only way to build. But this approach — dictated by rigid zoning laws, parking mandates and car-centric infrastructure — is a radical departure from the traditional, incremental growth that shaped cities for centuries.

Instead of interconnected neighborhoods, we've built isolated subdivisions, oversized roadways, and commercial districts that separate daily needs from where people live. This pattern has strained local economies, made car dependency unavoidable, and eroded the social fabric of our communities. Now, as cities struggle with mounting infrastructure costs, failing retail corridors and housing shortages, more and more people are questioning whether this approach is sustainable. The signs of failure are hard to ignore.

Those rigidities might have followed from mistaken thinking.  The Levittowns that took shape on farmland at some distance from the major rail or rapid transit routes made use of Fordist manufacturing techniques applied to building houses at scale.

Purchasing mass acreage, “subdividing” lots, and contracted crews to build countless homes at economies of scale, Levitt offered affordable suburban housing to veterans and their families. Levitt became the prophet of the new suburbs, heralding a massive internal migration. The country’s suburban share of the population rose from 19.5% in 1940 to 30.7% by 1960. Homeownership rates rose from 44% in 1940 to almost 62% in 1960. Between 1940 and 1950, suburban communities of greater than 10,000 people grew 22.1%, and planned communities grew at an astonishing rate of 126.1%.

Technocracy allegedly tamed the Great Depression, technocracy produced the implements of winning the war, so why not try technocracy to plan land use?

And thus the conditions that make the likes of Culdesac so intriguing, and perhaps so quixotic, began.  There were all those look-alike houses on those slightly larger than urban lots with a driveway and space for at least a car-port because it was cheaper to build them that way.  "Construction workers were trained to do one step at each house (which were spaced 60 feet apart) instead of building each house up from scratch individually."  One man sets the stud on the sole-plate, another toe-nails it, a third sets the door-frame ... 

Restrictive zoning and parking minimums and set-backs and the like came later, and as all three articles I just referred to noted, those regulatory impedimenta might have had other, more exclusionary, purposes in mind.  (That's incidental to the matter at hand, dear reader.)  It's those regulatory impedimenta that Mr Erfurt referred to, and it is those that pre-empted the emergence of car-free living in the Southwest.

While streetcars allowed people to travel easily within a city, they also ushered in a wave of housing development outside of urban centers. This occurred for two primary reasons. First, most streetcar companies charged a flat fee for riders, regardless of transfers. Local governments awarded streetcar companies monopolies in exchange for holding fares at a steady price (usually five cents). This gave people the opportunity to afford to live further outside of the city and commute in for work.

Second, land outside of cities was relatively affordable at the time, allowing developers to purchase swaths of undeveloped property on which to build homes. Sometimes streetcar operators (known as “traction magnates”) would also serve as housing developers, increasing use of their streetcars through the creation of residential neighborhoods.

Streetcar suburbs began to appear in cities across the United States, including Denver, Des Moines, Los Angeles, and Boston. The streetcar lines ran radially outside of cities, and the suburbs formed in rings around urban centers. Some existed within city limits, while others became their own municipalities.

The land use patterns of the streetcar suburbs reflected the rent gradient that arises along a railway.

Streetcar suburbs were not dominated by the single-family home, as many American suburbs are today. Instead, these neighborhoods typically had a mixed-use layout, incorporating a combination of commercial properties, multifamily buildings and single-family houses.

Developers placed commercial properties at streetcar intersections. Residents could easily run errands at their local grocery stores, banks, cleaners and drugstores on their way to or from the city.

Most homes were only a five to 10-minute walk from one of these streetcar intersections. Developers typically built a combination of multi-unit and single-family homes, making the streetcar suburb accessible to families with a variety of incomes.

That pattern continued into the early years after the War, with your Superintendent's childhood home in Morgan Meadows being of the easily-replicated three bedroom ranch houses on a residential street, while the duplexes and four-plexes were along the section roads, and the shopping centers of the era (there are bigger strip malls than those now-a-days) at the crossings of the mile roads, which by then had bus service rather than the streetcars.  These days, the four-plexes along the mile roads are another manifestation of inequality.

The root cause of Culdesac's commercial challenge, though, is government.

Some have argued that the era of streetcars and streetcar suburbs faded with the invention of the Ford Model T and the popularity of the automobile. But the true story is more complicated.

The exclusive monopolies governments granted streetcar companies ultimately limited streetcar companies’ opportunities for growth.

Because streetcar companies agreed to hold fares to five cents, they began to suffer as inflation rose. At the same time, labor unions fought to increase wages, which car operators struggled to afford. Some local governments also required streetcar companies to help pave the roads they ran on, adding to their maintenance costs.

With locked-in low fares, increasing wages and little to no government support, many streetcar companies struggled to stay afloat. To survive, some companies decided to expand their transit offerings, adding buses, trackless trolleys and subways.

While government had little involvement in supporting streetcar companies, they played a large role in stimulating the automobile industry. After World War I, federal, state, and local governments funded the development and maintenance of roads for vehicles. These roads, coupled with the affordability of cars, allowed people to move even further outside of cities than streetcar suburbs.

The federal government also helped develop and popularize a new kind of suburb, one that relied on the automobile. After WWII, the government hired developers to build mass-produced residential communities far outside of urban centers. The G.I. Bill and other federal efforts encouraged veterans to purchase these homes upon returning from war.

Changes in zoning laws also allowed these residential suburbs to flourish. In 1926, the Supreme Court upheld a ruling to allow municipalities greater separation of land uses. Developers could now create housing developments that were strictly zoned for residential purposes. New suburbs could be built just for residences, rather than the mixed-use layout of streetcar suburbs.

Further refinement of the zoning restrictions might have been motivated by some perception of a public interest in keeping the houses away from the taverns or the factories; or they might have codified the Fordist construction techniques of the Levittowns.  Whatever the causes might be, the Culdesac as hailed by New York's Times is the attempt to plop down something like a streetcar suburb near a car line.

While there’s a short-term parking lot for deliveries, retailers and guests, Culdesac residents are expected to get around by the nearby light rail system, as well as on buses, scooters, electric bikes and by using ride shares. There are 22 retail shops, several of them live-work spaces, and a small Korean market. So far, 288 apartment units have been built on eight of the site’s 17 acres with another 450 units planned.

A few rebels garage their cars somewhere off the property, despite bus passes being one of the benefits of living on the property.  An isolated Culdesac reminds me of the Biosphere in its dependence, intentions notwithstanding, on life as usual elsewhere.  But take away the constraints that trammel land use and perhaps something along the lines of streetcar suburbs will emerge elsewhere.

Jonathan Levine, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan, has been thinking about these issues for decades.

“What you thought, that we have sprawl because people want sprawl: That really was the dominant view around the turn of the 21st century,” he said.

His 2006 book called this idea into question. Its argument: Zoning has distorted the American real estate market, limiting housing options by making common elements of sprawl the only form of development allowed across much of the nation. In many cities, land-use regulations make it illegal to build town houses, duplexes, apartment buildings, granny flats, and the like – anything other than single-family homes – on around 75% of the land zoned for residential use. In some places, this figure rises above 90%.

“Some people say, ‘Americans want big houses on large lots,’” Levine said. But “if it were the case that all Americans wanted big houses on large lots and could afford big houses on large lots, would we need single-family zoning? Absolutely not … The very fact that we enact these zoning regulations in such an exclusionary fashion as we do in the United States is evidence that we’re defending against something. And that something is the desire of people – not all people; some people – to live closer in, accepting higher densities, maybe more urban living styles, etc.”

Perhaps.  The authors of those histories of Levittown would argue it is defending against the Wrong Sort of People living in Our Neighborhoods, and lot-size and setback provisions surely erect economic fences.  Or perhaps it's making compliance with building codes easier by enabling those Fordist methods of construction at scale: no messy tavern with the owners living upstairs; no corner store with a second story for dentists or tarot readers; no apartments breaking up the sight lines or making construction of a decorative pond or golf course or airstrip (yes, dear reader, there are such planned use developments, an easy drive from Cold Spring Shops headquarters) more difficult.

Professor Levine, however, correctly diagnoses the ailment.  “The [urban] planning profession, the economics profession, and academia are very much focused on the negative effects of zoning that constrain densities to overly low densities.  They see it as an impediment to the market providing the kinds of things that people want.”

Emergence cannot be nudged.