First Car-Free City In Tempe Arizona and The Culture Is Still Complaining Not Being Open-Minded | The Millionaire Morning Show w/ Anton Daniels

I wanted to share something with y’all that I thought was interesting. And maybe you’ll think that it’s interesting, too. America’s first car free city. America’s first car free city is now becoming a thing. It’s becoming realistic. So I want y’all to ask yourself this question. Could you guys see yourself living in a car free city? Going forward? For me, I’m okay. Will live, working and playing all in the same area.

It’s one of the reasons why I’ve always loved the downtown area. I know some of y’all like to spread out a little bit, but let me take a look at this and let me share this with y’all, and then we’re gonna go from there. All right. As more Americans work from home, they are changing the way they live, seeking more social, walkable communities. But are they willing to give up their cars entirely on real estate developers making a bet that in Tempe, Arizona, they will.

That’s where we find CNBC senior real estate correspondent Diana Olek. Hi, Diana. Hey, Contessa. Yeah. This new $170,000,000 rental community has all the amenities, the fitness center, the dog park, the outdoor kitchens. Well, what it does not have is cars. Cul de sac is the first community in the US designed specifically for car free living. Co founder Ryan Johnson said, it’s what Americans want in the US. We’ve been building the wrong kind of housing for a hundred years.

We’ve built sprawl and it’s created car dependency, and it’s made us lonelier, less healthy and less happy. And what people want is to live in walkable neighborhoods. Now retail, restaurants, and close to 200 apartments. In the first phase, no cars means no parking. No garages, no parking spaces. So more space for social areas. Somebody in the chat says Michigan has one Wellen island. You’re talking about Mackinac island.

Mackinal island is largely a tourist destination. And yes, you got to take a ferry to get over there and stuff like that. Mackinac island is a car free island that is a part of Michigan. And so they ride bikes and stuff like that there, but they don’t have any cars over there, which is very interesting if you’ve ever been there. It’s a very eye opening experience to say the least.

Right. But here, over here in Tempe, Arizona, which a lot of people are saying in the chat, and I’m reading back and forth to see what y’all talking about, is saying that. But Arizona ain’t necessarily the place for it because it gets too hot or the weather is too extreme, remove that from your purview. Right. Don’t think about it from that perspective. Just think about it from the perspective of, could you, or do you think that live, working and playing all in the same area, or to live and exist in an environment where you don’t have to have a car, would you ever consider it? Right? Because a lot of us as Americans, we’ve never been in an environment where we didn’t have a car, right? A lot of us grew up, can’t wait to get your car because that was your first sign of freedom as a teenager.

You know what I’m saying? We’ve always lived in rural areas, especially as the suburbs exploded. We also know that a lot of the suburbs was created based off of the fact that car manufacturers were lobbying against public transportation, which then forced you guys to sprawl out a little bit more, to spread out a little bit more. And so we start building further out in order to have more room and more space, right? You go into a place like Texas, you got to have a car down in Texas.

You head over into LA, you got to have a car over in LA. Because the public transportation is so trash and everything is kind of. The city planners kind of built it to where you have to have a car in order to get around, moving down, back into the city, into downtown. I find myself not needing a car at all. As a matter of fact, most of the time, I don’t even pull my car out when I’m downtown.

And if I just need to jump in a car to get somewhere a lot quicker because the people mover is literally right outside of my building. So I can jump on a people mover, I can get on a queue line, I can catch the bus. I can do that, right? Because it’s a lot more of a walkable city. Now. It’s funny because I find myself, even if I want to take something, and I’ll either take public transportation, I just have to plan a little bit more, or I’ll just call an Uber to get me over to where I got to go, right? And so it’s really interesting because once you change the lifestyle, you start to find that the people are a lot more fit.

It’s the honest to God truth. People that are more active, they get out more, they’re a lot more fit. But a lot of people are just refused. They refuse to even open themselves up to the possibility of it. No parking, no garages, no parking spaces. So more space for social areas. The complex is strategically located right next to the area’s light rail system. All residents get a free pass.

The first 200 also get a free electric ebike, and a partnership with Lyft gets them discount rides. Now, those are the partners. Investors in cul de Sac’s $30 million Series A include Lennar, one of the nation’s largest home builders, and Cosla Ventures and founders Fund. As part of the community, first floor studios are rented to small businesses, and some of the business owners actually live here as well.

It’s not as affordable out here as it was a few years ago. And having that opportunity to live and work where you are and just have it as one, that’s perfect. Now, walkable neighborhoods are, of course, all well and good when the weather is fine and lovely like it is now. But in Tempe, Arizona, in the summer, it can be well over 100 degrees for weeks at a time.

So the summer will be the real test to see if this idea can go the distance back to you guys. But it’s interesting, because it might be the first planned community to forbid cars or parking or whatever, but lots of people live without cars. I mean, look at New York City. So the advantage in New York City is that, yeah, you can go out and just walk to where you need to go and use mass transit.

But Phoenix is a car town. Tempe is a car town. And it’s not like that Light rail gets used very much. Well, actually, it does seem to get used a lot by the people who live here. And that’s the idea, is, it’s a test run. Look, is Phoenix going to give up its cars forever? No. This is a city of sprawl. And some of the people I talked to said, one guy said he actually moved out of Arizona because he couldn’t stand being so car dependent and living in all that sprawl.

Moved back, moved here because he liked this idea. So the idea is more that they’re offering you other options because society is changing toward that shared transportation. They’re not anti car, they’re just anti everybody having a car, because in Arizona, it’s something like, there are eight parking spaces for every car. What do you do? A lot of y’all are asking questions, like, for example, y’all asking these wild questions.

You saying in the chat, because I like to interact with the chat, and you saying stuff like, well, what happens if you got to go to the hospital, if you go outside of the country? And this is why I want everybody to travel more and experience more and not even just outside of the country, but go into different cities and see how they operate. Right? Over in Tokyo, for example, in certain parts, most people don’t even drive.

They walk or they catch public transportation, right? And then their streets are a lot more narrow. But their fire trucks and their EMT services are also built and developed. And they’re a lot smaller than they are here in the United States of America. But they have a bigger population and they have less crime. But they’re able to get to these places based off of the fact that it’s only the emergency vehicles that can get up and down these streets.

So it doesn’t remove the abilities for somebody to be able to service you. If you get into an emergency, you see what saying, like, it’s still built for you. If you go down some of these streets over in Italy and these cobblestone streets and how small these streets are, you can’t get no big truck down those streets. People walk. They tend to be healthier. They live longer. Over in Tokyo and Okinawa.

It’s a regular thing for people to live in their years old, and they’re active and they’re participating. I think that we so close minded. And so the thing that I’m saying is, I’m not saying that we have to have Carless cities. I’m saying, why can’t we explore the possibility of having it in some places, depending on what the use case would be for it and how we can adopt different things from different cultures to have a better experience.

A lot of times we just so close minded that we haven’t experienced it differently so that we can draw a conclusion that forces us to think outside of what we were experiencing in our neighborhoods, right? I know people, for example, that moved into cities and they justified the cost of living in New York because they was on Wall street or they were in finance or whatever, so on and so forth.

And so they moved over to New York, and this was in the 2004 five. And they moved over to New York and it was like anti, actually, the cost is equivalent. And I was like, how’s the cost equivalent? Because it costs more to live in New York. He said, because I don’t have a car. Said, I don’t need a car. They said, I just take the public transportation.

I ain’t got to worry about gas, insurance, maintenance, car notes, none of that interest rates. He said, I got fitter, I walk more. It’s better. You’re more interactive with the people. You get to see things that you normally wouldn’t see, right? And so when we start to think about things also. We need to also think about the tangible benefits. A lot of you all can’t even afford the car that you all got.

To be honest with you, we need to lower our standard of living in order to expand our mind so what the possibilities could be. So think of what you can do when you eliminated the cost that comes along with a car. And again, I’m not saying that we should have completely Carless cities, but I’m also having a conversation based off of the idea that what if you experienced it for yourself? And you was like, oh, man, that’s different.

I was having a conversation with an uncle of mine because he came over this weekend and we was talking about living spaces, and he was like, oh man, Anton, I seen your apartment, your penthouse downtown, right? He was like, man, that’s beautiful. I love the views and stuff like that. And he lives in a pretty big house that’s out here in the suburbs and stuff like that. And he said, man, I would love to downsize and do something like that.

And I said, why would you makes you think that? He said, anton, if I think about my home, think about the places that you all live in. He said, anton, if I think about my home, we only, as a family, probably only use 25% to 30% of the home itself. We got the regular places that we live that we go to. We got extra bedrooms that we don’t even use.

We barely even go into the basement, he says, and so because we’re creatures of habit, if you really go back and you think about how we’re using these spaces, I don’t use all of this home that I’m paying for that I got to heat. He said, my heat bill goes up in the summertime, my electric bill goes up in the wintertime, he said, and if I’m thinking about it, he says, man, he said, if I accelerated what I’m doing now before I retire, he says, because a lot of people wind up downsizing when they retire because they realize they don’t need as much home, he says, I can actually get a better experience because then it’s more or less about my views and where I live and if I can live, work and play in the same area.

He said, anton, you got me thinking differently because I hate having to get into a car to go everywhere I want to go, he says, I hate not having a whole bunch of options as far as the different types of restaurants that you got access to, right? And so for me personally, I think it was in 2012 that I decided that I never wanted to live in a very massive space anymore because I don’t have no use for it.

My experiences is outside. And then the places that I do come into, I just want it to be laid out beautiful, have beautiful views, and then I want it to actually everything to have a purpose in it. I don’t want to just walk around a whole effing house just because I got a huge house, you know what I’m saying? And so my costs are lower because I have a different experience and I was able to adopt things that I’ve seen from other cultures that forced me to start thinking differently when I went over to Japan.

And you see how some of those people live. They can focus more on their quality of life because they’re not so focused on trying to maintain a standard of living for other people. A lot of people that I know that have the most money, they don’t even have a car. They don’t even own a car. Some of the richest people that I know don’t own a car at all.

Probably not. What do you do when your friends come over? So when your friends come over, there is a parking lot that is next to the community where they can park, so they can go to the restaurant that’s here. They can also go to the stores that are here. But nobody here in the complex has a parking space, a garage. They don’t waste that space. And it’s not like you can’t own a car.

You just keep it somewhere else. But the idea, again, is to depend on community transportation rather than using so many cars and so much gasoline and so many emissions. Might I say, as you walk around the area, could you see yourself living there? In other words, are there sufficient dry cleaners or for me, the coffee shop, the liquor store, whatever it is, so that you could get by without having to go get in a car and go to a grocery or a target or whatever.

Well, honestly, you’d have to walk out of the community for certain services like that. There is a grocery store in the community. But what I ask is people with kids. Look, anybody who has kids, I had them. You are moober and Duber when they’re from middle school up until they get a license in high school. So I think it would be hard for families to live in a community like this because they have to drive their kids to so many different places.

So again, maybe this is more for young people. Maybe it’s more for retirees who aren’t so car dependent. It’s an experiment, is the whole country going to go this way? Probably not, but it could work for a lot of people. You know what’s so funny? I was studying, because I’m infatuated with the. As far as the way they dress, what their normal lives were, what they did on a daily basis.

And I studied those type of things, and I realized that they didn’t have deep freezers. A lot of times they didn’t even have large refrigerators with a freezer attached to it. They didn’t have the same experience. You know why? Because they ate what they bought for that day. They would go out and they would buy what they were going to cook, or they would buy what they were going to eat from the local grocer or whatever.

And they didn’t spend a lot of time or a lot of energy or a lot of waste doing things that wasn’t ideal for them. So they had more room and they had a better experience because they was focused on experiencing that day or that moment. They walked outside to the local space to go and get what they wanted to do. They didn’t go to the grocery store and buy a whole bunch of stuff.

Even the way that grocery stores were built back then was way different. They didn’t have big box stores and Sam’s clubs and Walmart’s. And that way more local communities thrived because they became interdependent on each other in order to solve for it. You had the guy that was the doctor right here. You had the butcher over there. You had the bread maker and a pastry shop over there.

You had the cleaners over here. You had, you know what I’m saying? The construction company over here. And everybody had businesses because everybody was interdependent on each other in order to thrive. They lived, work, and played. And then they kept more of their money within their communities. They kept more of their money in their communities, and they became less dependent on outside things because they farmed their own food.

They sold their own food. They raised the food that they then butchered and sold to each other. That all was locally sourced. They lived longer. They were fitter, right? They walked to baseball games. They dressed up. Everybody knew each other inside of the community. You knew your neighbors, right? They went and they had fun together. They all went to school with each other, and they grew up with each other.

And so everybody thrived. Everybody knew each other. You knew who your mail guy was. You knew who the person that was delivering your milk, right? It was so much different from how it is now. But it’s funny because I’m looking inside of the chat right now, right? And because people don’t ask questions, they don’t say, well, how would that work? Or how did we used to do it? Or what’s your perspective on it? Or I disagree or I agree with that.

They automatically say, oh no, it looks like an overglorified prison. That’s what you got out of this. The experiment is to see what works and what don’t work and then what you got to throw away and then what you keep. In most places they have a strong public transportation system. They have bullet trains in other countries for you to get from one space to another without it costing you a bunch of money or having to take a plane or to have to drive and do all of these stoplights.

They continuously rethinking how you get along so that you spend less of your time inside of a car going back and forth and spending more of your time immersed in the experiences that you experiencing on a day to day basis. You know what I’m saying? So they’re not closed minded to it. And it’s not to say, oh man, we want to completely get rid of cars again. This is to say, what are they doing right over there? That makes more sense for what my lifestyle should be based off of the direction that I’m going in and what makes less sense that I don’t want to spend a whole lot of time doing.

Because even when you all started talking about working from home and stuff, one of the things that you realized was that, man, I’m on a road at least 2 hours a day, 45 minutes there, 45 minutes back depending on what traffic is, 2 hours of my day. I get back into my schedule to do what I want to do or to experience my kids or maybe I can go to parent teacher conference.

But because you so close minded to what the possibilities are, you don’t even explore what your life could be like. And it’s because you’ve been trained to think a certain type of way instead of being trained to outthink your way outside of the box. I don’t know why you all don’t like having discussions. I don’t know why you don’t like change. I don’t know why you all don’t like, you know what I’m saying? Exploring what other people are doing effectively to see whether that makes sense for you.

It’s weird to me. It is so WeIRd to me. They condition you all to think one way and then you all just ran with it and now you saying, no, I would never even experience that. I don’t even want to try that. That sounds crazy to me. No, skip that or whatever. And then meanwhile you go to the gas pump and then you mad because they continuing to raise prices because the gas is going up and groceries is going up and this is going up and that is going up and then you looking weird and then you want to complain at the same time, but you don’t actually want to have no conversation about solving for how you can make a better community.

When you go and you look at a house, you don’t even say, well, is the AreA walkabLe? Right? We don’t even have these discussions. We just automatically just jump to conclusions and ah, that don’t make sense. I love when I’m down in my office and we go to a baseball game in the summertime or the springtime and I just jump on a queue line in Detroit and I catch it straight and I get off right in front of the baseball game.

We walk in, we go have a good time. We don’t even spend a bunch of money at the baseball game. It’s probably the thing that I spend the least amount of money on. We have fun, we go walk over here, we go have lunch, we go and explore and we go shop in over here because they got the new district over there. We get to see something that we never seen before.

Then we jump back on the queue line and we go back to the office. So now that I got a place down there, I could just jump straight on the prepoomover and I can get off right at my building and go right in there. I don’t like having to drive and sit in traffic. That’s not cool to me. I drive because I have to, right? And if I’m going to drive, I’m a drive sweet.

But my life experiences are saying, I don’t want to do this anymore. I’ve done this for the first 40 years of my life. It’s some stuff that even though I don’t like the rats and how dirty New York is, it’s some stuff that they did that’s really, really cool. And then when I went over to Japan and I seen them doing it even better than they was doing it in New York and it was clean with it and the people seemed happier and they were more fit and they focused more on style and they stopped spending as much money on maintaining a car, but instead they were spending more money on their experiences and their cultural experiences and their norms.

You was able to actually catch the train and go over to the zoo and do all different type of stuff. It opens your mindset, but you got to get outside of the thing that you used to doing so that you can have a better experience. That’s all I’m saying. That’s all I’m saying. It’s a great experience. And with the queue line, you can park further away for the people that come because they don’t have to pay for parking as much anymore and they can catch the queue line straight over to the stadium instead of paying 45 $50 just to park your car.

I don’t know. Anyways, just my thoughts. I like car free. I like the possibility of it, but I might be a little bit different. .

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