Carefree
Easy Street, Tranquil Trail, Peaceful Place.
Carefree is a planned town, and almost nobody reads the place that way. Land sales opened in 1955 and the first homes went up in 1958, on a four-hundred-acre former goat farm laid out by K.T. Palmer, Tom Darlington and Les Rhuart. What the three of them chose to do was defer to the ground. Streets follow the contours instead of correcting them, boulders stay where they sit, and the architectural standards were written to keep the hillsides intact.
The setting
The town covers 8.8 square miles and counted 3,690 residents in the 2020 census. Carefree has easy access to the Tonto National Forest, the federal open country north of town. The town center is organized around the sundial and the plaza. El Pedregal and The Boulders both sit inside the town limits. Black Mountain rises just above The Boulders, two thirds of the mountain inside Carefree, and at 3,398 feet the summit falls on the Carefree side by a narrow margin. The street names date from the first land sale and were chosen for the publicity: Ho and Hum Roads, Easy Street, Never Mind Trail, Huff N Puff Place.
How the plan held
Carefree today is roughly fourteen times its original four hundred acres. Private covenants usually thin out across that kind of growth. These held, and the mechanism is specific: the town incorporated in 1984 to prevent annexation by Scottsdale, and incorporation converted the founders’ private standards into municipal zoning authority.
The homes
Lots run about a third of an acre to an acre in the town core, half an acre to two acres in Carefree Ranch, and one to three acres at Mirabel. The standards written for the first four hundred acres now govern all 5,600, and they have carried the force of municipal zoning since 1984.
Lifestyle
Galloway Wash cuts a broad course a few blocks from the town center, and eleven acres of the wash are permanently protected. A constructed trail runs through the wash and up into the growth on either side, open to hiking, biking and horses from dawn to dusk. Ocotillo Ridge protects twenty-five acres of canyon in Carefree, shared with Cave Creek. Grapevine Wash runs the canyon floor under mature mesquite and palo verde, and deer, javelina, coyote and bobcat use the corridor. The trail through the wash is open to hiking, biking and horses from dawn to dusk. The riding country north of town is open to equestrians, and horses are kept at home on qualifying parcels under the town’s rural zoning. The town sits at the top of the north Scottsdale corridor, which puts that area’s dining, golf, medical care and shopping within easy reach. Nights here are dark enough to notice the sky: low density set against protected land, held by zoning that has not been diluted in forty years.
Who it fits
Carefree suits a household that has decided what it wants the house to look like and wants a town that agrees. Seventy years on, the plan the founders wrote is still the one in force. If Carefree has been on your mind, whether you are looking here or thinking about selling here, I would be glad to begin a quiet conversation.
