Cave Creek Needs a Town Square
By Brian Hardy · The Hitching Post · May 2026
I have been knocking on doors across Cave Creek for the past several weeks, and I keep hearing the same thing from neighbors on both sides of Cave Creek Road. Not about water – though they talk about water too. Something more immediate. Something they feel every weekend and when Bike Week rolls in. Every holiday when the parking lots overflow onto the shoulders, every time a tourist pulls a U-turn in front of somebody’s driveway because they can’t find a place to leave their car.
Cave Creek does not have a town square.
Think about that for a moment. We are a town of 5,000 people with a thriving tourism economy, a Historic Town Core that draws visitors from across the Phoenix metro and beyond, and we have never built the central gathering place that a community of our character and our aspirations deserves. We have Cave Creek Road. We have the restaurants and the bars and the shops. But we do not have a center – a place that belongs to everyone, residents and visitors alike, that gives the town core the breathing room it desperately needs.
That needs to change. And I believe we can do it in a way that solves three problems at once.
The Problem Every Resident Knows
During big events Cave Creek Road isn’t a street anymore, vehicles park on the dirt shoulders. They block driveways. They line up around corners where visibility is already poor. Pedestrians walk in traffic because there is nowhere else to walk. And the residents who live anywhere near the town core just stay home – because getting in or out of their neighborhood is more hassle than it’s worth.
This is documented. The town received a $40,000 MAG grant for a pedestrian safety study after a documented rise in accidents driven by tourism traffic on Cave Creek Road. Then on the first night of Bike Week this April, a suspected drunk driver went the wrong way on Cave Creek Road near Harold’s Corral and struck eight motorcycles and three pedestrians. Two people were hospitalized with life-threatening injuries. A former mayor has said publicly that speeding on Cave Creek Road is the most consistent complaint he hears from residents.
This is not a new problem. It is a problem we have been managing instead of solving.
What a Town Square Could Do
I am not talking about a concrete plaza with a fountain and some benches. That is not Cave Creek. I am talking about a Western-style space – designed in the character of this former mining town, surrounded by the kind of activity that already defines us – that serves as the genuine heart of the community.
Done right, a Cave Creek Town Square solves three things simultaneously:
First, it gives the town core a place to breathe. Right now, every event – every Bike Week, every Rodeo Days, every holiday weekend – crowds onto Cave Creek Road because that is the only place to be. A town square creates a second center of gravity. Events spread out. Traffic spreads out. The pressure on Cave Creek Road drops.
Second, it solves the public parking problem. Cave Creek has no public parking infrastructure. None. The town depends entirely on private lots attached to individual businesses, and when those fill up, everything spills onto the road. A town square development – designed from the outset with organized parking – could add hundreds of public spaces in a centralized location, with walkable access to the entire town core. This is how every successful small Western town manages its tourism economy. We do not.
Third, it gives residents back their town. The reason residents dread Bike Week and Rodeo Days is not the events themselves – most Creekers take real pride in the Western culture those events celebrate. What they dread is the chaos: the traffic that makes their streets impassable, the parking that blocks their views and their driveways, the sense that the town has been handed over to visitors and residents are just in the way. A properly designed town square – with clear event management infrastructure, designated gathering space, and parking that keeps cars off residential streets – changes that dynamic. Visitors have a place to go. Residents get their neighborhood back.
What This Would Look Like
I want to be direct that this is a vision, not a budget line. A town square for Cave Creek requires a serious planning process – community input, site analysis, architectural design that respects the town’s Desert Rural character, and a financing structure that doesn’t require a property tax or a 40-percent rate hike. I will not pretend I can hand you a cost estimate from a campaign blog post.
What I can tell you is what the right solution would need to include:
A central public space large enough to host community events — the kind of open-air gathering area that Cave Creek has never had but has always deserved. Something with shade structures, with the right Western aesthetic, with the feel of a town that knows who it is.
A structured public parking facility — either a surface lot large enough to matter or a modest garage, located near the town core but off Cave Creek Road, with clear wayfinding that pulls visitors off the main road the moment they arrive.
A pedestrian connection to the town core — a safe, shaded, walkable path that makes it easy and enjoyable to leave your car and walk to Harold’s, to Frontier Town, to the shops and restaurants that make Cave Creek worth visiting.
Event infrastructure — power, shade, a performance area, the basic amenities that let the town run Bike Week and Rodeo Days as organized events with dedicated space rather than improvised chaos on a public street.
And critically – design standards that make this unmistakably Cave Creek. Not a strip mall. Not a Phoenix suburb parking structure dropped in the desert. Something with the character of this town baked into every detail.
Every great Western town has one. Tombstone has Allen Street and the plaza around it. Prescott has its famous courthouse square – one of the most beloved gathering places in Arizona. Even Carefree, our neighbor to the east, has its town center with the amphitheater and the sundial.
Where the Land Comes From
This is the question that makes people nervous, and I understand why. Cave Creek is small. Available land near the town core is limited, and what exists tends to be privately held and expensive.
But there are options worth exploring seriously. The town has strong relationships with several large landholders near the core. The MAG transportation study for Cave Creek Road is already examining the corridor’s infrastructure needs – a town square with integrated parking fits directly into that conversation. Federal Community Development Block Grant funding has been used for exactly this kind of community infrastructure in comparable small towns across the Southwest. Tourism Tax revenue – the hotel and bed tax the council raised to 5 percent in February – generates dollars that are specifically intended to fund the infrastructure that supports the tourism economy. That is not a property tax. That is visitors paying for what visitors require.
I am not saying it is easy. I am saying it is worth doing, and that a mayor with real business experience – someone who has negotiated complex deals, structured financing, and delivered projects under real-world constraints – is better positioned to make it happen than someone whose background is managing a communications department.
The Bigger Picture
Cave Creek celebrates its 40th anniversary of incorporation in 2026. Forty years ago, residents fought to keep this town from becoming another Phoenix suburb. They drew a line. They said: this place will be different. And for forty years, it has been.
A town square is an expression of that same commitment. It says: we are not just managing the growth that washes over us from the south. We are building something intentional. We are investing in the infrastructure of a real community — a place with a center, a gathering point, a heart.
Cave Creek has Cave Creek Road. And Cave Creek Road is wonderful. But it was never designed to be the only place in town.
It’s time to build the place that this community has earned.
— Brian Hardy, Cave Creek
Brian Hardy is a candidate for Mayor of Cave Creek, Arizona. The Cave Creek election is July 21, 2026. Learn more at HardyForMayor.com.
Paid for by Brian Hardy for Cave Creek Mayor. Authorized by Brian Hardy.
