6 ms·

Carmel Indiana is an example of focusing on growth. * They didn't do austerity. The whole low taxes run the place on a shoestring wasn't the game. Carmel did n

Carmel Indiana is an example of focusing on growth. * They didn't do austerity. The whole low taxes run the place on a shoestring wasn't the game. Carmel did not do extravagant government buildings until they were affordable, and paid for by the development around them. For a long time city hall was almost a re-purposed dentist's office. * Carmel did not invest in poverty. Carmel pushed it out of town. Now it is extremely wealthy per-capita. * People laugh at the sheer number of roundabouts, but those have had a huge effect on public health by reducing both the frequency of accidents and more importantly, most accidents are now lower speed with less damage to life and property. Yes, Carmel took on a lot of debt. Yes, they invested that debt heavily in making Carmel a nice place to live and work. jim Brainerd, the mayor, knew one thing the article missed: if you are growing, the tax base is always expanding. Carmel was also extremely long-game focused on development: as bonds mature, tax abatements and incentives expire in a way that will enable rapid retirement of the debt.

Idiot211 2y ago
> Carmel did not invest in poverty. Carmel pushed it out of town. Now it is extremely wealthy per-capita. What exactly does that mean, I'm reading it quite negatively, but the rest of this is positive, so I might be missing your true meaning.
- richrichie 2y ago
  I am assuming that means no drug shelters, free services for homeless etc.
- tecoholic 2y ago
  Yeah. Me too. Does it mean, they just gentrified the entire town and only rich people live there? Or is it more like they created enough opportunities and incentives that poorly paid jobs became better paid jobs? I can see how the latter is “not invest in poverty”. But I have doubts that the trickle down effect can be that effective. Maybe it works well in a small population?
  - Camus134 2y ago
    I live near there. Carmel is now a very nice place to live, easily the nicest place to live in the State. It has very impressive walkable areas, tons of new restaurants and shops, the best schools in the state. It has become easily the most desirable place to live in the region, and good jobs have followed that.
    - giraffe_lady 2y ago
      Who does the bad jobs? How much do they get paid and where do they live?
      - indymike 2y ago
        There are a few lower cost apartment complexes, but for the most part they commute from adjacent communities because wages in low-income jobs are usually pay 15-25% better in Carmel.
- resource_waste 2y ago
  Less/No attempts to get local/state/federal money for low-income housing developments.
- indymike 2y ago
  > What exactly does that mean Carmel did not invest in anything that anchors poverty into the community. They were very careful not to overbuild section 8 housing, they aggressively police blight (i.e. people not taking care of their property), and also required homes to be made with more expensive finishes (i.e. brick instead of plastic siding), so cheap housing was simply not possible to build. The negative side: police tail old poorly maintained cars, are very quick to move homeless out, and generally make being poor in Carmel a bad experience. The local joke is "you got pulled over for being poor in Carmel".
  - bumby 2y ago
    I read that as “they made the tough problems somebody else’s problem to solve.” What I’m really looking for is governance that helps solve these types of problems, not pushing them away with the engineering equivalent of redefining the system boundaries.
    - indymike 2y ago
      > they made the tough problems somebody else’s problem to solve This is true. A lot of the problems that go with poverty simply moved somewhere else. > engineering equivalent of redefining the system boundaries I think Brainerd's we don't invest in poverty is an interesting stance because on the surface it seems to be just pushing the problem away... but if you look a little deeper, investments in large amounts of section 8 housing attract even more poverty, lower tax rates, thus creating blight, which lowers tax rates more, which requires more subsidized housing and so on. There is a death spiral for cities, and I suspect that over-investing in poverty is one of the forces that causes it.
      - bumby 2y ago
        Is it creating more poverty or “attracting” poverty from somewhere else? If it’s the latter, it’s not increasing the global level of poverty, just the local level. I would expect a well governed municipality to have the ability to absorb, and ideally mitigate, an increase in low-income populace. To me, raising the lower-limit of quality of life is one of the measures of a good government. I’m just not sure artificially raising it by expelling poor people, or making their life miserable so they expel themselves, is actually doing that on a larger scale. Rather it’s a bit of poverty shell game. Granted, there is a tipping point by which any system will become unstable if it absorbs too much, but again, I think a measure of good governance is the height of that threshold. The discussion about Carmel seems to indicate their threshold is low.
bilbo0s 2y ago
Yes, Carmel took on a lot of debt And as bonds mature, tax abatements and incentives expire in a way that will enable rapid retirement of the debt. Oh boy. I’m going to go ahead and wish Carmel the best of luck with all that. At the same time, I can’t in good conscience, advise other municipalities to follow this example. Prove it out first, then we can declare it a success.
- PandaRider 2y ago
  What's the alternative of long-term bond investments? Republican-style tax cuts? If I understand the article correctly, Carmel's Republican mayor Jim Brainard broke off from his party's motto. > The prevailing model of austerity, low taxes, and limited government in many Republican-led states and cities has often failed to improve the quality of life. Meanwhile, Democratic-led cities struggle to effectively address issues like homelessness, housing affordability, and public safety despite greater willingness to invest, just not in actual services and infrastructure.
  - pas 2y ago
    No, there's nothing wrong with bonds, if the thing they get invested into has good positive ROI. The elephant hiding in the rural balance sheets is boring economics, meaning that there's usually no such high-ROI thing within city limits, because to get good and affordable services the city needs economies of scale, and that requires both sizes and density. This basically translates to things that these cities could do: rezoning and waiting, joining up with neighboring cities for deals (but this is usually already the case, school districts and water districts). Homelessness and public safety is worse in urban cores, and this would require a lot more spending to fix. [0] (These cores are usually poorer, have funding issues, crowding out effect of rich suburbs means that the police force of the urban core needs to sort of match the salaries, etc. [1]) Also ideological differences lead to worse outcomes in public safety definitely. (Again, especially in these metro areas where - as other comments have mentioned - it's relatively easy to push poverty and crime around.) It's not a uniquely American problem, but the combination of wealth and income inequality, extremely fragmented hyperlocal institutions, gang and gun violence, plus senate veto make progress extremely hard. And in practice it serves as the perfect fuel for political radicalization. [0] https://www.slowboring.com/p/fixing-the-police-will-take-more https://www.slowboring.com/p/fixing-the-police-will-take-mor... [1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-police-are-in-the-wrong-places https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-police-are-in-the-wrong-pla... - https://pastebin.com/PHzjrCU6 https://pastebin.com/PHzjrCU6
pyrale 2y ago
> Carmel did not invest in poverty. Carmel pushed it out of town. Now it is extremely wealthy per-capita. I suspect this doesn't mean that everyone working there is paid handsomely. The city instead focused on being the rich neighbourhood of a larger urban area. So, basically, it's easier to be competent when money is not an issue.
- indymike 2y ago
  > creating being the rich neighbourhood of a larger urban area When I was five, Carmel was a nothingville with two stop lights we lived in a house my dad could afford buying as a college student. It had all the growth problem of a small Indiana town during the industrial decline of the 70s and 80s. That it got escape velocity from being another broke Indiana town is pretty remarkable. > easier to be competent when money is not an issue If it was easy, then everywhere could do it - and the Carmel miracle was getting the money needed to fuel it's growth. There was a strategy, and a very long-term focus on building a nexus of business and attracting the right support people (i.e. investors, healthcare, education, lawyers...) to attract the kind of people that those businesses needed. The mayor used a book "The Geography of Jobs" as one of his guiding strategies.
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    I think the point is did the city simply evict the poor people and build nice things to attract rich people? Forget all the escape velocity stuff, I assume they’re talking about gentrification. So what is the diversity of Carmel? Were some of the poor people elevated because they lived in a growing city, or they were they simply pushed out because doctors, lawyers, execs, and engineers moved there because they set up pretty parks and good schools for kids?
    - allturtles 2y ago
      I don't think gentrification really makes sense as a mental model for a rapidly growing suburb/exurb. Carmel's population has gone up 4x in the last 30 years. What has been 'evicted' is mostly farms. Almost the entire population is 'new arrivals' relatively speaking. There was no pre-existing working-class population to displace.
throw0101c 2y ago
> People laugh at the sheer number of roundabouts […] Road Guy Rob has recently done two videos on this: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZUZA76L09M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZUZA76L09M * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UV0x2hNRYnU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UV0x2hNRYnU
zip1234 2y ago
Focusing on development is not a panacea--I see plenty of places that are trying to 'develop' but it is just sprawl. Plenty of places give huge incentives and pays for road upgrades for things like corporate parks that never fill up or pay for the investment. Roundabout also have the effect of not needing expensive traffic lights and not needing as wide of roads. They increase throughput and thus can decrease backups. If you only have 2 lanes instead of 4 it is much less expensive to maintain.
RetiredRichard 2y ago
> Brainard and Carmel aren't the only ones: Despite post-bankruptcy fiscal constraints and a hostile state government (at least until Governor Whitmier), Detriot has seen infrastructure and amenity improvements under Mayor Mike Duggan, but it still has a long way to go. They also referred to Detriot's own investments during a tight time

Idiot211 2y ago

> Carmel did not invest in poverty. Carmel pushed it out of town. Now it is extremely wealthy per-capita. What exactly does that mean, I'm reading it quite negatively, but the rest of this is positive, so I might be missing your true meaning.

richrichie 2y ago
I am assuming that means no drug shelters, free services for homeless etc.
tecoholic 2y ago
Yeah. Me too. Does it mean, they just gentrified the entire town and only rich people live there? Or is it more like they created enough opportunities and incentives that poorly paid jobs became better paid jobs? I can see how the latter is “not invest in poverty”. But I have doubts that the trickle down effect can be that effective. Maybe it works well in a small population?
- Camus134 2y ago
  I live near there. Carmel is now a very nice place to live, easily the nicest place to live in the State. It has very impressive walkable areas, tons of new restaurants and shops, the best schools in the state. It has become easily the most desirable place to live in the region, and good jobs have followed that.
  - giraffe_lady 2y ago
    Who does the bad jobs? How much do they get paid and where do they live?
    - indymike 2y ago
      There are a few lower cost apartment complexes, but for the most part they commute from adjacent communities because wages in low-income jobs are usually pay 15-25% better in Carmel.
resource_waste 2y ago
Less/No attempts to get local/state/federal money for low-income housing developments.
indymike 2y ago
> What exactly does that mean Carmel did not invest in anything that anchors poverty into the community. They were very careful not to overbuild section 8 housing, they aggressively police blight (i.e. people not taking care of their property), and also required homes to be made with more expensive finishes (i.e. brick instead of plastic siding), so cheap housing was simply not possible to build. The negative side: police tail old poorly maintained cars, are very quick to move homeless out, and generally make being poor in Carmel a bad experience. The local joke is "you got pulled over for being poor in Carmel".
- bumby 2y ago
  I read that as “they made the tough problems somebody else’s problem to solve.” What I’m really looking for is governance that helps solve these types of problems, not pushing them away with the engineering equivalent of redefining the system boundaries.
  - indymike 2y ago
    > they made the tough problems somebody else’s problem to solve This is true. A lot of the problems that go with poverty simply moved somewhere else. > engineering equivalent of redefining the system boundaries I think Brainerd's we don't invest in poverty is an interesting stance because on the surface it seems to be just pushing the problem away... but if you look a little deeper, investments in large amounts of section 8 housing attract even more poverty, lower tax rates, thus creating blight, which lowers tax rates more, which requires more subsidized housing and so on. There is a death spiral for cities, and I suspect that over-investing in poverty is one of the forces that causes it.
    - bumby 2y ago
      Is it creating more poverty or “attracting” poverty from somewhere else? If it’s the latter, it’s not increasing the global level of poverty, just the local level. I would expect a well governed municipality to have the ability to absorb, and ideally mitigate, an increase in low-income populace. To me, raising the lower-limit of quality of life is one of the measures of a good government. I’m just not sure artificially raising it by expelling poor people, or making their life miserable so they expel themselves, is actually doing that on a larger scale. Rather it’s a bit of poverty shell game. Granted, there is a tipping point by which any system will become unstable if it absorbs too much, but again, I think a measure of good governance is the height of that threshold. The discussion about Carmel seems to indicate their threshold is low.

bilbo0s 2y ago

Yes, Carmel took on a lot of debt And as bonds mature, tax abatements and incentives expire in a way that will enable rapid retirement of the debt. Oh boy. I’m going to go ahead and wish Carmel the best of luck with all that. At the same time, I can’t in good conscience, advise other municipalities to follow this example. Prove it out first, then we can declare it a success.

PandaRider 2y ago
What's the alternative of long-term bond investments? Republican-style tax cuts? If I understand the article correctly, Carmel's Republican mayor Jim Brainard broke off from his party's motto. > The prevailing model of austerity, low taxes, and limited government in many Republican-led states and cities has often failed to improve the quality of life. Meanwhile, Democratic-led cities struggle to effectively address issues like homelessness, housing affordability, and public safety despite greater willingness to invest, just not in actual services and infrastructure.
- pas 2y ago
  No, there's nothing wrong with bonds, if the thing they get invested into has good positive ROI. The elephant hiding in the rural balance sheets is boring economics, meaning that there's usually no such high-ROI thing within city limits, because to get good and affordable services the city needs economies of scale, and that requires both sizes and density. This basically translates to things that these cities could do: rezoning and waiting, joining up with neighboring cities for deals (but this is usually already the case, school districts and water districts). Homelessness and public safety is worse in urban cores, and this would require a lot more spending to fix. [0] (These cores are usually poorer, have funding issues, crowding out effect of rich suburbs means that the police force of the urban core needs to sort of match the salaries, etc. [1]) Also ideological differences lead to worse outcomes in public safety definitely. (Again, especially in these metro areas where - as other comments have mentioned - it's relatively easy to push poverty and crime around.) It's not a uniquely American problem, but the combination of wealth and income inequality, extremely fragmented hyperlocal institutions, gang and gun violence, plus senate veto make progress extremely hard. And in practice it serves as the perfect fuel for political radicalization. [0] https://www.slowboring.com/p/fixing-the-police-will-take-more https://www.slowboring.com/p/fixing-the-police-will-take-mor... [1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-police-are-in-the-wrong-places https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-police-are-in-the-wrong-pla... - https://pastebin.com/PHzjrCU6 https://pastebin.com/PHzjrCU6

pyrale 2y ago

> Carmel did not invest in poverty. Carmel pushed it out of town. Now it is extremely wealthy per-capita. I suspect this doesn't mean that everyone working there is paid handsomely. The city instead focused on being the rich neighbourhood of a larger urban area. So, basically, it's easier to be competent when money is not an issue.

indymike 2y ago
> creating being the rich neighbourhood of a larger urban area When I was five, Carmel was a nothingville with two stop lights we lived in a house my dad could afford buying as a college student. It had all the growth problem of a small Indiana town during the industrial decline of the 70s and 80s. That it got escape velocity from being another broke Indiana town is pretty remarkable. > easier to be competent when money is not an issue If it was easy, then everywhere could do it - and the Carmel miracle was getting the money needed to fuel it's growth. There was a strategy, and a very long-term focus on building a nexus of business and attracting the right support people (i.e. investors, healthcare, education, lawyers...) to attract the kind of people that those businesses needed. The mayor used a book "The Geography of Jobs" as one of his guiding strategies.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  I think the point is did the city simply evict the poor people and build nice things to attract rich people? Forget all the escape velocity stuff, I assume they’re talking about gentrification. So what is the diversity of Carmel? Were some of the poor people elevated because they lived in a growing city, or they were they simply pushed out because doctors, lawyers, execs, and engineers moved there because they set up pretty parks and good schools for kids?
  - allturtles 2y ago
    I don't think gentrification really makes sense as a mental model for a rapidly growing suburb/exurb. Carmel's population has gone up 4x in the last 30 years. What has been 'evicted' is mostly farms. Almost the entire population is 'new arrivals' relatively speaking. There was no pre-existing working-class population to displace.

throw0101c 2y ago

> People laugh at the sheer number of roundabouts […] Road Guy Rob has recently done two videos on this: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZUZA76L09M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZUZA76L09M * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UV0x2hNRYnU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UV0x2hNRYnU

zip1234 2y ago

Focusing on development is not a panacea--I see plenty of places that are trying to 'develop' but it is just sprawl. Plenty of places give huge incentives and pays for road upgrades for things like corporate parks that never fill up or pay for the investment. Roundabout also have the effect of not needing expensive traffic lights and not needing as wide of roads. They increase throughput and thus can decrease backups. If you only have 2 lanes instead of 4 it is much less expensive to maintain.

RetiredRichard 2y ago

> Brainard and Carmel aren't the only ones: Despite post-bankruptcy fiscal constraints and a hostile state government (at least until Governor Whitmier), Detriot has seen infrastructure and amenity improvements under Mayor Mike Duggan, but it still has a long way to go. They also referred to Detriot's own investments during a tight time