Of all the places in all the country, how did I end up in Indiana? The answer is Carmel,” California native Joe Molina explained recently to the Wall Street Journal.
Located north of Indianapolis, Carmel is an upscale business suburb of just over 100,000 people. The Journal called it “the Internet’s favorite small city,” referring to how Carmel places at or near the top of American cities. Carmel has also racked up glowing national and global press reports—featured in the New York Times, The Economist, the Washington Post, and Bloomberg, along with numerous other pieces of viral social content about the city. A recent YouTube video dubbed it “the best-designed suburb in America.”
Carmel is not only a model of suburban success but also of Republican city governance. In the early 1990s, urban Republican mayors were the great policy innovators, led by Rudolph Giuliani, who was transforming New York City, and Stephen Goldsmith, who built a reputation in Indianapolis with outsourcing services. Likewise, Carmel’s 28-year Republican mayor, James Brainard, who stepped down in January, pioneered an original leadership and governance approach.
Brainard’s example shows how Republicans can create and sustain civil and political success in upscale suburbs that have been trending Democrat. If Republicans want to remain relevant in this critical geography, they’d do well to integrate the lessons of Carmel into their party’s brand.
Carmel has the statistics that one would expect for a city of its type. About 73 percent of its residents hold college degrees. Its median household income is $130,322. Housing prices are surprisingly affordable by national standards, with the median price under $500,000. And many companies have set up shop here, taking advantage of about 7.2 million square feet of office space.
The city has also grown more diverse. Carmel has a small but rapidly growing black community of more than 3,600 and is becoming a preferred destination for the Indianapolis region’s black upper middle class. The city also attracts a broad range of immigrants, with 17.1 percent of households speaking a language other than English.
Most major cities have one or more upscale business suburbs with similar profiles and performance. Undoubtedly, Carmel would have been successful even without strong leadership or innovative policies. But the city stands out precisely because its leadership produced unusually outstanding results.
The most famous of Carmel’s innovations is its use of roundabouts at street intersections. Roundabouts offer numerous advantages over traditional intersections. When traffic is light to moderate, cars typically don’t have to stop at roundabouts, reducing delays and tailpipe emissions. Roundabouts are safer, all but eliminating often-fatal high-speed, head-on, right-angle “T-bone” collisions. They require no electricity and keep functioning even when the power goes out. Since there isn’t a captive audience of stopped cars every light cycle, they tend not to attract panhandlers. Likewise, they eliminate the dangerous phenomenon of cars gunning it to make it through a green light.
If roundabouts are in fashion today, Carmel is one of the places that made them so. It has built more than 150, more than anywhere else in the United States. It’s possible to drive through Carmel without ever having to stop. Carmel may be one of the few growing American cities where traffic is better than it was 20 years ago.
Roundabouts are just one example of Carmel investing big in infrastructure and amenities—including a new water-treatment plant, world-class playgrounds, multiuse paths along almost every arterial street, public art, and a lavish new library. Some of its creations are unique, such as Christkindlmarkt, a German-style Christmas market named the nation’s best.
Carmel has also become famous for its urban planning. The city was not a county seat and lacked a sizable historic downtown. Instead, it had a collection of ramshackle one-story buildings along Main Street, some modest older houses on streets without sidewalks, and several aging strip-mall and industrial buildings in its historic center. Today, Carmel has replaced much of this with higher-density, mixed-use development, with the old downtown reborn as the Arts and Design District and Main Street refashioned with a mix of old and new buildings. The city transformed vacant, underused industrial space just south of Main Street into the Midtown district, fit with offices, apartments, retail, and public plazas. And south of Midtown, Carmel repurposed an old strip mall into another mixed-use area, City Center, that includes a $175 million performing-arts complex and a civic green.
All this development has occurred along the Monon Trail, a former rail line turned recreational trail, at the center of which is a lavishly landscaped and furnished promenade akin to New York’s High Line. A pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly path that connects the city’s walkable commercial districts, plazas, performing-arts center, City Hall, and community center, the Monon Trail has replaced Carmel’s former civic axis, Meridian Street (US-31). The city continues to add cultural amenities to this new hub, including an under-construction building for the historical society and a planned museum for the Great American Songbook Foundation. What was once a sprawling suburb’s decaying center is now a high-quality walkable, urban-style district.
Even with such amenities, Carmel has low taxes. Indiana’s owner-occupied-housing tax is constitutionally capped at 1 percent of a home’s value. Viewers of a viral Carmel High School video were stunned to learn that the school district spends less than $10,000 per pupil annually. The city does carry $1.4 billion in debt, but in a state with virtually no debt and a county with very limited liabilities, a roughly $14,000 per-capita debt is manageable for an affluent community. Chicago, by comparison, has $42,000 in per-capita liabilities, with total state and local per-capita liabilities of about $136,000—more than nine times Carmel’s burden. A deep-red state with conservative instincts, Indiana keeps a tight leash on municipal finances, with hard caps on tax rates and levy growth.
Carmel is situated in a midwestern metro region that is not large like New York, not wealthy like San Francisco, and not a boomtown national talent destination like Nashville. Its remarkable success derives partly from its leadership and governance approach, developed by the long-serving Mayor Brainard and embraced by the city’s Republican leadership. It’s a formula from the Republican Party’s moderate wing: built on political leadership, with an empowered mayor utilizing public-sector investment, focused on community improvement in areas within city government’s control, with commonsense center-right politics.
The first element of Carmel’s success is political leadership. While it differs from the now-dominant style of urban governance that relies on a broad civic coalition to drive the community’s development, Brainard’s approach, with the mayor firmly in charge, has delivered results and proved popular. Unlike today’s urban politics, often dominated by managerial leaders endlessly talking about “collaboration” or by angry populists, Brainard’s style combined the visionary governance of a Giuliani with the skillful management of his successor, Michael Bloomberg.
The second element is Indiana’s empowered municipalities, which operate under a strong-mayor system without term limits. Brainard was thus enabled to carry forward his agenda, often without city council approval. Granted, he enjoyed a seven-term runway to see long-term plans to fruition—his plans for the City Center development were unveiled in 2004, and its final buildings will be completed only this year—and to outlast his opposition. Again, this resembles New York, where Giuliani benefited from the city’s 1989 city charter that dramatically increased the mayor’s power (albeit with term limits). Cities with weak-mayor systems, council-manager government, or mayoral term limits can be successful, too, but they need to create different models of civic advancement.
The third element of Carmel’s success is its focus on public-sector action and investment. Admittedly, this willingness to invest large sums of public money is also the source of the city’s debt. But as Brainard said many times, Carmel did not have an ocean or mountains or other natural amenities, but only midwestern winters; it would have to work hard to create a first-class built environment. While the city’s taxes are low, its goal was not just to be the cheapest but to deliver value for the money.
While Carmel outsources some services like trash pickup and Brainard turned to typical public-private partnerships for real-estate projects, he emphasized government ownership of assets and building up “state capacity” for his city. The approach can be contrasted with that of Mayor Stephen Goldsmith in Indianapolis. Goldsmith was another innovator, but he leaned heavily on the private sector, signing numerous outsourcing and privatization deals. Brainard preferred to keep public-sector ownership and management. While Indianapolis sold, repurchased, and sold again its water utility, Brainard sought to bring Carmel’s water under municipal control. He bought out one utility serving part of the city and fought with the Indianapolis Water Company to obtain its Carmel waterlines. Brainard also completed 56 annexations, some of which involved bruising legal battles, to expand his city’s boundaries so that they would be essentially coterminous with its school district. (In Indiana, school districts are independent units of government, with boundaries that typically don’t align with those of municipalities but rather follow township or county lines.)
Republicans like to argue that people vote with their feet, moving to places with policies that they like. The Brainard approach clashes with the traditional austerity-driven focus of state and local Republicans—the Tea Party vision that is otherwise strong in Indiana. (Austerity has been the state GOP’s preferred policy since Mitch Daniels, nicknamed “The Blade” for his cost-cutting bent, was elected governor in 2004.) But city governments are a different beast from the federal one in Washington that draws so much justifiable frustration and even contempt. People like the services that local governments provide. They like it when the police car, ambulance, or fire truck shows up where it’s needed. They like parks, libraries, and well-paved streets. Assuming that capital is well allocated and that projects are competently and cost-effectively administered, government spending on such things can be popular.
Carmel Republicans differed most from typical state and local Republicans in their vision of what they wanted their city to be—and in their willingness to back it up with public investments. Their approach has been imitated in many surrounding communities, including at the state level, as even Indiana begins to pivot from austerity toward greater public investment. Communities in red states like Indiana are far better able to pull off this strategy than those in blue states like New York, where public unions siphon resources and fewer cultural and legal safeguards exist to block runaway taxation.
Of course, the Brainard model doesn’t just differ from local governing attitudes of some other Republicans: it makes a stark contrast with Democratic municipal management, which has proved disastrous (and remains a political opportunity for Republicans). Even Democrats who run suburbanized cities like Carmel and who are more moderate than their big-city counterparts are confronted now with the leftward lurch of their party. They find themselves increasingly trapped on issues such as radical curricula in public schools, crime, and homelessness.
The fourth element of Carmel’s success is its emphasis on community improvement. Brainard’s investment thesis was that improving the quality of place would attract people and businesses. Professional-class suburbs are targeting residents with professional incomes, who expect public amenities to match their private comforts and want civic ambitions to harmonize with their personal ideals. These residents are not indifferent to price, but they care as much or more about the product they are getting. People who shop in boutiques don’t want to live in a Dollar General community.
The fifth element is the city government’s discipline in focusing on items within its control. Mayor Brainard mostly avoided pursuing policies that would have been controversial but outside the core competency of the city or that didn’t yield tangible outcomes. He didn’t, for example, ban plastic bags, put a tax on soda, create a city-specific minimum wage, seek to “dismantle white supremacy,” or any other of a long list of things that many progressive cities attempt. Instead, he focused on what the city could accomplish: build roundabouts, acquire parkland, plant trees, pick up trash, and enforce speed limits. When he sought to lead public opinion, it was almost always for an initiative central to city government, such as building the Monon Trail.
The last, and critical, element of Carmel’s success: its Republicans govern from the commonsense center. What is the commonsense center? It is predicated on several themes: a strong public-safety and policing culture; low taxes and effective governance; heavy investment in first-class infrastructure, amenities, and other public goods and services; sweating the details on things like maintenance and operations; welcoming and embracing all people, regardless of race, sexuality, politics, or religion; friendliness to business and commerce; smart climate policies; civil discourse and disagreement—and an avoidance of extreme ideologies.
Many centrist Republican politicians get blasted by populist voters as RINOs—Republicans in Name Only. While undoubtedly a moderate, Brainard was the rare Republican politician who talked more liberally than he governed. For example, he frequently averred that climate change was real and said that the city had to act. He served on an Obama administration climate-change task force. Yet most of his climate-change-mitigation efforts in Carmel were things that he would have done anyway: building bike paths, adding new park acreage, constructing denser multiuse districts. He did not impose onerous green energy mandates on buildings, ban gasoline-powered lawn machinery, attempt to eliminate single-family zoning, or try to get rid of cars—all things touted by the climate-activist Left. Brainard told Governing that “[s]ingle-use zoning is very bad,” but he made no attempt to alter it in most of his city. He enthusiastically championed diversity in Carmel but didn’t engage in antiwhite polemics or criticize religious conservatives or other groups.
Carmel certainly is politically diverse. Some deeply conservative factions in the city prefer austerity. The city also has edgier right-wing elements, like a local Moms for Liberty chapter that included a Hitler quote in one of its flyers and has been rejected by the city’s mainstream, governing Republicans.
Similarly, Carmel has attracted some left-wing residents. The city has largely avoided getting drawn into their ideology, though Brainard did pivot leftward in his final term, which did not serve the city well. He made a strange and abortive attempt, for example, to sue the city of Minneapolis for police overtime in the wake of George Floyd’s death, and appointed a chief equity officer, whom he later fired and by whom the city was later sued for racial discrimination.
Those aberrational moments aside, the recent race to succeed Brainard as mayor showed the power of the commonsense-center model. Carmel Democrats believed that they had a big opportunity to turn the city blue. Former Biden chief of staff Ron Klain, a Carmel native, was involved in fund-raising for the race. But the Democratic candidate decided to run a highly negative campaign, attacking Republican candidate Sue Finkam for not sufficiently denouncing the Moms for Liberty group for its flyer. Finkam had, in fact, condemned the flyer at an event but resisted media pressure to get drawn further into the controversy and stuck to her positive, commonsense campaign positions. Finkam eventually won decisively, 57 percent to 43 percent; Republicans retained eight out of nine city council seats as well.
Brainard’s and Finkam’s success shows that commonsense-center politics is attractive to the suburban professional class, which wants to affirm values like diversity, while not embracing the anti-merit, implicitly antiwhite and anti-Asian, and increasingly anti-Semitic diversity, equity, and inclusion movement. These suburbanites have seen the reality of DEI up close at their corporate or institutional jobs, and many clearly believe that it has gone too far.
Only Republicans can deliver on this commonsense approach. While centrist Republicans like Brainard and Finkam can easily hold edgy right-wing groups at bay, it is extremely difficult for any Democratic politician to do the equivalent regarding left-wing activist groups. As the recent campaign illustrated, a Democratic victory in Carmel would have meant at least four years of local residents being called racists and other names. No wonder voters rejected it.
Strong political leaders investing and executing on a forward-looking, commonsense-center agenda is a feasible model for most American suburbs.
Those seeking to implement such an agenda would face challenges. First, the Carmel approach has not yet been clearly articulated as a Republican governing program. In Carmel and many other suburbs, city politics were long Republican by default. Now they are competitive. Suburban Republicans must explicitly and compellingly articulate their governing philosophy so that the public understands that every good thing created by the public sector in their communities happened because of Republican leadership. Citizens need to see Democratic candidates as proposing dysfunctional governance, far-left ideology, and ultrahigh taxes characteristic of many blue-state suburbs.
The GOP also must make a place within its coalition and brand for Carmel’s kind of politics. Too much of the Republican Party today is MAGA, Tea Party, or some other flavor that repels suburbanites. The party’s vanishing moderate wing at the state and national levels often tilts too far left. Indiana’s Republican governor Eric Holcomb, for example, has publicly embraced DEI. Affluent suburbanites are nothing if not status-conscious. With the GOP moving increasingly downscale, suburbanites will continue to abandon the party for status reasons alone—unless Republicans champion a higher-status model like Carmel’s that is not simply a watered-down Leftism.
As for Carmel, its future is not without risk. Following a legendary mayor, as with a great coach or CEO, is a fraught endeavor. The city faces looming controversies around critical race theory and sexual ideologies in the school district, which has its own elected school board and is not controlled by the mayor or city government. It also needs to redevelop its older office parks to adapt to post-pandemic work styles.
Overall, though, the city’s future looks bright. Carmel’s combination of moderate housing costs; low taxes; business friendliness; solid red-state governance; commonsense-center city politics; great schools; and high-quality infrastructure, amenities, and city services makes it among the best suburbs in the country for a sane conservative.
And Carmel has built with an eye to the future. Brainard hopes that his Palladium concert hall will be standing 500 years from now. As he put it at his final State of the City event: “We’re building our city for our children and grandchildren and people we don’t know, leaving them a gift that will sustain them as they grow and prosper.”
That’s an aspiration that urban Republicans should embrace.
Top Photo: The most famous of Carmel’s innovations is its use of roundabouts at street intersections. (Brian McGuckin/Courtesy of The City of Carmel)
