The Economist October 1st 2022
Most new housing in America is built ei- supports 1.6m people on half of the land
Urbanism
The joy of
roundabouts
CARME L , IND IANA
Growth is popular, if it is well planned
I n 1995, when Jim Brainard, then a lawyer,
fought the Republican primary to be-
come the mayor of Carmel, Indiana, his ci-
ty was a modest suburb of Indianapolis
with a population of around 35,000 people.
Walking around its sprawling tract hous-
ing, and talking to residents about what
they wanted for their town, he found a
theme. People said things like: “I wish I
could walk to a restaurant.” On winning the
primary, knowing that he wouldn’t face
much opposition in the general election,
Mr Brainard devoted himself to studying
urban planning. “I have a theory that our
architecture got very boring and bad about
the time we all got in cars and stopped
walking around looking at it,” he says.
Since Mr Brainard became mayor Car-
mel’s population has almost tripled, to ov-
er 100,000 people. A few decades ago it had
only a small central “historic district”. Now
it has an actual “downtown” full of apart-
ments, restaurants and shops, as well as a
fancy music auditorium and two theatres.
In summer families rock up on bicycles to
watch children’s films projected on a
screen in a new square. Nearby streets are
lined with terraced houses that resemble
Victorian ones, even though they were
built in this century. Visitors on foot do not
have to cross enormous expanses of tar-
mac to get anywhere.
A majority of Americans now live in
suburbs. But while their residents are
changing much like America, becoming
more diverse, older and with a wider range
of incomes, many of the suburbs them-
selves have barely changed in decades.


ther in brand new tracts at the edge of big
cities or in apartments in the centre. With
the right policies, however, America’s sub-
urbs could produce plenty more housing,
argues Alan Mallach, a fellow at the Centre
for Community Progress, a non-profit.
They have more land, are close to jobs, and
already have infrastructure in place. Car-
mel offers lessons on how to achieve that.
It is also a case study of the enormous pow-
er a single mayor can have to create
change, if he or she can sell it.
The key to Mr Brainard’s power was not
only the realisation that many people like
to live in more walkable neighbourhoods
but also that providing them can save the
city money. Low-density suburbs cost a lot
to maintain: when houses are further apart
they need longer roads and sewage lines,
and the bin men have to travel further be-
tween each one. A single mile of road can
cost $15m to build, and must be main-
tained. A new block of flats, by contrast,
adds far less to a city’s expenses, and yet
their residents still pay property taxes.
Even terraced houses cost a lot less.
In the past 20 years Carmel has taken
advantage of this using “tax increment fi-
nancing”. To illustrate how this works, Mr
Brainard points to an ageing strip mall
which the city has purchased. Its nine
acres of land, most of which is used for
parking and is empty much of the time,
currently generates around $61,000 in tax
revenue each year. The city is working with
a developer who will rebuild it with five-
storey apartments and shops, with parking
underground. This costs a lot upfront (the
city has to subsidise the parking to get the
developers on board) but Mr Brainard reck-
ons that when it is finished it will generate
$3m per year in property taxes. Even after
servicing the loan, that will leave a hefty
chunk behind for the city. “Sprawl kills cit-
ies,” he says.
Unlike suburbs in places such as New
Jersey or outside Washington, Carmel is
densifying without the benefits of a decent
regional public-transport system. That re-
quires hiding the cars underground. But it
also brings in one of Mr Brainard’s other in-
novations, the roundabout. The city now
has 145 of them, far more than any other
American city. Because they slow down
cars and make “T-Bone” collisions less
likely, roundabouts are safer. The city’s
traffic-death rate is a fifth of the rate na-
tionwide. But because cars do not get stuck
at lights, roundabouts also increase capac-
ity. That allows the city to grow without
needing to widen its roads. In a few places
it has even narrowed them. It has shrunk
one that goes through the centre from five
lanes to just two. Now the city sells t-shirts
boasting about its roundabouts.
How big could Carmel get? Asked this,
Mr Brainard jokingly notes that Manhattan
United States 29
area. Increasing its population 30 times
might be difficult: even with underground
garages and roundabouts, all those cars
still take up space. In reality, Carmel looks
more like a richer version of Milton
Keynes, a city of 200,000 people in south-
ern England that is also famous for its
roundabouts. But growth works. Drawn by
the new residents, employers have moved
in too, and more people now commute to
work in Carmel than leave it each day. With
housing getting less affordable in big cit-
ies, and many suburbs struggling with the
costs of ageing infrastructure, it provides a
promising model of how to improve. A few
mayors could make a trip to Indiana to see
how to do it. 
Midterm maths
The new
swing voters
WASHINGTO N, DC
The most sought-after voters are
young, urban Hispanic men
midterm
maths
T o win an election in America, a candi-
date must get at least one more vote
than their opponent (unless they are run-
ning for president). Parties have therefore
focused on two groups when debating
electoral strategy: base and swing voters.
Coveted archetypes of the latter group have
included the “soccer moms” of the 1990s
and 2000s and suburbanites through most
of the 2010s. With political polarisation
rising ever higher, readers may be forgiven
for assuming that swing voters are a dying
breed. In reality, they have been kept rele-
vant by tight elections in which a small
number of them can decide the outcome.
According to a schema developed by
V.O. Key Jr, a venerable American political
scientist, in “The Responsible Electorate”,
a 1966 book published posthumously on
his behalf, voters can be divided into three
groups. There are so-called “stand-patters”
(partisans who vote for the same side year
after year), “switchers” and new voters. Ac-
cording to Mr Key, switchers made up one-
eighth to one-fifth of voters in the years be-
tween 1940 and 1960.
Today switchers number in the single
digits. The Economist’s analysis of polls,
conducted on our behalf by YouGov, puts
them at 3%. On top of that, 83% of voters
who currently say they are “definitely” or
“probably” going to vote in November are
standing pat. Some 8% are new voters who