How Carmel, Indiana proves that high-quality governance is cheap when a community is coherent – a case study for the Free Cities and private governance movements.

Introduction: What does good governance actually cost?

Most people assume that good governance is expensive. That it demands large bureaucracies, heavy tax burdens, and a government apparatus that grows in perpetuity. Carmel, Indiana suggests they are wrong. What the Carmel experience shows instead is that when a community shares basic norms, when the physical environment is well designed, and when leadership makes deliberate choices about what to build, governance gets cheap. Surprisingly cheap.

Carmel runs a city of over 105,000 people on a general fund budget of about $144 million, which works out to roughly $1,371 per resident.[1] The average American city of comparable size spends between $2,500 and $4,000 per capita.[2] Carmel regularly shows up on best-places-to-live lists from Money Magazine, Niche, and U.S. News at a fraction of what peer cities spend on governance.[3] That gap is not luck. It follows from specific design decisions, from the kind of people those decisions attract, and from an uncomfortable truth that most governments avoid: the distribution of governance problems follows a power law.

This paper uses Carmel as a proof of concept for a bigger argument, one that is picking up speed through the Free Cities, charter cities, and private governance movements.[4] The argument: governance is a service. Like any service, it can be delivered well or badly. When you deliver it inside a coherent community built on sound urban principles, costs fall and quality rises.

Part I: The Carmel story

From bedroom community to best place to live

Carmel sits just north of Indianapolis in Hamilton County. For most of the twentieth century, it was a quiet bedroom community, the kind of place people slept before commuting to their real lives in the city.[5] In 1990 it had about 25,000 residents, no real downtown, no cultural identity, and no ambition beyond being a decent place to mow a lawn.

That changed when Jim Brainard won the mayor’s office in 1996. A Republican attorney who had spent time traveling in Europe, Brainard had seen what actual cities looked like: walkable streets, mixed use development, public squares where people gathered, infrastructure built for humans rather than just cars.[6] He came home and looked at Carmel as raw material.

What followed was a twenty-eight year transformation that has few parallels in American municipal history.[7] Carmel grew from 25,000 to over 100,000 residents. But the real accomplishment was not the growth itself. It was how the city grew. Instead of the usual American pattern of subdivisions, arterial roads, and strip malls, Brainard pursued an urban placemaking agenda that would have raised eyebrows in Portland or Brooklyn, let alone in a conservative Indiana suburb.

The Brainard vision: building a city, not a suburb

Brainard grasped something that most suburban mayors miss. There is a real difference between a city and a suburb, and the distinction matters for budgets, for quality of life, and for whether a place can sustain itself over the long run. Suburbs depend on nearby cities for culture, jobs, and identity while giving back relatively little. A real city generates its own economic gravity, its own culture, its own reasons to exist.

Turning Carmel from a suburb into a city meant pursuing several strategies at once, and sticking with them for decades:

Brainard built a continuous walkable district centered on a former railroad corridor turned greenway, connecting the Arts and Design District, Midtown, and Carmel City Center.[8] This was a serious undertaking. It meant rezoning, buying land, assembling public-private partnerships, and maintaining a sustained commitment to mixed use, human-scale development over multiple election cycles.

Then there are the roundabouts. Carmel has over 150 of them, more than any other American city.[9] They were not an aesthetic flourish. A roundabout costs about $250,000 less to build than a signalized intersection and saves over $5,000 a year in electricity alone.[10] But the safety numbers tell the real story. In 1996, Carmel had 30,000 residents and 217 traffic accidents. By 2019, 100,000 residents and fewer than 200 accidents. The population tripled; the accident count went down.

While Indianapolis Mayor William Hudnut famously used sports as an economic development tool, Brainard bet on the arts. Carmel built the Center for the Performing Arts and established the Arts and Design District, now home to over 200 art and design businesses including the Indiana Design Center. Americans for the Arts estimated that Carmel’s arts venues generated $42.7 million in economic impact in 2022.[11]

The park system grew from 41 acres to over 750. Well-designed parks in walkable communities tend to police themselves through constant use, which means the maintenance cost per acre stays low even as the system expands.[12]

The debt question

None of this was free. By 2019, Carmel carried approximately $1.3 billion in outstanding debt, the third highest of any Indiana city and about $14,145 per resident.[13] Critics raised alarms, and Standard and Poor’s dropped the city’s rating from AA+ to AA.[14]

But there is a distinction that matters here: investment debt versus consumption debt. Carmel’s borrowing went into infrastructure, public spaces, and commercial development that directly grew the taxable property base. That base increased sixfold during Brainard’s tenure, from roughly $2 billion to over $12 billion.[15] The city was not borrowing to plug budget holes. It was using capital to build assets that throw off revenue. An independent review by Reedy Financial Group in 2024 concluded that the debt load was reasonable and the repayment plans were sound.[16]

And here is the number that puts the debt controversy in perspective: Carmel’s property tax rate is 78 cents per $100 of assessed value, the fifth lowest in Indiana. Because commercial development carries a large share of the tax load, the average homeowner contributes less than $10 per year toward the city’s debt service. Intelligent investment in urban form, as opposed to endless suburban sprawl, generates returns that dwarf the cost of borrowing.

Part II: The budget case for coherent governance

What $144 million buys

Carmel’s 2026 general fund budget of approximately $144 million covers the full range of municipal services for 105,000 people.[17] At roughly $1,371 per capita, here is what it covers:

The budget faces new headwinds. Indiana’s Senate Enrolled Act 1, designed to lower property taxes statewide, means Carmel expects to collect $3.8 million less in tax revenue in 2026 than previously projected.[18] Mayor Sue Finkam, who succeeded Brainard in 2024, has responded with staff reductions and accelerated debt paydown while keeping investment in core services. Most city employees get a 3 percent cost of living increase; the mayor and senior leadership took no raises.

The per capita comparison

The numbers look even more striking in context. The average American municipality spends between $2,500 and $4,000 per capita on general fund operations.[19] Large cities spend much more. New York exceeds $12,000 per capita.[20] San Francisco exceeds $15,000.[21] These cities face different problems, granted. But even with generous adjustments for scale and complexity, the gap between Carmel and everywhere else is hard to explain away.

Carmel delivers police, fire, parks, cultural programming, infrastructure maintenance, and full municipal services for $1,371 per person, and keeps showing up on national best-places-to-live lists while doing it.[22]

So what makes this possible?

Part III: The power law of governance problems

Why most problems come from a small fraction of people

The Pareto Principle, the familiar 80/20 rule, says roughly 80 percent of effects come from 20 percent of causes. In governance, the ratio is often more lopsided than that. This is not ideology; it is one of the most consistently replicated findings in criminology, public administration, and urban studies.

Consider crime. In Marvin Wolfgang’s Philadelphia cohort study, 5 percent of offenders committed more than half of all crimes.[23] In Washington, D.C., about 60 to 70 percent of gun violence traces to roughly 500 individuals in a city of 700,000.[24] A 2025 study in Behavioral Sciences and the Law found that the top 20 percent of inmates were responsible for about 90 percent of prison rule violations.[25]

The pattern extends to geography. David Weisburd’s work at George Mason University shows that crime clusters at specific addresses and street segments. A small number of hot spots produce the vast majority of calls for service.[26]

Emergency services, code enforcement, and social services follow the same distribution. A handful of properties in any municipality can consume more public resources than whole neighborhoods. The Strong Towns movement has documented this pattern extensively.[27]

What this means for community composition

This is where the argument gets uncomfortable. If somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of a population generates 80 to 90 percent of governance costs, then the composition of a community is the biggest factor in determining how expensive governance needs to be. This has nothing to do with race or ethnicity in any crude sense. It is about behavioral coherence: whether residents broadly share norms around property maintenance, public conduct, and participation in civic life.

Carmel is a behaviorally coherent community. Median household income is about $134,602, nearly two and a half times the national figure.[28] Residents are overwhelmingly employed, educated, and invested in where they live. The city did not get this way by putting up barriers. It got this way by building something specific and good, and letting people self-select into it.

The result is a compressed power law curve. When very few residents fall into the heavy tail of the problem distribution, governance costs collapse. Fewer police are needed because there is less crime. Fewer code enforcement officers because people maintain their properties. Fewer social workers because fewer people are in crisis. The whole apparatus of government that exists to manage the consequences of dysfunction shrinks.

Income alone does not explain it

High income by itself does not produce low governance costs. Plenty of wealthy areas are expensive to govern because of NIMBYism, political fragmentation, or poor physical design. What matters is the alignment of residents around shared norms, combined with a physical environment that reinforces those norms.

Carmel achieves that alignment through design. By building a walkable, mixed use city with good public spaces, it attracts people who want community life. By investing in arts and culture, it creates shared experiences and social capital.[29] By maintaining good schools and safe streets, it retains families who have choices and could easily live elsewhere. The physical city reinforces the social cohesion that keeps governance cheap, and the cheap governance makes the physical city affordable. Each side feeds the other.

Part IV: Building a city, not a suburb

The fiscal math of sprawl

The fiscal case against suburban sprawl has been made before, but it still does not get the attention it deserves.[30]

Cities in the most sprawling quintile spend an average of $750 per capita on public infrastructure each year, 50 percent more than the $500 per capita spent by the most compact cities.[31] For hard infrastructure like water, sewers, and roads, the lifecycle cost difference is even more extreme. Sprawl can cost up to ten times more per household than compact development.

Each suburban home generates a net fiscal loss of $1,500 to $2,500 per year for local governments.[32] Tax revenue from a typical subdivision does not cover the roads, utilities, and services it requires. The shortfall gets subsidized by commercial districts and denser neighborhoods, a cross-subsidy that is invisible to most taxpayers but slowly wrecks municipal balance sheets.

Sprawl also increases the cost of fire protection, police coverage, snow removal, school busing, and every other distance-dependent service by 10 to 40 percent.[33] Covering more ground for fewer people is simply more expensive.

The New Climate Economy puts the total cost of sprawl in the United States at approximately $1 trillion annually when all externalities are included: infrastructure, transportation, environmental damage, health, and lost productivity.[34]

How Carmel’s design cuts costs

Each of Carmel’s 150-plus roundabouts saves thousands per year in electricity, signal maintenance, and accident response.[35] Because roundabouts reduce serious accidents by 72 to 80 percent, they also cut the emergency response, hospitalization, and litigation costs that follow intersection crashes.[36] Multiply those savings across 150 intersections and you have a meaningful chunk of a municipal budget.

Carmel’s walkable districts produce what Jane Jacobs called “eyes on the street,” the natural surveillance that happens when buildings face sidewalks and people are out walking at all hours.[37] Crime prevention through environmental design is not a budget line in Carmel; it is baked into the streetscape.

Mixed use development broadens the tax base. When commercial, residential, and cultural uses share the same walkable districts, commercial tax revenue flows from areas that might otherwise be purely residential. That is why the average Carmel homeowner pays less than $10 per year toward debt service despite the city carrying $1.3 billion in bonds.[38]

And compact infrastructure is just cheaper to maintain. Shorter road networks, denser utility connections, concentrated service areas. When you are not maintaining miles of cul-de-sacs serving a few dozen homes, the public works budget stretches further.[39]

The architecture of community

The case for urban design goes beyond fiscal efficiency, though. The physical form of a place shapes the relationships people form, which in turn shapes what governance costs. Suburban sprawl isolates people. They drive from garage to destination and back, rarely running into neighbors. That isolation erodes social capital and shifts the burden of maintaining order from the community to formal government.[40]

Urban form does the opposite. When people walk to restaurants, bump into neighbors at the farmers market, linger in public squares, and share trails, they build relationships. They develop shared stakes. Ray Oldenburg called the informal gathering spots that enable this “third places”: neither home nor work, but the cafes, parks, and public spaces where civic life actually happens.[41] This informal social infrastructure is what allows Carmel to run at $1,371 per capita. The community itself handles a large share of what formal government would otherwise have to manage.

That insight, that the physical design of a community is inseparable from how much it costs to govern, is underappreciated in policy circles. And it is central to the question investors and city builders care about most: can you replicate this?

Part V: What Carmel teaches us about building new cities

Governance as a design problem

A growing global movement takes the Carmel lesson seriously. The Free Cities and charter cities movements, private governance theorists, and new urbanists come at it from different directions, but they agree on the core point: governance is not something you inherit and endure; it is a design problem you can solve.[42] Paul Romer argued in his influential 2010 paper that new cities built on new charters with new rules offer the most practical route to governance reform, because they bypass the political impossibility of reforming institutions that already exist.[43]

The mechanics are straightforward. A governance service provider, whether private, public-private, or a special authority, acquires or receives the right to develop and administer a defined territory. Rules come from a charter or contract rather than inherited legislative efforts. Residents opt in voluntarily, choosing that governance framework because it beats the alternatives.[44] This is what already happens informally every time someone chooses to move to Carmel instead of a less well-run municipality.

Charles Tiebout laid the theoretical groundwork in 1956, arguing that people “vote with their feet” among competing local governments and that this competition drives efficiency.[45] Carmel is a Tiebout success story. It offered a better governance product, and people moved toward it. The Free Cities movement asks the obvious follow-up: what if you designed for that outcome from the start, instead of hoping it would emerge by accident?

The physical environment comes first

If Carmel teaches one non-negotiable lesson, it is that the physical environment is not secondary to governance. It is the foundation. Every decision about street layout, building form, land use, and public space has downstream effects on costs, cohesion, and quality of life. A new city project that skips serious urban design is building failure into its DNA.

Carmel validates several specific design principles for new cities:

Walkability has to be the default, not an afterthought. Mixed use zoning as the norm, streets designed for pedestrians first. Carmel’s greenway corridor, connecting neighborhoods, commercial areas, and cultural venues in a continuous walkable network, should be the template. The fiscal math backs it up: walkable communities cost 40 to 60 percent less per capita to service than car-dependent ones.[46]

Roundabouts over signals, everywhere the geometry allows. Carmel’s roundabout program is not a quirk. Every signal where a roundabout would work represents a choice for higher construction costs, higher operating costs, more accidents, and worse traffic flow. The roundabout embodies a broader design philosophy: build the system right and you do not need to babysit it forever.[47]

Mixed use over single use zoning. The American pattern of separating residential, commercial, and industrial areas into isolated zones is the most expensive land use approach there is. It forces people into cars, stretches infrastructure across huge distances, and kills the street life that generates social capital. New cities should default to mixed use and let natural integration happen.

Public space should be treated as infrastructure, not decoration. Carmel’s parks, plazas, trails, and performance venues generate economic activity, social cohesion, and the kind of informal community presence that substitutes for policing and social services. Every dollar spent on well-designed public space reduces future spending on formal governance.[48]

Architecture matters too. There is a measurable difference between a place and a non-place. A place has character and generates attachment. A non-place, a strip mall, a parking lot, a featureless subdivision, generates nothing. New cities need architectural standards that create places people want to be: varied facades, human-scale proportions, active ground floors. Carmel’s Arts and Design District exists because of deliberate standards, not because it happened naturally.

Building a coherent community by design

The second big lesson from Carmel: community coherence can be cultivated rather than imposed. For new city projects, this resolves what might otherwise be an awkward tension between the power law argument and a genuine commitment to openness.

Carmel did not screen its residents or impose income requirements. It built something specific and excellent, and let self-selection do the work. People drawn to walkable urbanism, cultural amenities, good schools, and well-maintained public spaces tend to be people who contribute positively to community life. The built environment acts as a filter, not by keeping people out but by attracting people who share a particular set of civic values.

For new city projects, this suggests several approaches:

The Citizen Contract model, drawn from the private governance literature, formalizes what Carmel does informally. A contract spells out the rights and obligations of both the governance provider and the resident.[49] Think of it as a homeowners’ association covenant scaled up to the city level, but with real services delivered in return. Making norms explicit, rather than leaving them implicit, builds coherence from day one.

Quality itself is a selection mechanism. The single most effective way to attract a coherent community is to build something worth being coherent about. Carmel’s investment in arts, culture, parks, and walkable design was not charity. It was a filter. People who move to a city with a performing arts center and a walkable downtown differ, in ways that matter for governance costs, from people who move somewhere because the land is cheap and nobody asks anything of them. New city projects should invest in quality early, understanding that the investment is what generates the population mix that makes everything else affordable.

Graduated development matters. Carmel did not transform overnight. It took twenty-eight years. New cities should build the core urban district first and expand outward as norms solidify. Elinor Ostrom’s work on commons governance shows that small, face-to-face communities develop effective norms much more readily than large, anonymous ones.[50] Starting small and growing deliberately is not a limitation; it is a strategy for building social infrastructure that scales.

Residents need skin in the game. Homeownership, local business investment, school enrollment, civic participation: all of these give residents a stake that aligns their interests with the community’s welfare. New cities should structure ownership so that residents have genuine equity in the project’s success, whether through property, cooperative governance, or contractual profit sharing with the governance provider.

The economics of new city governance

Carmel’s $1,371 per capita cost should discipline every new city project’s financial planning. If a well-run American city of 105,000 can deliver excellent services at that number, then a purpose-built new city with better infrastructure and a contractually coherent community ought to match or beat it.[51]

The economic model, drawing on Carmel, looks roughly like this:

The financial lesson from Carmel, put simply: governance costs are not driven by the services you provide. They are driven by the problems you have to manage. A coherent community in a well-designed environment has fewer problems and therefore needs less government. That is the governance dividend, and it is available to anyone willing to design for it.

Why this moment matters

The window for building new cities is wider than it has been in generations. In the United States, the American Enterprise Institute published a 2025 blueprint identifying potential sites for twenty new cities on federal land.[52] Internationally, dozens of charter city and special economic zone projects are in various stages across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. The design knowledge exists. The governance models exist. The technology exists.

What has been lacking is proof that the approach works, a real community with auditable budgets and measurable outcomes showing that quality governance in a well-designed physical environment is cheap. Carmel is that proof. It was not designed as a demonstration project. It was not bankrolled by a tech billionaire or built on empty land. It was an ordinary Indiana suburb that was transformed through purposeful leadership, intelligent design, and a willingness to invest in the things that make communities function.

If an Indiana suburb managed this within the constraints of the existing American municipal system, with property tax caps, state mandates, election cycles, and bureaucratic friction, then a purpose-built new city designed from scratch, with the right governance structure, the right physical form, and the right community compact, can do it better and at lower cost.

Conclusion: The governance dividend

The governance dividend is the idea that better governance does not just save money; it creates compounding returns that make a community richer, safer, and more attractive over time. Carmel’s trajectory from a forgettable bedroom community to one of the best places to live in America, at a per capita cost well below the national average, is that dividend made concrete.

How do you get there? You build a real city. Walkable, mixed use, human scale, with public spaces and architecture that people actually want to spend time around. That physical form cuts infrastructure costs, throws off commercial revenue, and creates the social fabric that does half of governance’s job for free. Then you cultivate community coherence, not with gates or income tests, but with quality. Build something good enough that it attracts people who care about where they live. Finally, govern with intention. Make design choices that compound over decades. Invest in assets that pay for themselves. Measure success not by how much you spend, but by what quality of life a given dollar buys.

When those elements line up, governance gets remarkably cheap. $1,371 per person, per year. That number deserves to be posted on the wall of every city hall, every charter city boardroom, and every Free City planning office in the world. It is what governance costs when a community is coherent, when the physical environment makes sense, and when leaders grasp that the best government is the one with the least to do, because the community it serves was designed to mostly govern itself.

References

1. City of Carmel, Indiana. “2026 Proposed Budget.” carmel.in.gov/government/departments-services/finance/city-budget
2. U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances, 2022.
3. Money Magazine, “Best Places to Live,” 2020; Niche.com, “Best Places to Live in America,” 2024; U.S. News & World Report, “Best Places to Live,” 2023.
4. Gebel, Titus. Free Private Cities: Making Governments Compete for You. 3rd Edition, Aquila Urbis, 2021. See also Charter Cities Institute, chartercitiesinstitute.org; Free Cities Foundation, free-cities.org.
5. City of Carmel, “History.” carmel.in.gov/our-city/history
6. Governing Magazine, “Meet the Mayor Who Totally Transformed His City.” governing.com
7. You Are Current, “Student of the City: Retiring mayor credits constant study, top consultants as key in Carmel’s transformation,” November 2023.
8. Indianapolis Business Journal, “Jim Brainard looks back on 28 years as Carmel mayor,” 2023.
9. Indiana University Environmental Resilience Institute, “Carmel Indiana Roundabouts.” eri.iu.edu/erit/case-studies/carmel-indiana-roundabouts.html
10. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, “Roundabouts: Status Report,” Vol. 36, No. 8. See also Congress for the New Urbanism, “How roundabouts transformed Carmel,” November 2024.
11. Americans for the Arts, “Arts & Economic Prosperity 6: Carmel, Indiana,” 2023.
12. Jim Brainard, interview with Indianapolis Business Journal, November 2023. See also City of Carmel Parks Department annual report.
13. Indianapolis Monthly, “Does Carmel Have a Spending Problem?” 2019.
14. Standard & Poor’s Global Ratings, City of Carmel Rating Action, 2019.
15. Hamilton County Assessor, Assessed Valuation Reports, 1996-2024. See also Indianapolis Business Journal, “Extent of Carmel borrowing unusual for Indiana,” 2018.
16. You Are Current, “Independent review of Carmel debt raises no red flags,” September 2024.
17. City of Carmel, Indiana. “2026 Proposed Budget.” See also Read the Reporter, “Carmel City Council unanimously approves $144 million 2026 budget,” 2025.
18. Indiana Legislative Services Agency, Senate Enrolled Act 1 Fiscal Impact Analysis, 2025. See also WTHR, “Carmel unveils 2026 budget, accounting for close to $10 million less in state property tax,” 2025.
19. U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances, 2022. Analysis of per capita general fund expenditures for cities of 50,000-200,000 population.
20. New York City Office of Management and Budget, Adopted Budget Fiscal Year 2025.
21. San Francisco Controller’s Office, Six-Month Budget Status Report, FY 2024-2025.
22. Niche.com ranked Carmel #4 in “Best Places to Live in America” for 2024. Money Magazine named Carmel the #1 Best Place to Live in the U.S. in 2012.
23. Wolfgang, Marvin, Robert Figlio, and Thorsten Sellin. Delinquency in a Birth Cohort. University of Chicago Press, 1972.
24. Thomas Abt, Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence. Basic Books, 2019. See also National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, “Gun Violence in America,” 2022.
25. Morgan et al., “Pareto in Prison: Power Law Distributions in Rule Violations.” Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 2025.
26. Weisburd, David. “The Law of Crime Concentration and the Criminology of Place.” Criminology 53, no. 2 (2015): 133-157.
27. Strong Towns, “The Growth Ponzi Scheme,” 2020. strongtowns.org. See also ASU Center for Problem-Oriented Policing, “Learn if the 80-20 rule applies.”
28. U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, Carmel, Indiana, 2023. National median household income was $74,580.
29. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster, 2000.
30. Burchell, Robert W. et al. Sprawl Costs: Economic Impacts of Unchecked Development. Island Press, 2005.
31. Smart Growth America and LOCUS, “Building Better Budgets: A National Examination of the Fiscal Benefits of Smart Growth Development,” 2013.
32. Strong Towns, “The Real Cost of Auto-Oriented Development,” 2020. See also Urban3 fiscal productivity analyses, urban-three.com.
33. Litman, Todd. “Analysis of Public Policies That Unintentionally Encourage and Subsidize Urban Sprawl.” Victoria Transport Policy Institute for LSE Cities, 2015.
34. New Climate Economy, “The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the United States,” 2015. See also Burchfield, Marcy et al., “Causes of Sprawl.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 121, no. 2 (2006).
35. Indiana University Environmental Resilience Institute, “Carmel Indiana Roundabouts.” See also Federal Highway Administration, “Roundabouts: An Informational Guide,” NCHRP Report 672.
36. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, “Roundabouts reduce injury crashes by 72-80% at intersections where stop signs or signals were previously used.”
37. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Random House, 1961.
38. Hamilton County Assessor data. See also Indianapolis Monthly, “Does Carmel Have a Spending Problem?” 2019: “Because much of the city’s budget is paid by commercial taxes, the average residential property owner owes less than $10 toward the debt per year.”
39. Strong Towns, “What Strong Towns Really Says About Infrastructure Spending,” 2024. strongtowns.org
40. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone, 2000. See also Hart, Roger. “Children’s Participation.” UNICEF, 1992, on how walkable neighborhoods foster civic engagement from childhood.
41. Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. Marlowe & Company, 1989.
42. Charter Cities Institute, “Introduction to Charter Cities.” chartercitiesinstitute.org. See also Lutter, Mark. “Building the Charter Cities Ecosystem,” marklutter.com.
43. Romer, Paul. “Technologies, Rules, and Progress: The Case for Charter Cities.” Center for Global Development, 2010.
44. Free Cities Foundation, “What Are Free Cities?” free-cities.org/concepts. See also Gebel, Titus. Free Private Cities, 3rd Edition, 2021.
45. Tiebout, Charles M. “A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures.” Journal of Political Economy 64, no. 5 (1956): 416-424.
46. Smart Growth America, “Building Better Budgets,” 2013. See also Ewing, Reid and Robert Cervero, “Travel and the Built Environment,” Journal of the American Planning Association 76, no. 3 (2010).
47. Federal Highway Administration, “Roundabouts: An Informational Guide,” NCHRP Report 672, 2010. See also Indiana University Environmental Resilience Institute case study.
48. Americans for the Arts, “Arts & Economic Prosperity 6,” 2023. Nationally, nonprofit arts organizations generated $151.7 billion in economic activity in 2022.
49. Gebel, Titus. Free Private Cities, 2021, Chapter 4: “The Citizen Contract.” The contract specifies mutual rights and obligations between governance provider and resident.
50. Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
51. Kling, Arnold and Nick Schulz. Invisible Wealth: The Hidden Story of How Markets Work. Encounter Books, 2011. See also Coase, Ronald. “The Nature of the Firm.” Economica 4, no. 16 (1937).
52. American Enterprise Institute Housing Center, “Homesteading 2.0: A Blueprint for New Cities on Federal Land,” April 2025.

Alex Voss is the Chief Financial Officer at Tipolis and the Head of Bitcoin Strategy & Board Director at the Autris Group (OTC: AUTR)

Find him on X at @AlexDVoss.

Cover image by Carmel Central on Flickr