The entrance to Carmel’s Arts & Design District.
The population of Carmel has more than tripled since 1990 – the town is now home to about 80,000 residents – but it’s not just families that are moving to Carmel. Businesses are also drawn to the city, which in recent years has become a hub for the knowledge and service economy, particularly in the bioscience and medical sectors. A full third of Carmel’s tax base is from commercial sources – a much larger percentage than most towns in the U.S. – illustrating its intense concentration of business activity and showing what accessible downtown development can do for local economies.
But how did Carmel become this way? The answer lies in focused and thoughtful smart growth planning. The Arts & Design District was first, giving residents a taste for the kind of concentrated development that characterizes Carmel today. With hundreds of millions of dollars in private investment, born from a robust public-private partnership, the city created a thriving arts area, focusing on walkability with a keen eye for architecture.
But planners quickly realized that the area was not big enough to be Carmel’s main downtown, so the city began to buy up land through another public-private partnership for a planned downtown area, eventually accumulating 88 acres of space to develop. Today, this area constitutes Carmel’s City Center, anchored by the Palladium theater. In addition, the city put in an extensive system of bike and pedestrian paths, set apart from the street.