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b'In our last podcast, I spoke with Aaron Renn, the Urbanophile, about the city of Carmel, Indiana. It was an opportunity to learn more about Carmel\'s controversial experiment in large-scale, debt-driven suburban retrofit, and an opportunity to hear, though the voice of an authentic supporter, about what Carmel is doing. It is different than other North American suburbs, and while Strong Towns has not delved deeply into what is happening there, we\\u2019ve been prompted to do so many times.\\nSome podcast listeners were upset that the podcast with Aaron wasn\\u2019t more of a debate, with me aggressively challenging the points being made. Others were thankful for the opportunity to have Carmel\\u2019s case made unmolested. Having heard the pro-Carmel narrative, this week we\\u2019re following up and offering a different perspective.\\nAaron called Carmel the anti-Strong Town, and there are some fundamental reasons why that is true. We ask the questions: How will you know that you\\u2019re wrong? When will you know?\\nWhat Carmel has done is to\\u2014by Aaron\\u2019s own admission\\u2014build all the happy, pleasant, comfortable amenities today to attract people counting on future growth to cover the cost. In a sense, it\\u2019s a go for broke mentality. It\\u2019s impossible today to know if this will work. Furthermore, it\\u2019s disconcertingly self-affirming for people to convince themselves that they can today enjoy all of the fruits of a community\\u2019s future labor.\\nWhat Carmel has done, in a very modern American way, is invert the time-tested process of making sacrifices today for a better tomorrow. A fiscally prudent approach to the same vision of tomorrow might involve Carmel\'s raising taxes on its residents, in order to make investments in things those residents want, based on a vision that these investments will ultimately pay off. What Carmel\\u2019s leadership has done instead is delivered on the amenities today, without requiring anything in terms of real sacrifice for a community that is currently wealthy. Carmel residents of today have no real skin in the game, at least not into proportion to the benefit they enjoy. Carmel residents of tomorrow, on the other hand, inherit a huge risk when that debt has to be repaid.\\nThat\\u2019s standard operating procedure for America\\u2019s suburbs; it\\u2019s just that Carmel has taken it to the next level. And then some. The incentives here are backwards.\\nThis ties into the concept of something being \\u201cbuilt out,\\u201d that the things we are working on have a finished state that will ultimately be reached. The concept of \\u201cbuild out\\u201d is the ultimate hubris, the somehow our vision today is the correct one for all time. That we use our vision of the built-out condition to justify wild expenditures and massive debt so we can live with the benefits, without experiencing the difficulty of getting there, only makes the concept more suspect.\\nIn a place going for broke, where is the rigorous return-on-investment analysis? Where are the spreadsheets and special meetings going back and analyzing the assumptions of past investments, comparing those to the reality that has emerged, and using that rigor to inform future investments? Where is the estimate of the amount of growth and tax base needed to make the investments being made today successful?\\nThese don\\u2019t exist, and their absence is not a confirmation of competence. This is especially true in a city that has gone to great lengths to make expensive investments that intentionally signal, "This is a high-quality place run by highly competent people." Where we do have data, it is the blinking-red-light variety, where money is being shifted from one account to another to cover emergency shortfalls, debt is being rolled over without being retired, all with assurances that things are under control. In the absence of rigor on return-on-investment, those assurances ring hollow.\\nIf we were to have confidence in Carmel, there would be signals that things under the hood\\u2014stuff that only the insiders can know\\u2014are operating well. Some of t'