🔒Takeaway perspective from Indianapolis: Cranes, planes and automobiles

A family commitment took us to Indianapolis recently. My GPS also made the trek and it, like us, struggled to grasp all the new construction and new neighborhoods and towns.

The landscape, straight as a ruler, is dotted with construction cranes, brand new shopping centers, new highways — and, to the confusion of my GPS, numerous new roundabouts. A map wouldn't be of much use because so much of Indianapolis is so new.

One village, WestClay in the northern suburb of Carmel, has an honest-to-God New England town square surrounded by historic-looking houses — and yet much of the 719-acre New Urbanist haven is less than a decade old. The village was settled in 2000. With construction all around, it's very much a work in progress. The median list price for a home is $699,900.

Indy is home to Anthem, Eli Lilly, the Simon Property Group, Lucas Oil Stadium, an industry built around major sporting events like the Final Four and Big 10 Tournament and a slew of manufacturers, from the highly publicized Carrier plant to an aerospace plant owned by Rolls Royce.

Through family I met someone who owned a small manufacturing plant. We exchanged introductions and he told me he'd recently hired a Mainer who was seeking better pay and more opportunity. Sounds familiar, right? The man moved his family from Maine and he was happy with his job and his kids were happy with their new school.

Now this manufacturer had a simple explanation for the disparity between Indianapolis's growth and Maine's.

I'm paraphrasing, but the gist of what he said was this: “In Indiana, we have plenty of open land. It's flat, so you just plow it down and build. Maine is beautiful. Maine's more the type of place I'd like to retire.”

There you have it, folks.

While no one here would ever wish for the rapid expansion of Indianapolis, it wouldn't hurt to have just a bit of that growth.