What will booming Hamilton County look like in 20 years? The cities have a plan.

A decade ago, the tallest building in downtown Fishers was a grain silo. The culinary center of downtown Carmel 15 years ago was a hamburger stand with a one-pound elk burger called the Big Ugly. Much of Noblesville's downtown riverside was known more for flooding than fun.

Today five- and six-story apartment and office buildings flex in the Fishers airspace. Main Street Carmel is a modern take on historic European town centers with a gauntlet of attractive restaurants fighting for customers. A waterside trail, an amphitheater, luxury apartments and businesses bound the White River in Noblesville.

“It absolutely amazes me,” said Hamilton County Commissioner Steve Dillinger, who graduated from Noblesville High in 1967. “I assumed 20 years ago there would be a lot of development but nothing like it is. Parts of these cities look like New York.”

The change has been so quick and stark that Carmel and Fishers have nearly run out of land to develop, while Noblesville and Westfield to the north can safely project when they will, as well.

Residents are well aware of the growth, if not the future: They’ve seen subdivisions replace farmland, mid-rise dwellings supplant bungalows and denser housing gain favor over sprawl. Road construction is continuous, the supermarkets are crowded. Many have been complaining about it for years.

“I have to sleep with one eye open,” said Kelly Baskett, who has lived in Carmel's booming Midtown area for more than three decades. “I’m on a city email list where I get every meeting agenda because I need to know what is being proposed.”

Two questions often top of the mind for Baskett and other Hamilton County residents: When does the development end, and what will the county look like in 10 or 20 years?

The four cities' planners have a fairly good idea. They are looking far ahead to anticipate how many schools, police officers and fire stations will be needed, estimate what property and income tax revenues will be and set in motion long-term road and public utility projects.

They say somewhere around 2045, nearly all the land left to develop within their borders will have been. That will also mean the end of rapid population growth as the cities reach capacity.

Carmel estimates it could reach a population of 135,000, and Fishers is projecting it will reach 130,000. Noblesville could ultimately move ahead of both southern Hamilton County cities to claim 140,000 residents. Westfield school district leaders say at least 68,000 residents will live within the city and overlapping township by 2035.

The increases would help bump the county to more than 500,000 inhabitants, by 2045, making it Indiana’s second-largest county behind Marion.

Where the new residents will be moving and into what types of homes varies by city.

Fine-tuning Carmel housing

Carmel already finds itself largely built out. Now it’s time for the city to grow up.

"Growing up is looking at our inefficient land area, but it's also growing in the sense that Carmel is a young city," said Mike Hollibaugh, director of the Carmel's Community Services Department, "and there’s fine tuning we can do."

Buildout means housing in Carmel, as well as Fishers, is going to have less elbow room, with a lot less lawn to mow for homeowners. With land at a premium, homes will be closer together, and the price of developing – and buying – them will rise accordingly.

Carmel is combing over sites that are ripe for redevelopment, Hollibaugh said.

“The private sector has been pretty good about finding nooks and crannies" to build homes in,” he said.

The city has been the starkest example of the fast growth since 2000. Carmel has built or is planning more than three dozen residential, commercial, retail, entertainment and government projects in the last two decades. Most are multistory, mixed-use structures with parking garages and stores and restaurants on the first floor.

That's meant less space for traditional suburban single-family homes. The trend is reflected in Carmel's building permit approvals, with a 43% decrease in permits for single-family homes from 2018 to 2023.

In comparison, north of 146th Street, Westfield has seen the number of single-family permits approved annually more than double in the past decade.

The reduction in Carmel permits also signals even more height and density coming to the central core, Hollibaugh said.

Mayor Sue Finkam said with demand for homes remaining high, Carmel will see more houses built on split lots and smaller properties.

“Both offer housing opportunities in for-sale and ‘for rent’ multifamily properties,” Finkam said. Those developments will help keep the availability of traditional homes for resale high, she said.

The areas prime for the most growth are on the soon - to-be-widened Monon Trail between Walnut Street and City Center Drive; the redeveloping stretch of College Avenue between 96th and 106th streets; and the U.S. 31 Corridor near CNO Financial Group’s 78-acre corporate campus, which is up for sale.

Fishers rethinking how it builds

Fishers is close to full buildout, too. The city has only four or five large tracts of land left – in the southeast and northwest corners of the city – in what traditionally had been developed as sprawling subdivisions.

Fishers officials said they expect those tracts to be built as homes on smaller lots, duplexes and townhomes. That would follow a trend of building lower-maintenance homes close to each other connected by trails with a common courtyard.

“The finite amount of land that is left has allowed us to rethink how we build on it," said Fishers Planning and Zoning Director Ross Hilleary said.

But those developments won’t account for all of a predicted 30,000 increase in population. The rest will come from infill – redeveloping property at former business parks, strip malls or dilapidated housing developments and continued building of apartments downtown or nearby.

Single-home permit applications have plunged recently in Fishers, from roughly 670 in 2021 to 280 last year, a drop of more than 58%.

“You can put a lot of stuff in small amount of land,” Fishers Mayor Scott Fadness said, pointing to the downtown Nickel Plate District. Since 2015, the city has added 1,375 units of rental and owner-occupied housing downtown. “It’s all on 15 acres.”

Sylvia Brecht, who moved to a home on the east side of Fishers in 2020, said she doesn’t mind the fast residential growth but believes commercial development is lagging behind residential building.

“There are lots of new homes being constructed, but not enough places for those people to shop in addition to the people who are already here,” Brecht said. “They just haven’t kept up.”

Brecht said if she could have chosen where to move over again she would have settled near downtown Fishers.

“It’s actually more congested, but more conveniences,” she said.

Opportunity for developers

For some developers, impending buildout provides an opening. Oynx+East specializes in the kind of infill projects the cities will be seeking, as well as the smaller, varied housing.

“There will be continued densification,” said Kelli Lawrence, CEO of Oynx+East. “Housing is going vertical as buildout arrives all over the region.”

The company’s most recent project in West Carmel illustrates the future of housing here. Flora is a mix of 121 townhomes, duplexes and single-family homes on 18 acres with streets and alleys, sidewalks and walking trails on a grid that connects rather than ends in cul-de-sacs.

It has green space, a courtyard, dog park and fire pits.

Elsewhere in Carmel , Oynx+East’s Melange along the Monon Trail is 45 townhomes three stories tall aligned in a row and a dozen owner-occupied flats on a former parking lot.

“People prefer a more maintenance-free lifestyle without the burden of homeownership,” Lawrence said. “That’s exactly what we do. It is an area of growth.”

Noblesville looks east to double size

For Noblesville and Westfield, part of the answer to a lack of space is simply to get more of it by annexing unincorporated county land.

Noblesville has its eyes on unincorporated Wayne Township, east of Indiana 37, for future expansion. The land is almost all agricultural and measures about 35 square miles, roughly the same size as the developed part of Noblesville's current boundaries, said Community Development Director Sarah Reed.

As developers reach deals with landowners, the city will extend sewer and water connections and annex the properties bit-by-bit. When the land is developed, it could double the city’s population of 72,000.

That will mean a major shift in the population center of the suburb, geographically, from the Historic Downtown Square to several miles west. The city is already working to improve the east-west roads to ease travel to and from downtown Noblesville but also knows basic commercial services, entertainment and shopping options are needed for residents there who are unlikely to travel downtown.

Officials are also determined to provide a range of housing options to meet the demands of younger residents and retirees with a variety of housing beyond the conventional homes that comprise 77% of the city’s housing stock. Such “missing middle” alternatives include courtyard apartments, bungalow courts, townhouses, villas, duplexes and live/work units.

Westfield still has room to grow

Westfield is the youngest and fastest-growing of Hamilton County's four big cities, and Mayor Scott Willis predicts residents will keep pouring in for the next two decades.

“I don't see us slowing down,” Willis said. “Certain things start to happen in your community and it just snowballs, at least it has historically in Hamilton County.”

The suburb's population is now nearly six times larger than it was at the turn of the century. Westfield has about 55,000 residents and is expected to jump to about 69,000 people by 2035, according to a report compiled for Westfield Washington Schools.

Willis said he expects growth near the border s of Washington-Westfield Township, with most of the available land sitting to the north and west of downtown Westfield.

The area near Grand Park, where the city is working with an urban planner to design a community vision, also has room for more development, as does the Indiana 32 corridor.

“We are just now starting a whole new comprehensive plan for our city,” said Willis, who took over as mayor in January. “It's kind of going to reset the map of how Westfield will develop over the next 10 to 20 years.”

Crucial to expansion will be a thoroughfare plan for roads, tunnels, bridges and other new infrastructure for development. The 12- to 18-month process is expected to begin this summer.

"Right now, a lot of residents are feeling like we are just slapping things in without a plan,” Willis said. “We are going to have a vision for every blade of grass in Westfield-Washington Township, which will one day all be Westfield.”

Angie Daugherty, who lived in Carmel for more than 25 years before moving to Westfield, still spends time in downtown Carmel and wants to see Westfield copy it.

“I'm hoping for outdoors area for young kids, places to gather, places to have a drink, restaurants and hotels are important to Westfield,” she said.

Development opposition

Most residential and commercial projects in Hamilton County face no public resistance or just a smattering of objectors at public meetings. But other proposals can spark pushback from hundreds of neighbors.

Kelly Baskett was among homeowners in the Johnson Addition just west of the Monon Trail who fought a $130 million plan for apartments and a Merchants Bank building expansion. The effort failed but opponents did get one building moved that encroached on a residential lot, she said.

“We will continue to get squeezed,” Baskett said.

The residents in the Johnson Addition generally favor the new businesses near the Monon, she said, but object to so many apartments being built. Baskett said the extra residents increase car and foot traffic – and crime.

“I’m overall glad Carmel developed the way it has,” she said. “But with all the (population) intensity in the area with so many people here it brings a level of uncertainty.”

Across Hamilton County's cities, residents have scored victories against proposals in a few cases:

• Homeowners in Carmel’s wooded Chesterton neighborhood turned away a proposal for 33 townhouses near Haverstick Road and 96th Street that would have required chopping down several trees.
• A developer dropped plans to build Maple Del, a community of townhouses and apartments on 116th Street near crowded downtown Fishers, when nearby homeowners complained about its density.
• Noblesville residents stopped plans for a gravel-digging operation after several protests at City Hall.

Many residents say they enjoy the increasing number of entertainment, commercial and recreational choices across the county.

Pam Burgoyne and her husband John, retirees from Illinois, have lived in Westfield for the past three years. They ride the bike paths throughout the county and hang out in Carmel’s downtown areas.

Like fellow resident Daugherty, they would like to see Westfield follow Carmel’s lead.

“If it ends up looking similar to what downtown Carmel looks like, it'll be good,” Pam Burgoyne said. “I do feel a little bit sorry for the folks who moved to Westfield because it was small and quaint, but progress does that.”

Turf wars

While land in the cities fills in, developers are expected to cast their sights on rural property to the north in Jackson and Adams townships, and already one major interlocal squabble has broken out.

Fearing encroachment by Westfield, the town of Sheridan and Adams Township are working on a merger plan that would prevent annexation by their neighbor to the south.

The consolidation was set in motion when Hamilton County said it would spend $40 million to bring water and sewer lines along U.S. 31 north of 216th Street, beyond the Westfield city limits. Combined with plans by the Indiana Department of Transportation to reconstruct U.S. 31 to an expressway, development is expected to sweep into the area quickly.

Westfield, in a move considered by Sheridan to be hostile, this year annexed 33 acres along the corridor in Adams Township.

The Sheridan-Adams merger would extend Sheridan's city limits to U.S. 31, preventing Westfield from annexing more land. The move will give Sheridan control over the pace and breadth of future development. Local officials said they’d like to retain the agricultural heritage of the northern part of the county.

But Dillinger, the Hamilton County Commissioner, said many variables go into how growth plays out, including a landowners’ willingness to sell to commercial developers and the aspirations of future government leaders.

“I’ve seen farmers sell their land in the south county, then buy more up north, waiting for the buyers to come there,” said Dillinger, a commissioner for 40 years. “When developers have access to water and sewer, then everybody gets interested.”

Contributing: Stephen J. Beard, USA TODAY Graphics , and Brittany Carloni, IndyStar reporter .

Call IndyStar reporter John Tuohy at 317-444-6418 or email him at john.tuohy@indystar.com. Follow him on Facebook and X/Twitter .

Contact Jake Allen at jake.allen@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter @Jake_Allen19.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: What will booming Hamilton County look like in 20 years? The cities have a plan.