Quote:
Originally Posted by drro
Is there really no upward mobility possible for the hard working, ambitious residents of Gary, IN? Chicago is near and should provide opportunities. Just make sure you don't end up in the West or South side, that would be more like sideways mobility.
Michael Jackson originated from Gary and made it really big. A textbook example of the American Dream.
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I think your luv of American cities of decline, White-Flight, Black and Poor left with far less a ability to move upward and then a new generation of lost and lowly educated left where jobs for them also were gone. American Corporate abandonment and relocation to suburbs and then of course Asia, Japan, Taiwan, then the big kahuna in China..... left manufacturing base cities to had a whole city virtually die to a part of it at best..... by far in the Industrial North.
Anyway, some links or link on Gary and where Whites could move to a new suburban city of Merrillville IN and they did. Merriville boomed and Gary declined. Now Merrillville is a older suburb and its peak perhaps past also and about half now African-American. Still it is not a city of abandonment.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/gary-indiana
Some history and booming to bust era for Gary IN. and some PICTURE For your pleasure.
From the link.
- Like many steel towns that struggled to stay alive, Gary, Indiana has become a ghostly shell of its former glory.
- Gary, Indiana was once a mecca for America's steel industry in the 1960s. But half a century later, it has become a desolate ghost town.
- By the end of the 1980s, mills in Northern Indiana, including Gary, were still making about a quarter of all the steel production in the U.S.
- And yet, number of steelworkers in Gary fell from 32,000 in 1970 to 7,000 in 2005. As such, the city's population also dropped from 175,415 in 1970 to less than 100,000 in the same time span, as many of the city's residents left town to seek out work.
- As of 2018, about 75,000 people still live in Gary, Indiana. But the town is struggling to stay alive.
- Job opportunities went away as businesses closed and crime rose. By the early 1990s, Gary was no longer called the "Magic City" but instead the "Murder Capital" of America.
- The town's failing economy and quality of life are no better expressed than through the neglect of its buildings. An estimated 20 percent of Gary's buildings are totally abandoned.
- Today, about 81 percent of Gary's population is black.
- Jobs at Gary Works -- almost 50 years after the first layoffs in the 1970s -- are still being cut, and about 36 percent of Gary residents live in poverty.
- Unlike their white neighbors, the town's African American workers faced uphill battles trying to build a better life during Gary's decline.
- "When the jobs left, the whites could move, and they did. But we blacks didn't have a choice," 78-year-old Walter Bell told The Guardian in 2017.
- He explained: "They wouldn't let us into their new neighborhoods with the good jobs, or if they let us, we sure as hell couldn't afford it. Then to make it worse, when we looked at the nice houses they left behind, we couldn't buy them because the banks wouldn't lend us money."
- Maria Garcia, whose brother and husband worked at Gary's steel mill, noticed the neighborhood's changing face. When she first moved there in the 1960s, her neighbors were mostly whites, some from European countries like Poland and Germany.
- But Garcia said many of them left in the 1980s because "they started seeing black people coming in," a phenomenon typically known as "white flight."
- "Racism killed Gary," Garcia said. "The whites left Gary, and the blacks couldn't. Simple as that."
Though those on the Far Right of the political spectrum today. Deny there was systemic Racism.... well Gary is clearly a example. Its segregation was total. Blacks restricted to their neighborhood. Many immigrants to theirs and White's to theirs. Then it all fell apart as the jobs dried up also.
Now for another side.... here is a more Right leaning link and what it dwells on. This a 2012 link.
https://www.amren.com/news/2012/09/t...ive-covenants/
*** Just a NOTE on the above link and what Wiki says.... American Renaissance is a monthly white supremacist online publication founded and edited by Jared Taylor. It is published by the New Century Foundation, which describes itself as a "race-realist, white advocacy organization".
From the link.
- with a population that nearly 100 percent white in 1920, Gary saw a migration of 15,000 Black migrants between 1920 and 1930. At 18 percent of the population of Gary in 1930, another 20,000 Black people would join them by 1940–lured by work in the steel mills.
- The city’s decline began in the 1960s as overseas steel production squeezed U.S. makers and accelerated in the 1970s as “white flight” prompted the rapid growth of surrounding cities. More than 80% of Gary’s residents are black.
- At its peak in the 1950s, Gary’s population topped 200,000, only to plunge in subsequent decades to about 80,000 in 2010.
- Wait a second: why can’t the 84 percent Black population sustain the wealth that white people left behind? Why can’t they keep alive the businesses? Why can’t they keep alive the high property valuations? How come the migration of Black people to Gary brought high levels of crime and violence that caused white people to flee the city? Why can’t the majority Black population ignite that entrepreneurial spirit, innovate, attract outside investments, and diversify the economy (as happened in Pittsburgh — another city built on steel)?
- The answer is self-explanatory: because the population is less than 10 percent white and 84 percent Black.
- Because Black people (outside of state and federal welfare, handouts, subsidies, and grants) have no purchasing power, the city needed an emergency infusion of cash in 2009 from the Obama stimulus fund. In all, Gary received $266 million in stimulus funds [Gary, Indiana: Unbroken spirit amid the ruins of the 20th Century, BBC, by Paul Mason, 10-12-2010]:
- This is the cost of “Manifest Destruction.” Gary isn’t suffering from Urban Blight–that’s just a symptom of the real problem. It’s not suffering from crime, high foreclosure rates, bad schools, or lack of outside capital investment in the infrastructure (and potentially investors who would open up businesses that could provide some semblance of a commercial tax-base); it’s suffering from the unmentionable legacy of the migration of Black people and the overwhelming of a once prosperous white city.
- With no ability to raise a local income tax it is reliant on property tax. But the State of Indiana passed laws capping tax raising powers, so by 2012 Gary’s tax income from property will halve.
- Indeed, where the white people went once they escaped Gary, prosperity flourished. Thriving business and commercial districts, safe streets, outside investments, and good schools were just an outgrowth of this migration [ Hurt feelings continue over Northwest Indiana town’s creation [Merrillville, Ind. experiencing now a little of what Gary did 40 years ago, WBEZ 91.5, 8-31-2012]:
Lot more.... Link also goes into Merrillville IN's rise. Its change from lily White also. True even today.... still perhaps still with its Suburban Ranch homes built in the 1970s.... it still is a far cry from Gary, IN. Merrillville is now over 40% Black and as another said in this thread.... if you can get out of Gary as a Black person.... perhaps Merrillville is where you go staying in the region?
**** Also a NOTE.... I in no way say either link is fake. Just different perspectives of sorts.... one blames a Race itself it seems .... one on Systemic Racism perhaps?
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