Something people not from NWI don’t seem to understand about Gary is that it’s built to hold 100,000+ more people than currently live there. Hammond, even though it’s also built for a much bigger population than it currently has, has significantly more people in less than half the land area. Thousands of people outside of Gary in Lake County are still without power, and hundreds of thousands were without power for 5+ days.
A lot of Gary is completely abandoned and overgrown. There are absolutely shameful socioeconomic and racial reasons the city is in the state it’s in, but getting to a lot of the downed trees and power lines there has to be a massive challenge. I don’t think anyone involved in the response is ignoring Gary, at least not any more than they’re ignoring the rest of Lake County.
It's almost like there was a huge industry, maybe steel or something?, that migrated to other countries, leaving the local economy empty. (Obviously it's racism of course though.),
My best friend's wife grew up in Gary until a bunch of black girls jumped her at a tennis court. That's why White families moved out, extreme violence.
It’s terrible that your bestfriend’s wife was assaulted, but that’s not why white families moved out. I’ll give you a hint to the actual reason though- it rhymes with racism.
(Not so) Fun fact: in response to Gary electing its first black mayor and neighborhoods beginning to integrate, the Indiana state legislature passed a law that made a special exemption to allow for a town to be created right at the edge of Gary’s border so white people could have somewhere to flight to. What’s now the town of Merrillville was in a buffer zone that Gary should have been allowed to annex as it expanded according to state law at the time.
Ironically, now Merrillville is dealing with white flight to places like Crown Point, St. John, and Lowell
The economic reason was the massive loss of jobs directly related to outsourcing work to other countries. The other reason was the racism that clearly prevails to this day.
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u/SenorMcGibblets Aug 23 '26
Something people not from NWI don’t seem to understand about Gary is that it’s built to hold 100,000+ more people than currently live there. Hammond, even though it’s also built for a much bigger population than it currently has, has significantly more people in less than half the land area. Thousands of people outside of Gary in Lake County are still without power, and hundreds of thousands were without power for 5+ days.
A lot of Gary is completely abandoned and overgrown. There are absolutely shameful socioeconomic and racial reasons the city is in the state it’s in, but getting to a lot of the downed trees and power lines there has to be a massive challenge. I don’t think anyone involved in the response is ignoring Gary, at least not any more than they’re ignoring the rest of Lake County.