[SPECIAL REPORT — BEYOND STEEL]

JOHN LUKE / TIMES FILE PHOTO Mayor Scott King and other dignitaries walk around the field of the new baseball stadium in downtown Gary following the dedication ceremony last August. The stadium is one of a number of controversial ventures for which King has been both criticized and praised.

Gary holds keys to revival

Experts say economic development plans must include city to be successful.

BY ROBIN BIESEN
Times Staff Writer

Love Gary or hate it, the people whose job is redevelopment say Lake County's largest city is the linchpin to the region's future.

Once the darling of the 20th century, the city deemed a model for the country has fallen on hard times, burdened by a 35-year legacy of joblessness, poverty and crime.

Isolated by race and politics, Gary lost its theatres and once-bustling retail district first. The loss of its grocery stores followed soon after. Misfortunes in the steel industry in the 1980s forced other related businesses to close.

For the better part of the last decade, the city's fortunes have seemingly been on the rise -- casinos brought jobs and a revenue stream unlike any other the city had known. At first, the city didn't get the recognition of tourists traveling to the casinos; the Trump and Barden organization billboards skillfully omitted Gary from its advertising brochures, encouraging gamblers to empty their pockets at Buffington Harbor instead.

The most recent census data shows city residents made income strides in the 1990s. Per capita income increased by more than $5,000 per resident per year between 1990 and 2000 -- from nearly $9,000 per person to more than $14,000. Still, income for Gary residents lagged behind the county average of $19,639 per person in 2000.

Amid a sea of controversy, Gary Mayor Scott King invested in what some would call risky ventures, wooing the Miss USA pageant along with a Continental Basketball Association team and most recently the Gary RailCats, a minor league baseball franchise, by agreeing to build a stadium.

And, King scored a public relations coup in 2001 when Boeing headquarters based in Chicago selected Gary's airport to house half of its corporate fleet of aircraft. The arrangement worked so well that Boeing announced in 2002 that its entire fleet would be housed at the Gary airfield.

At the same time he spent millions of dollars transforming the former St. Mary hospital into a criminal justice facility, King divested Gary of maintaining the city jail, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in the process.

For the most part, the mayor listens to his critics as he does his neighbors and then does what he believes is in the city's best interests, whether it is popular or not.

King was frustrated over a failure by government leaders south of the Borman Expressway to embrace a local income tax that would have benefited the cities located north of the highway. So he was one of the mayors who, in 2000, endorsed the unorthodox notion of carving a new county that would have separated Gary, Hammond, East Chicago and Whiting from the rest of Lake County.

The idea didn't fly, but King isn't sorry the cities took the step of considering it.

King said he considers it a victory when he sees increasing numbers of suburban residents at the Steelheads basketball games or the annual summer air show. He believes it will be the same story when the RailCats suit up for their first home season a couple of months from now.

It's a way of redefining Gary to itself and the region, he said.

"Every time a family comes to Gary to enjoy one of these venues, they have a good time and go home without incident and they go back and tell their family and friends, it's a good thing for the city," King said.

Just like any other region that has found itself in tough circumstances, Orville Powell, clinical associate professor at Indiana University's School of Public and Environmental Affairs and retired city manager from Durham, N.C., said Northwest Indiana will have to pull together to change the status quo.

Like Gary, Powell said Raleigh/Durham officials realized they needed to make changes if they were going to improve the long-term economic prospects for the region.

"We always felt we had to get our house in order in three areas -- we had to lower the crime rate, improve the schools and clean up our act so we looked good -- before we could even begin attracting people and industries," he said. "And, we had to work together as a region to start to attract development."

Through the cooperation of three universities -- Duke, University of North Carolina and North Carolina State -- and the state, Powell said the region was able to develop the 7,000-acre Research Triangle Park, a development chock full of companies dedicated to research and development.
It was a development that didn't come easily.

"Fortunately, there were some far-sighted people who saw the need to bring jobs to a poor, agricultural area," Powell said. "We worked very hard to compete as a region. Until we got a business to the region, we were a team. We weren't bad-mouthing our neighbors. We were all working on the same page. Once we got them to our region, then it was fair game for communities to compete against each other."

Over time, Research Triangle Park has become a vast economic engine for the Raleigh/Durham area, producing 42,000 jobs that pay, on average, $56,000 per employee.

It wasn't the kind of development that could have happened in a piecemeal fashion, Powell said.
It worked only because leaders in the region worked together to make sure it succeeded, he said.

Dan Lowery, director of the Quality of Life Council, said the success of Gary is critical to the long-term health of the region. Polarization and an inability of the region's political leaders to galvanize around economic development issues central to Northwest Indiana have stalled development and redevelopment in the two-county area.

"We absolutely cannot move forward without Gary. There is no potential for the region to move forward without Gary being significantly engaged and involved," Lowery said. "That Gary has problems is not a new idea but the hostility aimed at the city is not in proportion to its problems. Part of that is race, part of it is we are still suffering a debilitating hangover from the white flight that occurred in 1968.

"The people who left Gary felt like they were chased out of town. Others who stayed felt abandoned by those who took what they could and left. Until that generation can move beyond that time, it is going to be impossible to get past the bitter hostility that still exists in some quarters."

Every year of delay means losses that total in the millions of dollars in economic potential.
"The moment for change is passing," Lowery said. "If something isn't done now, changes in the steel industry are going to reallocate the lakefront to other resources and it will be done without a plan. Sprawl will erode the economic base further.

"And, if we wait another 15 years, we'll lose another generation of our best students. If we don't get wired electronically now, other areas will suck up the intellectual businesses. If ever we could act together, this would be the moment in time. It's not hard to figure out what needs to happen.
Lowery said he does not see the leadership that can make it happen.

"It's to the point where if the political leaders, particularly those at the county and Statehouse, got together and set an agenda for Northwest Indiana, they would find tremendous support," he said.

Robin Biesen can be reached at biesen@nwitimes.com or (219) 933-4168.