Nov. 4, 2025 Ι Bloomberg CityLab
On either side of the impeccably refined and classically domed City Hall and courthouse buildings that make up the largely vacant civic core of Gary, Indiana, are two stark white modernist buildings. Both were designed by Black architect Wendell Campbell, a founder of the National Organization of Minority Architects, and built in the 1980s, a time when the industrial city was reeling from job and population losses and desperate to rescue a downtown in full collapse.
One of them is a sports and fitness center that’s still in use, but the 83,000-square-foot Genesis Convention Center, built in 1981, has been empty since 2020. The city is currently weighing redevelopment or demolition; one idea has been to use the building’s blank white facade as a canvas for murals and public art. But in a city with at least 7,000 abandoned buildings, there’s no lack of alternative wall spaces.
There are plenty of reasons for the failure of the Genesis Center and the dissolution of downtown Gary that don’t have much to do with the building, the residents or the governance of the place itself. One is the decline of American manufacturing. US Steel established Gary in 1906 as a mill town to supply nearby Chicago and New York City. It’s laid out on long, narrow blocks with distinctly Manhattan dimensions — the center of downtown is at 5th Avenue and Broadway — with the huge Gary Works plant at the end of Broadway. Still the largest integrated steel mill in the US, it employed about 30,000 workers in the 1960s and ’70s but now needs only around 4,000 people to churn out 6 million tons of steel a year.
The city’s population also peaked in the ’60s, at about 170,000; today fewer than 70,000 live there. Roughly 80% of Gary residents are Black and a third live below the poverty line — about three times the state average.
Especially downtown, the impact of the exodus is shocking. Most of the land within a several-block radius of City Hall — 5th and Broadway, the center of town — is a bleak patchwork of cleared lots and abandoned commercial buildings. It’s the kind of decay only seen when there was once a rapid and focused public investment in infrastructure, followed by immediate wholesale neglect.
But according to a new study by Notre Dame’s Housing and Community Regeneration Initiative, the failure of mega-scaled landmark buildings like the Genesis Center — a typical gambit for struggling cities — isn’t just an indicator of flailing industrial economies. Instead, the size and form of these developments are themselves the primary culprits.
“When you’re in a state of physical collapse, it doesn’t make any sense to build one big building, because what you need to do is take whatever demand exists and spread it out in smaller buildings, so you can actually find a way to illustrate to people that this change has come,” says Stefanos Polyzoides, dean of Notre Dame’s architecture school, which houses the Housing and Community Regeneration Initiative. “One building accommodating a change is not urbanism. It’s architecture.”
Notre Dame’s architecture school is known for traditionalist aesthetics, and its plan to rescue Gary is as old-school as it gets. It calls for micro-scaled urban improvements led by local business owners, as well a suite of zoning changes designed to make downtown a more urban, less car-oriented place. Instead of proposing some new museum, casino or stadium project, it relies on mom-and-pop developer capital and urges persistence and patience.
“Most cities in the Midwest have not done anything meaningful for 100 years,” says Marianne Cusato, Notre Dame architecture professor and director of the Housing and Community Regeneration Initiative. “One of the things we’ve lost over the course of the last several generations is how to build the non-hero buildings in such a way that it becomes the hero building.”
Polyzoides and Cusato aren’t arguing that Gary’s old planners just needed to read more Jane Jacobs. Instead, they’re promoting traditional city-building as part of a wider critique. In too many cities, they say, corporate developers have sought a quick return on shoddy, suburbanized projects that were racially and economically segregated as well as unsustainable. Where this process has failed — like Gary — might hold the key to reclaiming a better way of creating urban community.
Mapping the Comeback
If you look out on the city from the steps of George H. and Phillip Maher’s City Hall, the first thing you’ll see is a condemned five-story commercial building, its sidewalk hazard-taped off, rising from a weedy plot of lawn. Other long blocks nearby are given over entirely to surface parking lots, bare grass, or roofless ruins.
“We’re at 5th and Broadway,” Cusato says. “That’s where you need to build it back.”
There’s a blank-slate quality to Gary’s decay. Given the advanced state of dereliction, building anything back here can seem like a herculean task — where to start? The first step, Cusato says, involves creating a civic realm with a sense of urban enclosure at the city’s hollowed-out core.
The Notre Dame plan — one of several that the school assembled for Rust Belt towns across Indiana — focuses on the Broadway corridor, the city’s north-south axial spine, and the neighborhoods immediately to the east and west. Perhaps the most fundamental change proposed is a shift from traditional use-based zoning to form-based zoning, which dictates the relationships of buildings to the street (preferably close), and the amount of parking (as little as possible), instead of prescriptive limitations on what a building can be used for. There’s also guidance on how to incorporate open spaces like side gardens and courtyards.
Taming the incessant roar of 18-wheelers that dominate downtown’s wide, one-way streets is another part of the fix: The plan would reduce the number of vehicle lanes and divide streets with planted medians to encourage more pedestrian usage and activate the streetscape.
The plan pays close attention to simple “fabric buildings” — commercial spaces with apartments above the shop, large windows and signage at the ground level, with a cornice or parapet up top — as well as any landmarks that may still be salvageable, like the City Methodist Church, empty since 1975. Cusato believes its delicate central transept can be saved, alongside the nearby empty Palace Theater, to anchor an eventual arts district.
In the Holy Angels neighborhood to the west, Cusato wants to take advantage of the comparatively intact residential building stock, pushing into the vacancy “donut” she says, with small two-bedroom wood-framed homes built on pre-approved templates, to streamline permitting.
“Let’s say we build 15 houses,” she says. “If we can build that in a place where you feel that immediately, you’re going to get 15 more. But if you build one there, one there, and one there, and they can’t see each other, it’s going to feel like zero were put in.”
Who’s going to live in these tidy starter homes? Gary is banking on interest from buyers priced out of Chicago, just 30 miles up I-90 or less than an hour’s ride on the South Shore commuter train line. Additionally, the Notre Dame Plan plays up the area’s nearby natural splendor; when not boxed in by US Steel, its beaches offer lakefront living at bargain prices, and it’s a short drive away from Indiana Dunes National Park.
Steel’s Shadow
The redevelopment strategy steers around dependence on any singular private sector player or big employer. But it’s hard not to wonder about the role of US Steel in any Gary comeback, especially since the corporation was purchased for $14.9 billion by Japanese conglomerate Nippon Steel in June. Mayor Eddie Melton says he’s “working to re-establish the relationship with US Steel,” and is cautiously optimistic about the new ownership.
In a statement, US Steel spokesperson Andrew Fulton said, “We are bullish on the future of Gary and know that there is great potential in its citizens, and in its leaders.” But US Steel doesn’t have any direct role in the plan, and Notre Dame doesn’t lay out any prescriptive steps for the company to take.
The industry that built Gary also left it with a set of enduring challenges. The 4,000-acre Gary Works complex sits just steps from the downtown, blocking access to the Lake Michigan waterfront. It’s one of three Gary mills that released 25 million pounds of pollutants, a recent investigation by CBS News found — more pollution than the combined toxic release of four comparable mills in other states. Gary residents have elevated cancer and respiratory disease risks, and Lake County, where Gary is located, has more toxic releases than 99% of all US counties.
Gary’s fiscal woes are intertwined with the industry as well. In the late 1990s, the city’s coffers took a massive hit when the state of Indiana let US Steel assess its own property value. The resulting valuation dropped the company’s tax burden by 50%. State lawmakers also capped residential property taxes and raised sales taxes, hamstringing the city’s ability to raise revenue.
Some funding is already on its way. A state law authored by Melton when he was a state senator will supply $12 million for economic development and blight remediation in Gary, as well as a $90 million match for a multimodal transit facility.
And Melton points to a new sense of energy and civic purpose since he assumed office at the end of 2023. Homicides dropped 55% from January to June compared to 2024, After decades of depopulation, since late 2022 the city has added approximately 300 active addresses.
“Everyone leads with gloom and doom, and that’s not our story anymore,” he says. “It’s taken us 50, 60 years to get to this point.”
Notre Dame’s most urgent zoning changes were approved by Gary’s Plan Commission in January, and are headed to the city council next, alongside the broader downtown plan. Melton has tailored several policy proposals to complement Notre Dame’s efforts, like a program to get public sector workers to move into the city by donating city-owned lots, offering down-payment assistance, and pairing them with developers to build new homes. And he prizes the self-determination that the Notre Dame plan allows for. “This plan allows us to pace our growth with incremental development,” he says.
For the time being, though, “I have to say ‘no’ to a lot of developers. We’re not at the point financially where we can risk a lot for development.”
Mike O’Connor, senior vice president of development and leasing at Holladay Properties, is one of the developers Melton has had to tell no. Based in South Bend, Holladay has 25 offices across the East Coast and Midwest, and owns two properties in Gary. The city and O’Connor were in talks to develop a 150-unit mixed-use residential building, but Carla Morgan, corporation counsel for Gary, says the developer wanted a $20 million subsidy — money the city felt could be better spent disbursed in smaller amounts.
O’Connor, who’s supportive of Gary’s plan, says he doesn’t recall the exact figure Holladay sought, but it reflected the size of the proposed project. “There is a critical mass you have to have,” he said. “We have to have at least 150 dwelling units,” to spread the cost of amenities and management. The city asked them to do a third of this, he says.
“Giant developers try to extract giant subsidies from cities,” says Morgan. “We can’t afford these subsidies, and the kinds of development they want to build are going to price out the mom-and-pop [shops]. Your average person that’s going to open up a pizza place is not going to be able to afford the rents in a Holladay Properties building. You build it and they don’t come.”
New Traditionalists
As Notre Dame’s Polyzoides tells it, the advent of car-centric and suburban-style development is as much to blame for Gary’s collapse as deindustrialization. “Some people are arguing that you need to bring jobs, other are arguing that you need to [develop] place,” he says. “But the fact is that you need a job and a place.”
The racist “redlining” policies the mid-20th century sped Gary’s depopulation: In a 1940 Homeowners Loan Corporation map, 74% of the city was declared “hazardous” or “definitely declining,” depriving the growing Black population of capital. White residents, meanwhile, got off-ramps to suburban neighborhoods, aided by new zoning rules, subsidized highways and cheap loans for single-family homes. The sprawl that has grown as Gary’s urban center contracted is not economically viable, Polyzoides says. What’s needed is denser settlement to offset the costs of the required utilities and infrastructure.
Polyzoides was a founder of the New Urbanism movement in the early 1990s, which sought to reintroduce American cities to traditional urbanism through private-sector-led greenfield development. The movement is best known for old-timey new towns like Seaside, Florida. Notre Dame’s report on Gary does go long on brick crowns and parapets, along with sepia-toned postcards of an idealized, urban past. But these aesthetics are in service of a wider economic development goal, and Polyzoides pairs this traditionalism with a fierce populism.
“We are being ruled by a corporatocracy that is interested in maximizing its gain with volume, not quality,” he says. He’s done with large-scale institutional builders that lack patience and commitment to place; a typical developer “builds trash, squeezes them hard, and then walks away.” If you care about place in cities that need it most, “you have to stick around for 20 years.”
That rhetoric is very much at home in Gary. As a recent New Yorkerprofile of Melton recounts, the city’s first Black mayor, Richard Hatcher, blamed “corporate capital” for the city’s plight during his terms in City Hall from 1968 to 1988.
Darrell Biddings is one such longtime downtown Gary small business owner. He purchased a property on the 700 block of Broadway in 2002, and after a “tremendous amount of renovation” he says, opened Loft Adiq, an entertainment and events center in 2009. He recently opened a co-located Caribbean restaurant there, called Get Jerked. He’s acquired the adjacent lot and wants to build a billiards and cigar bar.
“I’ve been investing in Gary for over 30 years now,” Biddings says. “We haven’t allowed anything to deter us from making investments in the city.”
But if the city is going to depend on small business owners for its downtown renaissance, there are resources it needs to offer, he says, like business management training. “A lot of times, mom-and-pop business owners jump in the water and learn how to swim while we’re in the water,” he says. “If we’d had avenues for training, then a lot of businesses that had not made it might be able to make it.”
Small Steps
As Polyzoides says, there’s nothing new or radical about their model of granular, local capital investment; this was just how most everything was built until the 1950s. But much of the modern development landscape is populated by giants. In 2023, the top 10 residential real estate brokers were responsible for 26% of all sales volume.
The Housing and Community Regeneration Initiative also studied another industrial city in Indiana — Elkhart, population 50,000. There, local capital has been credited with reinvigorating the town’s manufacturing-centered economy.
Developer David Weaver is the founder of the weIMPACTGroup, an Elkhart-based company that began working with other local business owners to build mixed-use commercial, office and residential buildings in the downtown-adjacent River District. At 20,000 to 45,000 square feet, they were relatively small projects; a 12-unit residential building completed in 2022 and office space for handful of business and a pair of restaurants. The neighborhood had more than a few similarities to downtown Gary, as it was hemmed in by industrial tracts and low-rent sprawl.
Working with other family-owned businesses, as well as the public sector and philanthropic support, Weaver has seen $250 million invested over the last six years in Elkhart’s River District, a mixed-use live-work neighborhood at the confluence of the Elkhart and St. Joseph Rivers. So far, the effort has produced hundreds of new residents, a 1.5-mile riverwalk, five parks, and 40 new businesses; a new and lively urban place. “The only way I’ve seen this successfully executed is to slowly build confidence by incremental development,” Weaver says. “I think what Notre Dame has set up is a playbook for communities to think about redevelopment in a way that’s hyperlocal to them.”
Notably, the equity invested is from the community itself, he says. “Nobody is coming to save Elkhart,” says Weaver.
In some ways, Elkhart is in a different boat than Gary: It has a strong philanthropic community and an intact industrial base. (It’s the home of Patrick Industries, which manufactures RVs.) Weaver’s ability to finance urban development is closely tied into this dynamic. His firm also develops industrial facilities, and Weaver says the returns for building a “a big dumb box” can be 20%. For his civic work in the River District, it’s paltry 3%.
And he’s not sure building quality urban places outside of major metropolitan areas is going to be an attractive investment for investors any time soon. “I don’t know that we’ll ever be in a situation where the best outcome for the community is the best outcome for the developer in the short term,” he says. “There’s a conflict. I think it’s very difficult to build buildings that enhance civic pride, that put the community first, and provide a short-term superior return.”
Patience to get something back is a quality Gary residents who have withstood the city’s decline have already demonstrated. The path back to a great city, there or anywhere, runs through them.