Just Around the Corner: Northwest Indiana's Crossroads, in the Shadows of Industry

Copyright April 30, 2000 Adrian Jones

This paper was originally produced as a final project for Urban Studies 470 ("Can Cities Survive?) at the University of Pennsylvania, under the instruction of Professor Hon. Edward G. Rendell, former Mayor of Philadelphia, former General Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and current candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania; and Dr. Margaret Pugh.

Please note that much in Northwest Indiana has changed since this paper was written. LTV Steel has gone bankrupt and closed, while Behtleham Steel is in bankruptcy and US Steel and National are pursuing a merger as a means of staying alive. When LTV called our leaders' bluff, thosands of retirees lost benefits and Northwest Indiana suffered the largest mass layoffs in the State's history. Still, the same elected officials who have run Northwest Indiana for years are still in office, wondering what happened to the golden eggs of that goose everyone loved so much and begging Indianapolis for "temporary" bailouts. (January 27, 2002)

Executive Summary.

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Fast limited trains operated electrically from Chicago to South Bend, Ind. leaving Illinois Central Randolph St. Station and stopping at Van Buren, Roosevelt Road, 53rd St, 63rd St, and Kensington ... Electrified All The Way - Dining Cars--Parlor Cars

Nation's Lifeline

Rail transportation converges at the crossroads of the nation to serve the world from Nortwest Indiana ... Just Around the Corner along the South Shore Line

Executive Summary

This paper is an analysis of the current tax and industrial policies of Lake County, Indiana. Lake County's tax burden is the highest in the world for some companies, and a handful of the most powerful employers have recently renewed threats to leave. Over the past couple of months, Northwest Indiana has arrived at a tipping point, the accumulated effect of many aspects of its 100 years of history. Indeed, I will demonstrate that the issues in the current debate are well-grounded in the racial, tax, and political history of Lake County.

Following a court's declaration that Indiana's property tax assessment scheme is unconstitutional, various ways to relieve the industrial tax burden have been proposed, including radically changing the assessment basis, instituting a county income tax, and implementing regionalization proposals. I conclude that although many of the reforms are politically unpopular, the alternative--daring the community's largest employers to make good on their threats to leave--is much worse.

Introduction

The Chicago South Shore & South Bend Railroad is about as close as much of Northwest Indiana gets to commuter transportation. Originating in Chicago's Grant Park, the Railroad runs the length of Lake Michigan's South Shore. At either end are nationally-ranked universities: The University of Chicago and Notre Dame. This is where the similarities end.

As the South Shore exits bustling Chicago, riders quickly find themselves in the run-down, slums of Gary that were once the American Dream of so many suburban pioneers. The house on Cleveland Street where A Christmas Story was filmed still stands in Hammond, yet Homan Avenue is hardly the bustling commercial center it once was. The magnificent strength of the steel industry built the region, yet the factories along the South Shore Line are increasingly underutilized.

Suddenly the train has passed the industry, replaced by the ancient mounds of sand covered with indigenous vegetation that constitute the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, with mansions tucked into the dunescape along the park's fringes. Across the giant interstates that criss-cross the region as they curl around the finger of Lake Michigan, past the regional outlet mall, and on to South Bend, the train makes its daily voyages through Northwest Indiana.

Romancing the Region

Nobody in 1925 knew that the South Shore poster collection, designed to encourage Chicagoans to ride the infant railroad into Indiana, would become the rallying point that would lead to unprecedented hopes of resurrecting a region in the late 1990s. In a region where industry had always battled the environment, where steel unions battled management, where highways divided extreme wealth from extreme poverty, where blacks lived completely separately from whites; in this land, the dinky and inconsequential South Shore Railroad provided a lightning rod for regional improvement efforts. In 1998, the original 1920s series was reprinted with over 100 additions of new posters highlighting the region. As rosy it is to "romance the region," the neoclassical beauty of the poster series both obscures and--in its irony--calls attention to some of the deeply troublesome problems the region faces. The ability of Northwest Indiana's disparate industries, citizens, races, and--ultimately--communities to join together to forge a common vision will determine if Northwest Indiana becomes another random rust belt graveyard, or whether the region is able to attract the right mix of industry, business, and people to sustain itself in the new millennium.

Setting the Stage

Perhaps it is surprising in some ways that Northwest Indiana has not yet faced the industrial devastation that has plagued Flint, Rockford, Youngstown, and so many nearby communities. On the other hand, the "Big 10" industries that line Lake Michigan's south shore are growing increasingly restless as they are crushed by some of the highest tax rates in the world. In late March 2000, steel maker Ispat Inland's CEO Dale Wiersbe warned of a scenario he called "all too likely," to wit: "Absent significant tax policy reform, Northwest Indiana's 10 largest employers ... may become shadows of our former selves or may just cease to exist altogether" (Wiersbe 2000). Such a crippling blow would eliminate 40% of the region's employment and 70% of its property tax base, or, in other words, it would put Flint to shame.

Wiersbe cited the following examples of high property taxation in Lake County. In each case, Lake County property taxes:

Increase the cost of each ton of steel produced at three major Lake County mills by $10 compared to Bethlehem Steel's plant just 15 miles away in Porter County.
Cost BP Amoco in Whiting 16.5 cents per barrel refined compared to 1.8 cents at the same company's plant in Alliance, Louisiana.
Cost Unilever of Hammond 50 cents per case of soap produced, compared to 1.6 cents at the same company's plant in Germany.

Wiersbe continued his "all too likely" scenario by warning, "Imagine a once-prominent integrated steelmaking plant[1] pared back to warehousing and distribution, or the historic oil refinery[2] becoming simply a storage tank farm" (Wiersbe 2000). Faced with this prospect, Northwest Indiana leaders suddenly began to take notice.

Origins of Northwest Indiana Cities

Northwest Indiana was little more than Indian trails and scattered farms until after the Civil War, when Chicago's massive expansion caught the region in its fetch. Early communities were surprisingly supportive of regionalism, and several communities voluntarily merged together in the first decade of the 1900s. This was a time "when Regionites agreed that cities and towns should pull together," writes local historian Archibald McKinlay. McKinlay continues:

Many local leaders openly advocated the amalgamation of all Calumet Region cities in Indiana. In fact, most of the general public favored amalgamation, as taxpayers asked themselves why each city would duplicate the services of all the other cities (1998).

Yet gradually the attempts of various cities to swallow each other tuned into "fear of who would be king of the hill" (McKinlay 1998). In a five-year annexation "free-for-all," cities made preemptive annexation strikes, annexed each other, and created such a legal mess that Superior Court ordered a ceasefire in 1910. The Court declared some annexations null (McKinlay 1998). The mutual distrust that developed survives to this day, and regionalization seems to be resting in peace.

Gary, the widely-acknowledged economic hub of the region, was established in 1906 as a company town for United States Steel (USX), which at the time was so giant that it had an annual budget exceeding that of the Federal Government. Indeed, its Gary Works then was "by far" the largest and most modern mill in the world, located on 9000 acres. Marshall Field himself selected the site, which had tremendous advantages: rail access, proximity to Chicago, a central point between the ore-rich Mesabi Range and major markets, and the ability to create new land in Lake Michigan with slag waste [3] (Greer 1979).

Racism & the Company Town

Along with this giant mill went the construction of a company town, which has its advantages and disadvantages. As notes one critic: "Gary [was] ... founded ... by a dominating, possessive, out-of-state power as a one-industry proviso" (Guest 1997).

Hostility towards blacks in Indiana is legendary, although the role of USX in enforcing racism is less well-known. A quick look at Indiana's racial policies reveals that the 1851 State Constitution banned blacks from the state, among the largest public gatherings in Porter County history was a 1923 Klan rally (Neeley 1993), the Klan nearly took over the state's government in the 1920s, and schools were legally segregated in some communities until 1949 (Greer 1979).

As for USX enforcing racial separation, Edward Greer, a special aid to Gary's first black mayor, alleges,

The United States Steel Corporation played a key role in the institutionalization of racism, particularly in the employment arena. . . . [For example,] when some black parents in 1930 attempted to racially integrate [sic] a small park in their neighborhood which had previously been barred to them [4], [USX Gary Works Superintendent William] Gleason personally appeared on the scene and threatened to fire any black Gary Works employee who did not leave (1979).

Aside from enforcing racial segregation, USX also indirectly controlled the city's political machines, which had all the characteristics of machines: buying votes, ballot fraud, patronage jobs, and corruption (Greer 1979). Given all this, it's no wonder that Northwest Indiana has developed into the most racially segregated metro area in the United States, with a dissimilarity index of 91. Consider that Gary is only 40% white, whereas neighboring Hammond, a city of similar socioeconomic standing, is 93% white (Associated Press 1997).

The development of such extreme racial segregation can be traced to the depression, when the housing stock began the aging process that continues today. Following World War II, demand for housing by high-paid, high-skilled white workers was satisfied in growing neighboring communities, and the spiral of white flight and economic decline had begun. From 1960 to 1998, Gary's population fell 40% from 178,000 to 108,000. Over the same time period, some South Lake County communities grew nine-fold (Mrozowski 2000). Adding insult to Gary's injuries, technological innovation caused the job base to lose 23,000 jobs (Interfaith 1998). As whites fled and unskilled black steelworkers moved in, Gary's remaining whites struggled to retain political power. The final blow to the white machine came in 1967, when, despite its widespread electioneering, the machine was beaten by black mayoral candidate Richard Hatcher (Guest 1997). Following white disinvestment, Gary today is a place of boarded-up windows that claims the highest murder rate in the nation. Its stigma extends so far, notes Congressman Peter J. Visclosky (D-IN), that one of the nation's largest street gangs recently reserved Gary's Convention Center for a national street gang conference (1997).

Shifting the Burden...

Industry griping about high taxation is nothing new. In 1972, USX executive W. A. Walker testified that Gary Works' property taxes are "the highest we have" [5] (Greer 1979). Prior to recently, however, city officials have turned a blind eye to industry's claims. Only within the past few months have public officials been seriously worried about the possibility of massive disinvestment.

Conversely to the situation now, when Hatcher was elected Gary's mayor in 1968, high residential property taxes were the norm, and they were a significant cause of the decline in the city's housing stock. A homeowner with income of $10,000 and a home worth $15,000 paid $750 (or 7.5% of his gross income) in property taxes! USX, having maintained a tight grasp on City Hall, had long "self-assessed," meaning that it provided the government its own assessed valuation (Greer 1979). After a protracted fight against a reassessment, USX eventually opened its books, and the tax burden shifted so dramatically that today, 40,000 homeowners pay under $200 in property taxes, and 8,000 of those pay no property tax (Brown 2000).

(In Indiana, an assessor in each township (a unit of goverment usually covering 36 square miles of land) is responsible for assessing each property's value, which is used to taxation purposes. The assessor's decision is--in effect--final. One assessor explained it to me how a corrupt assessor is a political disaster: "I might decide that I don't like you because you supported a political enemy of mine. When I come visit your house to perform the assessment, I might find that you have a $10,000 laundry room sink, which raises your taxes substantially. Of course, your laundry room sink is only worth $100, and you can appeal the assesment, but you'll spend 10 years fighting it in court, and if you win, all you'll get is a reassessment--done by me. And when I reassess, I might find that your front stoop adds $20,000 to your home's value, and you're back at square one.")

... and Killing the Golden Goose

"We've killed the golden goose," proclaimed self-appointed Gary cheerleader Tom McDermott in March 2000. [6] "The basic industries are in the process of disinvestment," he noted (Brown 2000). Indeed, "the soak-the-rich mentality is backfiring," notes The Times newspaper (The Times 2000b). While nobody disputes that industries have been disinvesting slowly but steadily over the past decades and that much of the disinvestment is attributed (justly or not) to the high property tax burden, the prospect of reverting to the pre-1970s system of high residential tax burdens is equally unsettling, since "reassessment could mean upward property tax adjustment of 200 to 300 per cent for some homeowners" (Brown 2000).

The Courts Intervene

But Lake County might not have a choice of whether to reassess. In 1993, a group of South County [7] homeowners sued the State, arguing that the State's complicated assessment system is unconstitutional. The Court agreed three years later, and it gave the State until 1998 to develop a fair-market-value standard for assessing properties. The case has since bounced up and down the halls of the Capitol building like a ping pong ball, with the Tax Court, Supreme Court, Governor's Office, and Legislature all swinging their paddles. The latest ruling holds that the assessment law is constitutional, but that the state must develop a new manual of rules and methods for assessing property (The Times 2000a). In short, the State has been under court order since late 1998 to change the reassessment formula.

Politicians have so far managed to delay reassessment until at least after the 2000 gubernatorial election. Indeed, as Legislators return home "patting themselves on the back for passing legislation that authorizes the posting of the Ten Commandments on public property," the options to solve Lake County's tax woes are few and far between (The Times 2000a). None seems to keep industry, residents, and laborers happy, and the choice will directly affect the survival of Gary and its sister cities.

Options include these:

Implementing a County Option Income Tax
Making large cuts in public expenditures
Removing welfare burdens from the property tax-funded expenditures
Forming regional cooperatives

1. Implementing a County Income Tax

Lake County and Porter County [8] are currently among the five counties in Indiana that do not use a county income tax; the 87 other counties charge up to 2%, in addition to the statewide 5% flat income tax. The current informal proposal in Lake County is to reduce property taxes by assessing residents at 1% of adjusted gross income and non-resident workers at 0.25%. Industry generally supports the income tax because it means their property tax burden is substantially reduced. Residents of Gary and East Chicago are also large proponents of the tax, since it would be paid primarily by wealthy South County residents. Indeed, because Indiana's enabling legislation stipulates that income tax revenues be distributed to jurisdictions based on their total expenditures, the highest spending jurisdictions would get the most revenue, regardless of any other factor. In other words, he who spends the most gets the most. The tax would allow the big-spending cities to avoid politically-risky budget cuts because it

would allow Hammond, East Chicago, and Gary governments, which received nearly $70 million in casino gambling revenue in 1999, and city officials there, whose spending patterns far outpace every other city and town in the state, to keep spending levels constant or increase them (Beisen 2000).

The wealthy South County communities would subsidize this spending by their industrial neighbors to the north. Indeed, Gary, Hammond, and East Chicago account for 47% of Lake County's assessed property valuation, but only 28% of its taxable income. Some 43% of South County residents' tax expenditures would go towards subsidizing Gary and East Chicago [9] (Beisen 2000).

Gary Mayor Scott King contends that the tax "is a way of leveling the playing field of taxation that has been skewed by residential flight" from his city (Biesen 2000). Yet with income-tax-free Porter County next door, would residents and business chose to avoid the income tax by relocating to Porter County? Not only does fast-growing Porter County have no income tax, but according to my analysis, its communities uniformly have lower property tax rates. Thus, shifting the burden south would likely push a substantial portion of people who are "on the margin" to flee to Porter County.

Lake County City

Tax Rate/$100

Porter County City

Tax Rate/$100

Cedar Lake

$14.35

Chesterton

$9.88

East Chicago

$20.91

Hebron

$9.28

Gary

$25.80

Kouts

$8.56

Hammond

$27.13

Portage

$10.94

Lake Station

$24.04

Porter

$8.99

Lowell

$16.43

Valparaiso

$12.63

Merrillville

$15.00

Munster

$15.74

Whiting

$21.67

Source: The Times, "The Region," 2000. Selected municipalities only. Italics indicates "North County" municipalities in Lake County.

Some civic leaders are worried already about white flight from Merrillville, a rapidly-growing and congested South County shopping hub that is currently about 10% black and 10% Hispanic. Taxing South County residents to subsidize spending by North County communities is thus politically unpopular and could lead to flight by wealthy South County residents to income-tax-free (and mostly white) Porter County.

2. Making Large Public Expenditure Cuts

"It would be insane to even think of another tax when so much public money is being gobbled up by inefficiency, corruption, and profligacy in municipal governments," writes The Times on the proposed income tax (The Times 2000b). Dubbing the income tax supporters (mainly North County mayors and capital-intensive industries) the "mayoral-industrial complex," The Times blasted North County cities' "insatiable appetite for tax money and a maddening propensity toward waste and inefficiency." Indeed, while acknowledging that the mayors promoting the income tax have "problems not of their own making," The Times notes, "They also have old-style spending habits: expensive armies of patronage workers, inability--if not unwillingness--to live within their means, inept management, [and] suspect labor practices" (The Times 2000b).

A few years earlier, The Times ran an expos� on Whiting, a small North County town that a Times editor called "as dependent on [BP Amoco's] Whiting Refinery as a tick is dependent on a dog or a deer" (Ross 2000). The article, titled "Little City, Big Payroll," quoted a former police officer who asserted that Whiting patronage politics is "absolutely out of control." Indeed, the small city, engorged with property tax revenue from the refinery, has a payroll per resident of $742, compared with $200 to $300 for comparable area communities. In numbers, Whiting has four times as many public employees as comparable-sized cities. Indeed, the City commonly makes three trash pickups a week, and its four police officers are supervised by 14 sergeants, corporals, and lieutenants. ("Four Indians, 14 chiefs," as one resident put it.) (The Times 1997c). Another community, Hammond, recently added $38 million in casino gambling revenue to its $38 million budget, and officials in this city with the highest property tax rate in the County continue to claim they are short of revenue (The Times 2000b). Citizens in South County, long antagonistic towards their neighbors to the North, obviously support the idea of reducing wasteful spending in North County. David Bochnowski, a local banker and a South County resident, said, "The big question is: Is government willing to do its part? We need to see the same kind of streamlining ... that has been done by the private sector as it has tried to be more efficient." (The Times 2000b).

3. Remove the Welfare Burden

North County cities, while they may have bloated budgets, also bear large poverty expenses that are taken from property tax revenues, and the income tax is seen as a way of spreading the burden to South County. The other--and more equitable--way to assuage the burden, as I will analyze it here, is for the state to remove welfare expenditures from the County's budget. In the recently-concluded Indiana General Assembly session, no tax bill was passed, but the Democratic bill called for the State--with a $1 billion surplus--to remove the $220 million poverty burden. The GOP ignored the welfare burden, but they did propose a quicker reassessment. The quicker reassessment, though not politically popular in Democrat-controlled Lake County, is probably a beneficial step. But the Democrats' proposal to remove the welfare burden is also necessary, though unpopular in the suburban and rural Republican areas of the state. In a way, the events of the 2000 Legislative session show how, as is often the case in politics, parties often do promote necessary reforms, but they bristle at reforms that could cost them votes. Indiana has so far fallen victim to NIMTO syndrome: "Not in My Term of Office."

Explaining the General Assembly's gridlock only as a case of NIMTO syndrome ignores some larger issues of client politics. The GOP proposal to speed reassessment also meant moving to a market value assessment system which would have raised taxes on homeowners while cutting taxes on utilities [10]. The current system, based on subjective evaluations of property quality, size, and neighborhood, is "unlikely to promote uniformity" and is more likely to be subject to "court challenges" (Baron 2000) (See the earlier comment on corrupt assessors). While the GOP's proposal to speed reassessment would be a tough pill for Democratic Lake County to swallow, Republicans have thus far shown little willingness to remove poor relief from the duties of local governments. The GOP's hard stance might be because the governments that would benefit most are primarily in Democratic areas, and it is quite unpopular to tell white rural Indiana Republicans that they have assumed a mostly-black urban welfare burden.

4. Forming regional cooperatives

Many in Northwest Indiana know that certain sections of certain cities were once independent towns that were annexed into bigger cities. Few seem to remember the genuine 'barn-raising' attitude that guided small towns to pool their resources and eliminate duplication of services. Today, some regional efforts exist among the county's 19 cities and towns, but they are few and far between. For instance, there are many are standard arrangements such as mutual protection by fire and police. True regionalization, however, is as much an apparition as a racially integrated Indiana neighborhood. For example, "jaws dropped" when Thomas McDermott suggested in March 2000 that Hammond merge with Whiting, which in 1999 lost 13% of its tax base because of BP Amoco's land sell-off. The suggestion was "condemned," with Whiting's mayor vowing to "fight [a merger] to the death." "Whiting has no intention of ever getting into discussions about annexation," the Mayor said. Over 100 calls flooded city hall, with residents claiming that McDermott was "mouthing what industry believes is good for the area." Residents also expressed frustration that downsizing at the Whiting Refinery was due to the recent merger of Amoco with British Petroleum. One Whiting xenophobe who "resents any industry headquartered oversees meddling in the region's economic affairs" claimed that "we're seeing what it's like to be colony of England again" (Masters 2000). Unfortunately for Whiting, this is the exact attitude that has hoist so many cities up their own petards: the thought that industry is an irrevocable gift from God that exists only to provide high-wage jobs and a tax base that can be exploited at as high a rate as the government desires. This attitude blinds the community to measures that can be taken to insure oneself against industry's possible departure. As Warren Buffet would say, "when the tide falls, we'll see who's been swimming naked."

An even more ambitious proposal for metropolitan government was made--and defeated--in 1986. Dubbed "Metrolake," the proposal would create a multi-jurisdictional government in Northwest Indiana. The proposal was defeated by Gary's black mayor Richard Hatcher, who charged (perhaps correctly) that the proposal was an attempt to end his 20-year tenure as mayor of Gary. As one commentator noted, the governmental consolidation proposal was a "thinly veiled racist attempt to dilute black political power" by keeping "Gary's majority black population in a minority political role" (Keating 1996). When racial politics enters the scene, talk of regionalization dies a quick death.

Putting on Clothes Before the Tide Falls

During a 1909 steelworkers strike, a USX executive announced that unless operations could be conducted "with less trouble incident to labor and more cooperation on the part of the community, the natural outcome would be the boarding up of the plants ... and moving them elsewhere" (Greer 1979). Industry executives have been singing a familiar refrain since then, but suddenly leaders in Indiana are more nervous than ever that repeated claims of unfair taxation finally mean something. While Northern Lake County is far from paradise, it is also doing much better than it would be were industry to hasten the pace of its disinvestment. On the other hand, leaders of Lake County's major industries are growing increasingly frustrated at having to give repeated warnings that the tax structure of Lake County could lead to massive disinvestment: their rhetoric now has a different ring than it has in the past. When the tide goes out, there may be communities left standing naked.

While Whiting and other communities appear to be mimicking the proverbial ostrich, Gary has taken a different approach. Sure, the prospects of doubling or tripling property taxes on 40,000 residents are unsettling, but even more unsettling are the prospects of a massive disinvestment in Gary's fragile economy. To this end, the city has turned a once-underutilized airfield into a the hub of start-up Pan Am Airlines. Donald Trump agreed this year to move the Miss USA pageant to Gary, special tax zones are slowly luring heavy industry back, and a new CBA basketball team will soon form. The Chicago Bears have even considered a Superfund site for their new stadium. Certainly, however, having a nearly-empty Pan Am 737 land in Gary is no panacea. Indeed, people have joked that the captain of the plane should say, "We are now making our final approach to Gary Municipal Airport. Please gather your valuables, protect your children, and RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!" Yet the airport, Miss USA, and other projects represent hope that Gary's worst days are behind it. And that hope can be worth more than the projects themselves.

The South Shore will continue to make its hourly trips across Lake Michigan's southern shore. The clanking railroad and the slow lap of the Lake against the dunes will probably always remain. In the midst of the hope generated by Gary's new projects and by the "romancing the region" poster collection, worries mount that at any moment, industry could yank the rug out from under Northwest Indiana. Northwest Indiana's leaders have some difficult decisions to make as they approach these critical crossroads, and the decisions that are made over the next couple of years will set the region's course for decades to come.

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