Gary, Indiana in the USA has a population around 100,000 and practically no jobs or services. It is the recipient of Obama’s stimulus package to resuscitate the economy. A report on BBC 2 last night looked at the city to examine the impacts of recent economic policy in the US. Watch an excerpt and read more here.
Gary is one third poor, 84% African American, and has seen its population halve over the past three decades. If crime, as the official figures suggest, has recently dropped off then – say the critics – that is because population flight from the city is bigger than the census figures show.
In Ireland, we don’t have ghost towns like Gary yet. If we get out-migration then we might do in a few places as oversupply decay and other buildings are vacated as people leave. However the size of the country will probably mitigate the stark neglect experienced in many areas of the US (the Ozark Mountain region depicted in Debra Granik’s recently released film Winter’s Bone offers another example). Nevertheless, Gary is a bleak vision of uneven development under capitalism.
Cian O’ Callaghan
Ireland after NAMA 
October 13, 2010 at 12:22 pm
‘Fun fact’: Gary, Indiana, is the birthplace of Michael Jackson and that attracts a few tourists/fans to the town every year, but, admittedly, this marginal tourism is more than unlikely to ‘save the place’.
The town is actually much more of a suburb of Chicago today (it’s about 25 miles/40 kilometers from downtown Chicago, i.e. very close by US standards). A very rundown suburb that compares to the most infamous of Chicago’s inner-city so-called ‘ghettos’ in terms of levels of socio-economic deprivation and lack of employment opportunities. But that has not always been the case. While it is close to downtown Chicago, Gary was never a ‘dormitory’ suburb for Chicago worker. While it was a residential area, it was once a rather prosperous center of the US steel industry. Although there are a couple fo steel mills left there, the bulk of the US steel production has been relocated outside of the US, and the remaining steel mills are almost more of a liability for Gary than an asset given that they produce a very bad odor that let one know that s/he is arriving in Gary miles before seeing the road signs. This is quite a deterrent to any potential residential re-development (again, it’s very close to Chicago and one could imagine that residential re-development could be an option for regenerating the area?).
To add to Cian’s comment on the uneven nature of development under capitalism, Gary is a bleak vision of the *ever-changing* geography of uneven development under capitalism that produce both the fortunes and misfortunes of places and, most importantly, of the people who live there and are sometimes so embedded in these places (emotionally but also materially – if you own a house in Gary, Indiana, you are extremely unlikely to find a potential buyer and to be able to sell and take off today… the bad smell doesn’t help either to increase the value of your property) that they can’t move to the ‘new eldorados’ of capitalism… wherever that be.
October 14, 2010 at 1:04 am
Capitalism is not to blame and even if it is, there is no alternative in the USA.
Ireland is heading back to the 1980s or worse. We survived that, didn’t we? We did not need massive borrowing to do it either! The disease is credit. The answer is savings or investment by labour and entrepreneurs. Ireland is full of Tigers, right? Now if all they are is Gombeens then there is a problem as the inequality that crushes South America will pertain for the next few decades …..
October 14, 2010 at 11:31 am
@Pat, sorry I’m being a bit vague saying capitalism is to blame. What I am talking about really is the neoliberal political culture in the US that determines investment in places based on economic worth and has very poor social welfare infrastructures.
As Delphine suggests above the fact that any sort of regeneration of the area is left to market forces means that little is likely to change. Government policy does effect the development of places.
I agree with you about the problem of credit though.
Cian