Major new transit investment is bringing change to Michigan City, a once-powerful industrial hub on the shores of Lake Michigan. To ensure the city’s most neglected neighborhoods share the benefits, local stakeholders, with support from LISC, are taking a whole new approach to economic development and helping create a flexible blueprint for other small American cities emerging from similar histories.
Rendering at top courtesy of Anderson + Bohlander, LLC
Michigan City, Indiana, was once home to the largest factory in the state, a maker of railroad cars known as Pullman-Standard by the time it shut down in 1970, throwing more than a thousand people out of work. That foreshadowed a long period of post-industrial decline. But this small city on the south shore of Lake Michigan has been slowly growing back. It now stands poised to receive a surge of private development, spurred largely by public investment in a new downtown train station and commuter-rail improvements that will soon make it possible to zip over from Chicago in just an hour.
These changes will undoubtedly raise the fortunes of Michigan City homeowners and business proprietors, and be a boon to Chicagoans looking to enjoy the neighboring city’s 12 miles of beach, 15,000-acre national park, casino, winery, and outlet mall.
A coalition of community-minded stakeholders is determined to ensure that new investments also benefit current residents of three small neighborhoods clustered in a U-shape around Michigan City’s historic downtown—people who’ve endured the brunt of the city’s lean years, watching services, amenities, commerce, population and opportunity drain away from the place they call home.
The process, known as Community-Centered Economic Inclusion (CCEI), was supported by the Local Initiatives Support Corp (LISC) and the Brookings Institution’s Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking precisely to connect the most underinvested neighborhoods to citywide and regional economic opportunities. Locally dubbed the Vibrant Michigan City project, LISC sees the CCEI process as an answer to traditional high-level, top-down economic development initiatives, which often overlook entrenched inequities that concentrate disadvantage at the neighborhood level, particularly in communities of color.
LISC and Brookings have helped guide CCEI in more than a dozen cities from Los Angeles to Buffalo to Philadelphia (and including Indianapolis). With a population of 32,000, Michigan City joins Seymour and Warsaw as Indiana’s first small cities to chart a path forward with CCEI. Their experience will serve as a model for applying this place-focused approach in less urbanized areas, says LISC senior vice president of economic development Bill Taft.
The nonprofit Economic Development Corporation Michigan City (ECDMC) is spearheading Vibrant Michigan City, and for longtime executive director Clarence L. Hulse, it’s a timely and urgent project.
“When [the rail project] was announced about four years ago,” says Hulse, “we started seeing the city changing, with developers buying all the tracts of land, buying old buildings and repurposing them. And that’s all great except for in that U-shape around the downtown. There’s high poverty, and probably 50 years of no public investment, no sidewalks, no new buildings. Some parts are just empty, with boarded-up houses. And so we quickly realized that unless we start working on some of those issues, people are going to get pushed out. Things are going to change, and they won’t have a voice.”
Amplifying local voices
In April, the Vibrant Michigan City coalition convened a gathering where residents of the focus areas were invited to express their needs and priorities. Seventy people turned out, a sizeable crowd reflecting the racial diversity of the city’s West Side and East Side districts where Black and other people of color make up a majority.
A major reason for the turnout is that the meeting was held at the HOPE (Helping Our People Excel) Community Center in the heart of the West Side, says Angie Nelson Deuitch, a management consultant focusing on diversity and inclusion and serving as president of the Michigan City Common Council. Nelson Deuitch is currently running to be the city’s first Black mayor. “I think that’s the difference this time,” she says. “We came to the people versus us being at City Hall or at the high school out on the edge of town. This process has been the most inclusive we’ve seen in a long time.”
Gerry Jones, a 41-year Michigan City resident and HOPE Center board member, agrees. “A lot of people got up and expressed their frustration, their anger, their fears, their concerns,” she says. “And they felt, I think, safe in being able to express that.”
What emerged from this sharing of perspectives, along with a series of focus groups and stakeholder interviews, was a set of action items.
There are still industrial jobs paying more than $40,000 in the focus neighborhoods, but most residents travel outside the city to earn lower wages, with longer-than-average commute times. There is a severe lack of quality, affordable housing and many residents are severely rent-burdened.
Among the many possible solutions proposed: a workforce development hub and expansion of the city’s bus system to get workers where they need to go; support for the city’s only nonprofit developer, the newly formed Lake Michigan Community Development Corporation, so it can build infill single-family housing; establish subsidies for home repair through area banks and local funders; opportunities for young people to build skills or just have fun; stronger identity and leadership for neighborhoods. And that’s just for starters.
The process also allowed local stakeholders to begin to imagine transforming problematic features of the Michigan City landscape that for decades have seemed permanent facts of life—a 100-acre state prison on the West Side that, after 150 years, is slated to be demolished; a massive, view-spoiling coal-fired power plant on the West Side waterfront slated for closure in a few years; and a four-lane highway along the north side of town that could be fitted with attractive pedestrian crossings so locals can access the dunes and sparkling lake just a stone’s throw away.
“On the West Side, when the prison goes away, it becomes a choice neighborhood in the whole region,” observes Hulse. “You can get on your bike and go to the national park, see the beach and all the trails. That will impact your property values right away. With the power plant, when that goes away, that’s 50 acres sitting right on the waterfront.”
Regional impact, local ownership
All these projects will require persistent local advocacy and organized work. And unlike Chicago or Indianapolis, small cities like Michigan City typically don’t have a range of community-based organizations and experts ready to carry out that job. Capacity building and technical assistance will be especially important to the CCEI process in smaller towns and rural regions, observes Joshua Anderson, principal at Anderson + Bohlander, LLC, and a consultant in Indiana’s small-cities CCEI pilot.
Yet thanks to the “synergy” that comes from people getting together and shaking the trees for ideas and opportunities, says Nelson Deuitch, things are already happening in Michigan City. A revived Michigan City Black Business Association has joined with the NAACP and Indiana Black Expo to mount cultural events from a seven-day Kwanzaa celebration to a Martin Luther King breakfast. The Eastport Neighborhood Association, the only of its kind in the priority area, has reorganized for action on the East Side, and business owners along the East Side’s Michigan Boulevard are now meeting regularly to talk about how they can rejuvenate the corridor that holds many fond memories for people who grew up in Michigan City.
Local people, especially residents of chronically under-resourced districts, can’t do the work alone. That, too, is a fundamental tenet of CCEI, which seeks to shift power dynamics by bringing to the table a range of stakeholders at the municipal and regional levels. In this respect, Vibrant Michigan City has been every bit as effective as CCEI processes in much larger cities. The advisory coalition includes participants from the city planning department, the mayor’s office, and police department.
It also includes the head of the Northwest Indiana Forum, who has provided support to applicants for funding under a new state program called the Regional Economic Acceleration & Development Initiative (READI). READI distributed $500 million to regions in the first round (Michigan City initially got a small grant for planning). Thanks to the relationships built through the advisory coalition, the city now has more insight into projects that could win a grant from the second round of funding, READI 2.0, which is largely targeted for workforce and other housing.
“I think this process has helped Michigan City stakeholders to broaden their perspective a little bit to see how they can compete regionally, but also to think bigger about transformative projects that could benefit the citizens of Michigan City, particularly those that historically have been disenfranchised in various ways,” says Katy Renn, a nonprofit consultant who is facilitating engagement for Vibrant Michigan City.
Whatever the sources of partnership and funding, Hulse has emphasized to CCEI participants that people with the biggest stake in Michigan City’s neighborhoods—people who’ve invested their lives and raised their families there—will be the stewards of their community’s future. “At the end of the day,” he says, “they’re going to be the ones to actually put these things into place by selecting local leadership to make them happen.”