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I've visited Gary multiple times, just to look around and do photography. I would say that I honestly felt quite safe there; much like Cairo, Illinois, another place where I've been which has suffered a similar fate - anyone that would rob or shoot me migrated away 20 or more years ago. The place is simply empty of people to a degree that's hard to even explain. There's nobody there.
I wish I could share my pictures, but it would destroy my already crap opsec.
In the 2007/2008 Google street view of Cairo, one of the buildings on the main commercial strip had completely collapsed and was just a pile of rubble spilling out onto the sidewalk.
I can confirm that when I was there in 2018, it certainly had not gotten any better. From 2000 to 2020, the population fell by half from around 3,600 to around 1,800. This from a peak of over 15,000 in 1920.
With the general decline of the river trade, Cairo is remarkably remote now. It's very hard for me to see how it could ever attract investment again. I imagine if you had commercial interests in the area, you'd base yourself in Cape Girardeau or Paducah.
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I actually have a very rare thing - a friend who grew up in Gary. Her description is that that the only people left are the very elderly, and the people who are so dysfunctional they drop out of the South Side of Chicago and go to Gary. The latter would be a real problem if they got a gun and spotted you, but for the most part they're too low-functioning even to do that, otherwise they'd be driving up Chicago's crime rate.
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Peoria, Illinois also feels like that. I've done urban decay photography around there, and I didn’t feel so much unsafe as…spooked out. There’s a certain “hollowed out” feeling to small-ish Midwestern rustbelt cities where even the criminals have ghosted away, and there’s just the dusty bones of long-dead businesses and echoes of decay.
It's incredible to me, just how large a portion of the U.S. consists of areas like that. You can drive for hours through formerly-inhabited areas, in most of which you can fairly confidently say: "This will never be anything again." "That building will eventually cave in, no one's gonna save it." "This must have been beautiful in the '50s."
I wish we lived in a different world, where that didn't happen.
I guess I haven't spent too much time in the Rust Belt specifically, but there has been a lot of migration around the country for at least the last century. It's easy to point to growing Sun Belt cities and stagnating-or-shrinking northern ones -- an older friend from Ohio noted that Cincinnati is about the same size it was in the 70s and still mostly fits inside the same interstate ring road, while Houston is in the process of building a third.
But it's also impacted smaller communities. My family history involves a couple tiny rural towns in the South that have since completely evaporated and left only road signs and a couple still-occupied houses. The historical marker points to where the one room schoolhouse and the general store had been. These places disappeared with better cars and roads in the middle of the last century: we can just bus the kids to the bigger school down the road, and drive into town for the store. Will this get rebuilt? I don't know: some developers nearby have been trying to sell swanky ranchettes, but even if that happened in the same place, it's a fundamentally different community -- this time around it has electricity and indoor plumbing, not to mention air conditioning and a major city within a few hours of driving, none of which were there a century ago.
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Gary had 52 homicides in 2023, a per-100k rate of 76.8. This is a third higher than Baltimore, and 12x the rate of the US as a whole.
And they were a little proud of that number, because it was 18% fewer homicides than in 2022.
Time for a little math. Let's make a simplified model of Gary where the population is gender balanced, and equally age distributed between age 0 and 65. Let's further say that males age 15-30 represent 75% of homicide victims.
Among this sliver of the population the murder rate is 499 per 100,000!
A 15 year old boy in Gary will have a nearly 7.5% chance of being murdered before age 30.
Obviously there are all sorts of problems with the model, but it should be mostly accurate. I think it's possible that a quarter of adult men in Gary have been shot at some point.
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Well, I can't argue with that. I just wonder where they were happening, and over what. I admit I didn't go into the residential areas much.
That's still only 1 murder a week, and a population who goes 99.9% unmurdered each year. Hard to casually distinguish from 0 and 100%; it just adds up over time.
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