| Indiana University, Northwest (IUN) is located in Gary, Indiana, a city of approximately 117,000 residents. Gary is in north Lake County, Indiana, and shares it boundaries with the cities of Hammond and East Chicago. These three older industrial cities have a combined population of approximately 240,000 and constitute the urban core of the Northwest Indiana metropolitan region. As the urban core of a mid-sized Midwest metropolitan region, these cities suffer many of the same problems of central cities, including concentrations of poverty, racial segregation, population loss, loss of jobs to the suburbs, loss of economic base, high maintenance costs, and increasing property tax rates. All these factors make it difficult for Gary, Hammond, and East Chicago to rejuvenate the urban core economy, which perpetuates decline.
IUN's Community Outreach Partnership Center (COPC) is focusing on a severely declining neighborhood adjacent to the university campus in Gary. The area comprises about 10 city blocks and will serve approximately 8,000 residents. The poverty level for this area was 30.4 percent in 1990, a four-fold increase from 1970. Approximately 76.1 percent of the residents are African American, 17.3 percent are White, and 6.6 percent Latino.
The COPC is focusing on four outreach activities directed toward the urban problems of education, neighborhood revitalization, community organization, and economic development. Research will measure the combined impact of these four projects on the revitalization of the neighborhood. Based on the evaluation results, the intent is to demonstrate a holistic approach to inner-city neighborhood revitalization that can be replicated in Gary, Northwest Indiana, and other cities in the United States.
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