In the new series From Harm to Healing, Capital B is putting a spotlight on how pollution and environmental dangers are threatening Black communities, and the people who are working to fight back against these threats to health.
Photographs by Javonte Anderson/Capital B
A man stood in the bed of a pickup truck, his head on a swivel, as he heaved tire after tire into a Glen Park alley. What he didn’t know: A motion-activated camera mounted high on a utility pole was capturing everything — his face, his license plate, the make and model of his truck. Within days, police used the footage to track him down and charge him, one of dozens of arrests Gary has made in its fight to curb illegal dumping.
Just before dawn one spring morning, a dump truck rumbled into Tolleston Park. Under the pale glow of streetlights, its driver tipped the truck bed, sending trees and debris spilling across the walking track. But a concerned resident had already called police, setting off a chain of events that would end with officers on the scene, the truck towed, fines issued, and charges filed in Gary Court.
And at the vacant Washington Elementary School property in Gary’s historic Gary Heights neighborhood, after years of tire and furniture dumping, an organized cleanup greatly reduced the blight at the site.
Together, these efforts show how residents and cameras are making illegal dumping in Gary harder to get away with.
It was one of several victories in the city’s campaign to turn residents into the eyes and ears of enforcement — proof that cameras and citizens together are making illegal dumping in Gary harder to get away with.
Scenes like these repeat across Gary, from narrow side streets to broad avenues, from neighborhood parks to forgotten lots. Illegal dumping has become one of Gary’s defining challenges: an everyday nuisance for residents, a costly burden for city government, and a drag on economic growth.
But the city is fighting back and seeing some success. With a multipronged approach that involves community cleanups, technology, a beefed-up legal response, and the support of residents willing to speak up, Gary is combating illegal dumping.
“The mayor wants to get everyone engaged. If you see something, say something, making sure that we spread accountability throughout the community. Everyone loves a clean community,” said Michael Suggs, Gary’s chief operating officer.
A home is demolished in Gary’s Aetna neighborhood in March 2025. 
Illegally dumped trash piled near Beckman Middle School in Gary raises concerns about safety and blight. 
Residents and city officials gather during an early planning meeting for Gary’s Love Your Block initiative in February 2025. 
A pile of illegally dumped trash and debris sits overgrown with weeds beside an abandoned building in Gary, Indiana.
A costly and persistent problem
Gary’s struggles are not unique. Cities along America’s Rust Belt, once defined by heavy industries, now share different commonalities.
Disinvestment, neglected infrastructure, population loss, and vacant land have become magnets for illegal dumping in these cities and neighborhoods. Across the country, communities of color bear a disproportionate share of this blight, confronting the health, safety, and economic consequences that come with it.
In St. Louis, residents of majority-Black neighborhoods report illegal dumping nearly four times more often than residents of majority-white neighborhoods.
Under the Biden administration, the Department of Justice created the Office of Environmental Justice, which notably filed suit against the city of Houston over the city’s inadequate response to illegal dumping in Black and Latino neighborhoods, resulting in nearly $18 million in funding to increase its efforts.
In Gary, the issue is long-standing. The city owns many abandoned or tax-foreclosed properties, so when illegal dumping happened on these lots, Gary was held responsible. Even before Mayor Eddie Melton took office in January 2024, the city was under scrutiny of the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, which had issued fines for two sites deemed hazardous. However, a subsequent visit from the IDEM commissioner at the time revealed a different reality — one that called for assistance rather than punishment.
“I visited those sites and I visited other areas in Gary that had open dumps, and it quickly dawned on me that the issue going on was much bigger than those two properties,” said Brian Rockensuess, then-IDEM commissioner. “What Gary needed was much more than a fine to get itself going; it needed help.”
As a result, IDEM issued Gary a grant of $500,000 last June to install fencing and cameras at key sites, shifting the focus from cleanup and enforcement to stopping dumping before it starts.
To confront the systemic issue, the city partnered with the Lake County prosecutor, the sheriff’s department, and IDEM to create Gary’s first illegal dumping task force. The task force reinforces efforts to clean up dumping sites and prosecute offenders. The city also made significant investments in manpower, doubling the size of its code enforcement team from six officers in 2023 to 12 in 2024 — a sign, officials say, of how seriously they are taking the fight.
The investment has produced some results. In 2024 alone, Gary collected $2.5 million in fines for illegal dumping, issued nearly 1,500 violation tickets, and made 25 arrests.
“If there’s a violation, we have to enforce it, and if they don’t clean it up, then we go forward with imposing fines and things of that nature,” said Assistant City Attorney Celona Hayes. “That’s what the law department is doing in support of code [enforcement] and in support of the constituents and of the city, those that live here, trying to ensure that we have safe and healthy neighborhoods.”
That expanded code enforcement team is now tasked with perhaps the most difficult part of the fight: catching offenders in the act.
Anthony Edwards, Gary’s code enforcement director, credits surveillance technology with boosting the department’s efforts. With cameras set up in strategic locations, some equipped with license plate readers connected to the city’s real-time crime lab, he believes the department has a leg up.
“We try to get the perpetrator who is doing it, and most of the time they come from the outside of the city and dump, so it makes it harder,” Edwards said. “But since we have the cameras, our technology is working for us now, and that way we’re getting the arrest that we need and holding the people accountable.”
Why dumping persists
Once booming industrial hubs, Flint and Gary lost factories, people, and jobs. Neighborhoods were hollowed out by vacancy and disinvestment, becoming symbols of that collapse. Communities filled with abandoned properties, crumbling infrastructure, and growing challenges like illegal dumping, blight, and shrinking tax bases, reducing funding for basic services.
Marc Zimmerman, director of University of Michigan’s Youth Violence Prevention Center, studied the effects of vacant property improvements on violence, property crimes, and intentional injuries in three U.S. cities: Flint, Michigan; Youngstown, Ohio; and Camden, New Jersey.
Through their research, Zimmerman and his team identified nine key factors driving illegal dumping in those communities: economic decline, too many vacant lots, little to no monitoring, poor lighting or visibility, physical neglect, illegal activity, neighborhood norms, easy access for dumpers, and secluded spots where people can dump unnoticed.
Zimmerman’s team studied what happens when vacant lots are maintained versus left untouched. In Youngstown, they went further: Some lots were cleaned by professionals, while others were cared for by residents using small grants, similar to Flint’s “Clean and Green” program and Gary’s Love Your Block program where neighbors maintain vacant lots in exchange for funding.
The results were clear: When people on the block take charge of and care for their neighborhoods, it sends a message to would-be dumpers that the neighborhood matters, and dumping and other problems decrease.
In Youngstown, community-led greening cut violent crime most, while in Flint, the Genesee County Land Bank reported anti-dumping measures like barriers, cameras, and signage halved illegal dumping in three years.
And the effects go far beyond keeping neighborhoods free of debris.
“This is about people taking back their neighborhood from issues that they had no control over. And it’s happening street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood. This is about people taking back their neighborhood, so to speak,” Zimmerman told Capital B Gary.
Residents making blocks greener
Research shows greening vacant lots — through mowing as well as creating gardens or pocket parks — boosts neighborhood appearance, mental health, and safety, especially when residents lead the effort.
Similar efforts are taking place in Gary, where residents are hoping for good results.
Through programs like the Love Your Block initiative — which has distributed micro-grants to residents, placing them in the driver’s seat of their own neighborhood improvement — the city is employing methods that studies show yield long-term, positive results.
“It’s like we’re coming back to ourselves,” said Tiara Williams, project director of the city’s Love Your Block program. “We have a dumping problem. We understand that it does take a village and a community.”
Another effort in Gary to fight illegal dumping and revitalize the community was created by Carl Weatherspoon Jr., whose Love Your Block project stationed five 20-yard dumpsters at strategic locations throughout the 5th District — 24th Avenue and Johnson Street, Lincoln, Buchanan, Pierce, and Fillmore streets. He titled the initiative “Dump Away, Have a Great Day.”
Though they were set to remain for two weeks, each dumpster filled to capacity in just three to four days. The overwhelming demand now has him weighing whether to switch to 40-yard dumpsters for future cleanups.
“It’s a need because our district is being taken over by people outside the community dumping,” Weatherspoon said. “I said, ‘Man, we gotta get some dumpsters.’ And so we got some dumpsters, and we did it in the 5th District. It was a success. The community loved it, and they’re asking for it again.”
The effort extends from everyday citizens to elected officials. Throughout the 2nd District, Councilman Dwayne Halliburton spread the message with signs imploring residents and visitors alike to think twice before dumping or littering.
“It’s our community, and we have to take that initiative for ourselves first — we want to send a message to everyone else that we’re serious,” Halliburton told Capital B Gary.
From Flint’s playbook to Gary’s future
The city of Flint’s progress at combatting blight demonstrates what is possible for Gary in the long term and suggests additional measures Gary might take to achieve revitalization.
Flint has made progress, in part, by creating a dedicated blight department responsible for assessing, cleaning up, demolishing, and maintaining properties impacted by dumping. City leaders also changed ordinances to impose stricter penalties on offenders, including an ordinance allowing the city to forfeit vehicles deemed to be used for illegal dumping.
“What happens is people start paying attention from the neighborhood, and they started coming out, helping, looking out, calling the police, reaching out to the council people,” said Flint Councilman Leon El-Alamin, whose district contains a large portion of the city’s blighted areas.
El-Alamin said those measures not only slowed dumping, but also forced the city to think about what comes next once vacant and blighted properties are cleared.
He pointed to the creation of forward-looking zoning ordinances as a crucial next step. The councilman highlighted that zoning is crucial for long-term redevelopment, ensuring that after demolition, there are opportunities and plans for rebuilding. He also said that the city has recently updated its zoning regulations to support these goals.
El-Alamin says while it’s important to tear down unsafe buildings, it’s just as critical to involve the community and get the right zoning in place so people have a chance to rebuild.
“We want the blighted structures gone, but we also want to make sure redevelopment can happen once they’re down,” he said.
National research echoes that concern. Zimmerman with the University of Michigan said sustaining improvement is often harder than the initial cleanup. He said the communities he researches continue seeking outside support and resources.
“The sustainability question is very important,” he said.
For leaders in Gary, the sheer size of the city has proven to be the largest obstacle to tackle.
The city stretches wider than San Francisco, for instance, while managing a fraction of its population, budget, and manpower — turning every mile into a test of limited resources.
Despite the challenge, city officials and residents say the fight is non-negotiable.
“I think the biggest key is the 52 square miles,” said Suggs, the city’s chief operating officer.
“Everybody’s motivated, everybody’s fully trying. But there’s still a challenge. We still need to find the resources, both physical … and cameras and what have you, to better help us do that job.”