Gaynette Ford remembers the day she danced in the street.
After years of living next to a crumbling drug house, where strangers loitered, and needles littered the ground, she had all but given up on getting it torn down. Then, one afternoon, she came home to a sight she never expected: a demolition crew leveling the eyesore to the ground.
“I danced in the streets, just to have the comfort of knowing it was gone,” she recalled.
Ford, 81, has lived in her Gary home since the early 1980s, when she bought it at auction for $25,000. For decades, she maintained the vacant lot next door, taking care of the grass and upkeep, even though it wasn’t officially hers. All she wanted was to keep her block looking decent.
The Gary Side Lot Program, housed in the office of the Gary Redevelopment Commission, allows citizens who live next door or adjacent to an empty lot or parcel owned by the city to acquire the lot. Categorized as “side lots,” the program aims to reduce blighted conditions within neighborhoods and return properties to the tax rolls.
“Our goal is to make sure that as the city grows, that the people who stuck it in with the city have the opportunity to grow wealth,” said Chris Harris, executive director of redevelopment. He said the Gary Redevelopment Commission owns more than 4,000 properties throughout the city, over 80% of which are vacant lots.
Gary homeowners interested in the program must visit the redevelopment office, where staff will help determine eligibility. If the city or another entity owns the lot, the office will work to secure the land rights for the homeowner.
Applicants must be current on their city and state taxes for at least two years and have lived in the city for an extended period while maintaining sole ownership of their existing property. They must also attend a meeting with the commission to explain why they want the lot and what they plan to do with it.
Once approved, program participants can use the lot to build a garage, create off-street parking, expand their yard for gardening, or add other structures that enhance the property.
“The vision was always to make sure that the homeowner’s current parcel was contiguous with the parcel we just acquired, and it would not just be separate but still in their name,” Harris said, emphasizing that people record their new deeds when going through the program to make everything official.
With over 30 citizens completing the program, the office hopes to ramp up information dissemination to encourage citizens to continue the process.
“It just helps with the aesthetics of the city,” said Harris about the program.
A big push for this program has been giving these lots to homeowners who have taken care of them, even before the program awarded ownership of the plot.
One of the program’s successes, Shirley Griffin, moved to Gary from Mississippi shortly after graduating from high school in the late ’80s. While working in finance and accounting, her family invested in the home for about $5,000, which they bought and fixed up. The house next door was once a sanctuary for drug users, she said. But eventually, the house was torn down, and she and her family took it upon themselves to keep the vacant lot tidy.
“I want it to look nice where I am staying,” Griffin said.
At some point, someone asked why she didn’t just buy the side lot. She didn’t even know that was an option. Hearing about the program from a neighbor, she decided to steamroll the process of getting her side lot. The most stressful part of the process was the waiting game to see if she got approved.
“I think it’s really good for homeowners because they have more property,” Griffin said. “These houses are so close together, so now you have more room off to the side of it, you won’t hear loud music or other things going on.”
The roots of the problem
Many of the vacant lots owned by the city are in the Midtown neighborhood and can be traced back to the socioeconomic divide in the city. Surveys from the Gary Commercial Club in the 1930s showed these areas were heavily concentrated in poverty, with redlining following slowly behind it as the city rapidly grew with development but fell shortly afterward thanks to overcrowding and weak building regulations.
Attempts to tackle these challenges have long been part of the city’s agenda. In the 1960s, former Gary Mayor Richard Hatcher sought to combat the city’s poverty through his Model Cities program, which rehabbed areas where crime and poverty existed. Senior homes, low-income housing, and other retail locations were built along Broadway to aid in the high unemployment rate for black people while fixing the poverty rate.
For Ford and Griffin, reclaiming the neglected land isn’t just about expanding their property; it’s about building something lasting and leaving behind a piece of themselves.
When it’s warmer, Ford plans to plant a garden with benches and chairs for others in the community to enjoy. She hopes a program like this will encourage more people to come to Gary and stay for a long time. As the walls of her home were filled with pictures and information for the last several generations, a favorite pastime is to study her family’s history; she looks forward to what the future could be for those other recipients as well.
Meanwhile, Griffin is planning her own transformation. Now that the lot is officially hers, she plans to have it cleaned back into her backyard to remove any shrubbery. She has ideas for what to do with her project, from a garden with a firepit to a small office space to a recreation area for her family.
As a full-time caretaker of her disabled daughter, she hopes this program will encourage other community members to join and continue to make changes throughout the city.
“I’m benefiting, and the city is benefiting too; plus, the neighbors are gonna appreciate that it’s looking nice over here because it makes their property look nice, too,” she said.