Reddit reviews The Cost Of Being Poor: A Comparative Study Of Life In Poor Urban Neighborhoods In Gary, Indiana (S U N Y Series on the New Inequalities) (SUNY series, The New Inequalities)

Thanks! As an economist (and not native-born in the region) I do my best to stay objective and let economic data lead me to conclusions as much as possible.

A book is something I'm interested in doing in the future. A historian colleague and I have discussed maybe doing a kind of economic/historical ethnography to capture interviews with current/former Gary residents that experienced the decline while they're still around and then coupling that with economic data.

I do have a peer-reviewed journal article on the socioeconomic and demographic trends of Northwest Indiana from the 1970s to today that you can download and read for free here, but this focuses more on the entire Northwest Indiana region and barely touches on the tip of the iceberg that is the economic history of the region.

If you're looking for a good data-driven book on the history of Gary you might want to check out The Cost of Being Poor by Sandra L. Barnes (who was born and raised in Gary).

If you want some excellent insight into the current state of manufacturing and union jobs in the United States here are two articles from Ben Casselman (one of my favorite reporters) from when he was with FiveThirtyEight (he's now at the NY Times). They are from during the presidential primaries in 2016 so they are a bit dated but the insight is excellent and still highly relevant:

• Manufacturing Jobs Are Never Coming Back
  
• Americans Don’t Miss Manufacturing — They Miss Unions