![]() With a negative income tax, an income of $2000 would be subject to negative taxation. Here's how Milton Friedman, one of its most famous proponents, explained it in a 1973 interview with Playboy: It's called the negative income tax because, if your income is below that amount, you get money. The negative income tax is simple that's part of its appeal, which, at the time, was bipartisan. ![]() One thing that has worked in Gary has particular resonance today: its 1970s experiment with the negative income tax, a brief, small-scale, but promising attempt at stabilizing some of the city's population. And, of course, on Gary International Airport, a potential economic boon that is still struggling to get off the ground. Steel Yard stadium, which cost $45 million (nearly double the original estimate), never led to development nearby, and landed a business associate of then-mayor Scott King in the big house. On the Sheraton, into which the city poured millions in the 1980s before the hotel went under a few years afterward. On 1981’s little-used Genesis Center, which has been a drain on municipal coffers for years. Mayors from Richard Hatcher through Freeman-Wilson’s predecessor, Rudy Clay, spent hundreds of millions in federal and other funds trying to help the city regain its footing. The downward spiral of fewer residents, store closings, an eroding tax base, and higher crime proved impossible to stop, despite repeated efforts. Even the healthy-looking stadium next door tells a sad story: As Bryan Smith wrote when he profiled Karen Wilson-Freeman, the Gary native and Harvard Law grad in her first term as mayor, stood as a symbol of old, failed redevelopment. Tearing down the Sheraton that's stood empty along the freeway for twenty years until this month, cost two million dollars. Then there's the problem of bringing down the buildings. No one really knows how many there are the city has been working with the University of Chicago's Gary Project and a team of volunteers, using open-source software from LocalData, to document the scale of the problem. Gary is estimated to have some 10,000-15,000 abandoned homes, a quarter of its stock and an astonishing figure in a city of 80,000, the result of having lost more than half its population in 40 years. Gary has long been a destination for urban-explorer photographers in this story, the economic ruin they capture overlaps with the crime problems the underfunded city struggles to cope with. The Tribune's coverage of suspected serial killer Darren Deon Vann is accompanied by dramatic photos-not of blood and gore, but striking, almost beautiful pictures by Michael Tercha of two abandoned homes in Gary, Indiana, where four bodies were found.
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