42 Business View Magazine - July 2016
predicated on growth,” he continues. How do you man-
age traffic? How do you manage population density?
How do you provide resources to a growing number of
people? In cities with a fair amount of disinvestment
or population loss, like Gary, there’s a new question
to answer: ‘What do you do with all of the excess in-
frastructure?’ We have a city that was built for a grow-
ing population of 200-250 thousand people, and our
zoning codes reflect that and the way our city is laid
out reflects that. And so we have an interesting op-
portunity to repurpose our city and reshape it with a
smaller population in mind that builds in for economic
opportunity and builds in for population growth on a
much smaller scale - with all the infrastructure already
in place.”
While Van Dyk can pose the question, he isn’t sure
that a ready-made answer, as yet, exists. “The concept
that’s emerged from other cities that are similar in the
amount of population loss they’ve experienced, is this
idea that you take sparsely populated parts on the pe-
riphery of town, work with residents to relocate them
to the central city where it’s more efficient to provide
police coverage and fire coverage; where it’s more ef-
ficient and less expensive to plow the streets and pro-
vide lighting. That’s not really an option for us. The out-
er neighborhoods of our city are some of the strongest
ones we have and our central city, midtown and down-
town, is really where we’ve experienced the greatest
amount of disinvestment and population loss. So, we
have to think a lot differently about it.”
Part of that thinking involves going over all of the plan-
ning work done by previous administrations, while
