Northwest Indiana Discussion

The buzz is all over the streets that secret is out!

Mayor of Chinese city visits Gary
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May 14, 2010
BY JON SEIDEL, (219) 648-3068
GARY -- A Chinese mayor dropped by Gary City Hall Thursday to talk about possible investments in the Steel City, Gary officials said.

Gary Mayor Rudy Clay said he met with Mayor Hang Gao of Xinmin City, Liaoning Province, for about an hour. Gao was on his way to New York City, Clay said, but took a tour of Marquette Park before he left town.

"He had his own interpreter with him," Clay said.

Specifically, Clay said Gao wanted to know about plans to establish an independent foreign trade zone at the Gary/Chicago International Airport, which would mean breaks on tariffs for foreign companies importing their merchandise through Gary.

"The airport itself would have to put in a formal request to the foreign trade zone board in Washington, D.C.," Clay said.

That process might cost as much as $25,000, Clay said, and previous members of the airport authority board might have been hesitant to pursue the idea. Clay made new appointments to that board earlier this year, though.

"I think the board we have there now, I think they would support it," Clay said.

Clay joined a group of local business leaders on a privately funded trip to China in May 2008, seeking international investments for Gary.

Those investments have yet to materialize. The Gary City Council ratified a sister-cities agreement with Fuxin, also of China's Liaoning Province, shortly after Clay's trip.

http://www.post-trib.com/news/2271306,n ... 14.article

how about we QUIT shopping at WalMart?

I have a $800 credit limit at Walmart and anything I buy over $299 is interest free if I pay it off in 6 months.

The county of Lake has the highest tax rate in the state I did not receive a cost of living adjustment even though the cost of living is steady going up. They bailed the banks out the bankers paid themselves with my money that I worked hard for.

I can't afford brand names anywhere else but at Walmart.

I just placed a order online today with them.

I know but there is nothing else feasible.

Gary may as well get the jobs.

Years ago I heard from all the supervisors on the EJ&E Railroad that it was being set up and that one day there would be an intermodule yard in Gary and inland seaport in Gary.

This is the last year the city of Gary will be able to legally rob industry with the states blessing.

Watch what materializes after certain thing are put in place.

Where does the article say anything about Walmart?

Getting the area around the airport named a foreign trade zone is a good idea, but it will do little to establish Gary as an import zone for chinese goods.

The VAST majority of goods are sent via container on cargo ships. Ships from Asia use ports on the Pacific Ocean typically and ship the goods via rail to the end user. The big west coast ports are Seattle, Tacoma, Oakland, Los Angeles and Long Beach.

Air freight is a good business, but is more used for on demand product. Items that are time sensitive or that degrade in shipping.

I think this is another pipe dream on Rudy's part ........

Agreed. Nothing will come of this.

Maybe this is where any stimulus money slated for Gary vanishes into thin air...

The foreign Trade Zone is already there and the building it has been there for over 20 years.

My Understanding is it will be expanded to the new intermodule yard in Gary just up the street and the inland Seaport will all fall in the footprint of the trade zone.

The Building is Green and has giant letters on the front of it Saying Foreign Trade Zone at the Airport.

They have been in business for years now they are in the process of bringing in two whales!

The Genesis Center has been there for years. So has the Jackson family home. So has Lake Michigan. So has the airport. So has Marquette Park. Nothing is going to entice anyone to invest in anything of real consequence in Gary. On the outside chance that a warehouse is constructed in the Hellhole, most of the jobs will be low-paying and will probably go to people who don't live in the city. Any tax revenues generated by the warehouse will be squandered. Spunk and Co. will continue to decry WalMart, all the while waiting for the company to build another store in Hammond so they can crow about all the development occurring in their little craphole.

I'm glad you reminded me of the "some half-baked project is better than nothing" philosophy that pervades the region. I meant to include that, but I guess it was the early hour. From the faux Statue of Liberty to Grade-Z retail complexes to baseball diamonds, "something is better than nothing" has been the last port in the storm for region cheerleaders.

Remember when Purdue81 used to post on these topics? He wrote that he had no overarching solutions to the problems of 'da Region, and that the political, societal, and financial capital needed to tackle those ills was far too great. He was 100% dead on. For whatever reason, there is a "perfect storm" of apathy, lack of education, corruption, waste, laziness, short-sightedness, and hindsight that pervades NWI. As long as there exists a significant number of people who just can't shake memories of the salad days of heavy industry (WWII through the late 1970's) you're simply stuck with your situation. Younger people who were born as late as maybe 1980 have been inculcated with half-true stories about how magnificent downtown Hammond was when it smelled of chocolate from Wieboldt's (or wherever), how neat it was to shop at a "luxury" department store like Minas' without having to drive to Chicago, and how much charm landmarks like Wayne's Trick Shop used to lend to Hammond. Dolts like Spunk and the doddering, senile Thurm Ferree con regionites into believing that all of that "prosperity" is attributable to the rise of unions--and that all of that is again possible, if "good union jobs" return to the area. They conveniently leave out the fact that WWII pretty much laid waste to a significant portion of the world's industrial capacity and that a generation of able-bodied European and Asian workers simply ceased to exist. Once faced with the slightest bit of competition, industrial areas like 'da Region (you know, you guys who "built the country") were sent reeling.

Before NWI can even begin to pick itself up and dust itself off, you need to wait for residents born up until 1980 or to die off and take their mid-20th century perspective with them. That'll be a long time coming.

The Region did OK with labor-intensive jobs. I don't see any big manufacturing plants building in Gary in the near future, the high taxes with the exemption from the 1-2-3 caps alone probably kills that, but warehouses like what was being discussed are a possibility. Nothing wrong with that, IMO.
Downtown Hammond WAS nice, no matter what you rthink. Minas was a nice store, and there were upper end clothing and shoe stores too. Plus two movie houses and a number of restaurants.
Goldblatt's, where I had my first real job, had the big candy counter.
It wasn't the Gold Coast or Mag Mile, that's for sure, but it served well the needs of the residents here.

Wal-Mart's net sales grew by only $3.9 billion in 2010, one-seventh of the $27.3 billion in net sales increase the company experienced in 2009. Between 2006 and 2009, Wal-Mart's net sales growth averaged 9.3%. By contrast, the 1% sales growth announced in the company's 2010 Annual Report has got to have shareholders coming to the June 4th annual meeting very uptight.

The implosion of sales growth only makes Wal-Mart more determined to push into more lucrative markets abroad---but also into urban markets in America.

Wal-Mart is waging two urban guerilla wars simultaneously---one in Chicago, the other in New York City. Never before has a retailer had to resort to such intense efforts to build a store.

Much of the problem stems from the fact that Wal-Mart stores are loaded with two things: cheap Chinese imports, and cheap American jobs. This profile explains in large measure why urban markets---where organized labor is most concentrated---have been so difficult for this retailer to break into.


Wal-Mart has opened up its corporate checkbook to buy its way into urban centers. The New York Times reported this week that the Arkansas retailer is trying to bulk up its Chicago efforts to site a second store by hiring two former employees of Mayor Richard Daley. A Wal-Mart spokesman said the company's new lobbyists would be "helping us to tell the Wal-Mart story."

Mayor Daley likes that story, and has been urging the Chicago City Council to hold a vote on a southside Wal-Mart and be done with it. The Mayor doesn't want to bother with passing the project through the city's Zoning Committee---where it is likely to encounter stiff Chicago winds. Wal-Mart is therefore buying more political muscle to try and punch a hole in Chicago's zoning process.

"Vote it up or down, and then go back and tell the people 'Hey, I got a job as alderman, but you don't have one, ha ha ha,' " Daley was quoted as saying. "Laugh at the people: 'I got a job, OK, you don't have a job.'" Daley must count himself among the economic illiterates in this nation who still believe that giant retail corporations "create" jobs---even as other national and regional retailers drop by the wayside---taking thousands of jobs down with them. Daley has a jobs calculator---it just has no minus pad on it.