Mikel Livingston and Steven Porter, Journal and Courier
EDITOR'S NOTE: Journal & Courier reporters Mikel Livingston and Steven Porter, assisted by data editor Jennifer Christos, spent more than four months reporting and researching this series. They conducted nearly 50 interviews; analyzed more than two dozen U.S. Census databases containing demographic and migration data; reviewed usage data for Section 8 vouchers and local homeless shelters; parsed CHA reports and sociological research studies; and interpreted IRS migration data. In addition, they analyzed a massive crime data set compiled by Lafayette Police Department crime analyst Steven Hawthorne containing details of 165,490 arrests in Tippecanoe County from 1999 through Sept. 20, 2014.
Two men were shot as they sat on a North 11th Street porch across the street from Teola Spindler's Lafayette home one evening in June.
Spindler mistook the gunshots for fireworks at first. By the time she went outside, Lafayette police officers and crime scene technicians were swarming the scene as an ambulance sped away with one of the victims.
To Spindler, the gunshots that interrupted an otherwise normal evening on her placid street were yet another indicator of local crime rates on the rise — a trend she blames partly on a wave of former Chicago public housing residents who moved to Lafayette.
"I don't want to be racist. However, they closed the projects down and they're all moving here," Spindler said. "They're sucking this town dry."
Call it the Great Chicago Myth. For decades, the belief has been ubiquitous in Greater Lafayette that thousands of low-income African-American families packed up their belongings and headed down Interstate 65 straight to Lafayette, bringing with them rising crime and worsening drug problems and higher burdens on local social services.
By 2000, when Chicago officials began tearing down 51 high-rise public housing projects notorious for warehousing poor people in miserable conditions — eventually evicting 25,000 households in the process — the belief calcified into an unshakeable conviction.
"There was a period where we did have a large influx of folks moving in from Chicago and the northwest Indiana region primarily because that region in Chicago had closed its housing authority list for 10 years and got rid of some of its public housing," said Lafayette Mayor Tony Roswarski, expressing a theory that's common among area leaders. "So we saw a large influx of people moving here looking for homes, looking for jobs, looking for a better way of life. And, unfortunately, you have some people that come because they don't want to do the right thing."
There are many problems with the Chicago Myth, starting with the suspicions and wariness so many black families report experiencing when they first move to Lafayette.