The City of Gary has published a set of new residential housing templates meant to make building new housing stock in the city easier.
Gary's Community Development department is soliciting proposals from developers looking to make the plans a reality in the city's badly depopulated Emerson neighborhood. Eligible Gary residents will be able to receive free lots and city subsidies towards new construction through a homeowners assistance program expected to launch next month.
The eight draft designs, which range in size from a 500-square-foot carriage house to a 2,400-square-foot two-story duplex, were developed in consultation with the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture's Housing and Community Regeneration Initiative. The templates are one aspect of a far-reaching project undertaken by the university and the city to reinvigorate Gary's troubled downtown, and, together with proposed zoning changes, aim to address a longstanding barrier to residential development in the area.
Much of the residential land in Gary, which was incorporated in 1906, was initially divided into narrow lots that formed dense neighborhoods.
That changed later in the 20th century, as city officials adopted new zoning rules meant to discourage density and promote more suburban-style neighborhoods with larger homes and lots. Current rules governing minimum house sizes and minimum setbacks make building on many of the city's existing lots — with an average width of just 30 feet — effectively illegal. Developers seeking to erect housing stock on narrow lots have been compelled to either consolidate parcels or seek a variance from the city's Board of Zoning Appeals.
Marianne Cusato, a Notre Dame professor who serves as the Regeneration Initiative's director, stressed that this trend, termed "exclusionary zoning" by reformers, is far from unique to Gary.
"We're working with the City of Elkhart on this exact same issue," she told The Times, "South Bend went through it a couple years ago."
The first step to addressing the problem is updating the city's zoning code to allow developers to build on existing narrow lots. The Gary Plan Commission, which makes recommendations to the city council on land use matters, is set to vote on a series of code changes that would do just that during its Jan. 16 meeting.
The housing templates, which, with the exception of a side-by-side duplex, are all designed to fit on 30-foot lots, represent the second step. Cusato said that the plans are meant to invoke Gary's architectural heritage while providing features — like larger closets and space for a king-sized bed — that modern homebuyers have come to expect.
"They're not easy houses to design because to meet modern living standards with a home that fits on a narrow lot and is appropriate to place and fits its context is a little bit to navigate," she said. "So we've done that for the city, for developers, for homeowners, and either you can take that and build it or you can look at it and be inspired by how it's done to design your own."
Notre Dame is in the process of developing a comprehensive report on its recommendations for Gary's downtown, which Cusato said will be delivered to the city "sometime this spring."
In the meantime, the university has been sharing pieces of the overall plan with city officials. In addition to their work on the zoning changes and housing templates, university staff have been consulting with the city on how best to utilize the $12 million in blight elimination funds that will become available later this year through a state matching grant, Cusato said.
In a request for proposals posted in December, Gary's Department of Community Development announced it was seeking contractors to bid on the construction of new homes based on the templates "to support the City’s goal of creating quality, affordable housing that meets the needs of residents and aligns with local building and hiring standards."
The document leaves the exact combination of units to be built up to developers, but specifies that each proposal should include at least one single-bedroom home, one two-bedroom home and one duplex. Developer proposals are due at 4 p.m. on Jan. 25.
Community development director Ragen Hatcher told The Times that the city has set aside 80 lots that it owns in Emerson for an expansion of the city's housing assistance program. An existing program implemented in 2023 provides benefits in three tiers.
Police officers and other first responders are eligible to receive up to $30,000 towards a home down payment. Other municipal employees can receive up to $18,000. Other eligible homebuyers can receive up to 6% of the purchase price of their home up to a $10,000 cap.
After receiving proposals from residential developers, the city plans to pair homebuilders with homebuyers to rejuvenate the sparsely populated neighborhood. Hatcher said that the city has asked developers to price the new homes in order to make them affordable for prospective buyers earning $50,000 per year.
"What we realized was that we don't have a lot of housing options here. So if you're a new city employee, you want to move into the city of Gary, there aren't a lot of options because there's not a lot of new builds," Hatcher said. "So we tried to fix that problem along with this problem in the Emerson area with the low population. And so we paired those two things together."
Applications for the program are set to open on Feb. 1 and close on Mar. 1, Harcher said, and the city expected to award lots by April 1.
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