Midwest on F L O T I S S E R I E

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 08:41:53 -0500

Angst about data center development continues to grow in the Rust Belt.

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 10:56:00 -0500

As a true blue Hoosier, here’s my hot take on the Chicago Bears moving to Hammond: no dunking on NWI.

I’m seeing a lot of disgust for Indiana in related Bears commentary that troubles me, especially the comments about NWI as a place of blight, beyond consideration or repair, obscuring the stakes behind a regional geography of race and class. Meanwhile, I am glad that people from Chicago suburbs have found occasion to think about their neighbors in Hammond and Gary. There is life outside of Schaumburg.

Indiana’s history as a state is thick with race and class problems, perhaps best captured in the old phrase calling it the “middle finger of the South thrust into the North.” That middle finger reaches right up and touches Chicagoland. Indiana’s policy approach to this dynamic is predictably toxic, having cleaved communities like Hammond and Gary from state investments and statehouse power. Indy loves business and it loves a chance to razz Chicago. Guess why.

“The Region” in Northwest Indiana is practically and functionally the south side of Chicago. You can drive from Gary through East Chicago and Whiting straight into Pullman and Bronzeville, without much marking a state line other than some signage and an iconic White Castle. But everything on the Indiana side of the line is governed from a statehouse that rarely considers them at all until there’s a chance to further demean and isolate them. Like so, with Indiana’s current plans for redistricting that further disenfranchise Gary residents.

Does it serve to remind us that Gary was founded as a company town by the world’s first billion dollar corporation? I think so (and great article btw). The town was the subject of serious curiosity and consternation during the early days of industrialization, especially when comparing the claims of the owners and capitalists to the realities of the workers. Poet Carl Sandburg famously wrote the poem “The Mayor of Gary” to illustrate the casual venality that the ownership class felt toward the steelworkers. This dynamic is still very much alive in the minds of the people in surrounding communities, who are perpetually worried about a “Chicago influence.”

This is why we train a jaundiced eye on characterizing working class communities like they’re beyond consideration or redemption. The world isn’t a Costco. People live among the brownfields. I spent a lot of time in this area in my twenties – all my friends in The Region were somehow connected to US Steel, even still. Feel however you feel about the Bears deal, but we don’t do Gary slander in this house.

Yanking this back to the question of writing: if you want to catch an interesting news source from the area, Capital B’s Gary outlet does some amazing reporting and opinion.

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 10:30:00 -0500

The local story is ripe with corruption. Indiana likes to spin up private “growth” orgs to bypass legislation, after a long history of treating the state’s water resources like something between a highway and a sewer. Indiana’s Plan to Pipe In Groundwater for Microchip-Making Draws Fire

Readings on the Midwest Water Wars

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 14:32:00 -0500

I’m following a new environmental drama in my Hoosier hometown. Some geniuses in the Indiana statehouse decided to court agreements to build gigantic computer chip plants in an area of the state that lacks one critical thing: there’s no water. Computer chip manufacturing apparently requires a ton of water.

“No problem!” the intellectual giants said. “There is the large Wabash River aquifer to the north that we can just have piped 35 miles down to our site.” The only problem is that the math doesn’t math and the people of Indiana hate the idea of giving up their water rights on the word of business men who are now on the record openly lying about the science.

Here’s what I’m reading:

Purdue Groundwater Expert on LEAP by Dave Bangert

The following quote is building a metaphor so the average person can understand just how much water is planned to be removed from this critical aquifer *** every day *** for this chip plant. The state agency responsible for steering the plans lied by claiming the aquifer will be recharged because it’s connected to Lake Michigan. There’s zero evidence that it is, and there’s no evidence it will be recharged as quickly as it’s tapped, or that the communities downstream that are planned to absorb the runoff can handle this amount of water at all. The more you learn about this, the more you wonder why Indiana would choose such a bad location for a chip plant (the answer is always money).

“Ask people if they know what ‘one acre foot’ means. That’s a volume of water that we commonly refer to in hydrogeology. One acre foot means you have one acre of land that’s flooded to a depth of one foot. Imagine that you’re at the football stadium. Without the end zone, it’s about an acre. And so if you fill that to a depth of one foot, that is 326,000 gallons. Now think about how deep you would have to flood the field to get 1 million gallons – that’s essentially about three feet of water to pump out 1 million gallons per day. To pump out 10 million gallons, that’s a football field flooded to 30 feet. To get to 100 million gallons, you’ve got to flood it over 300 feet. … That’s taller than all the buildings in West Lafayette.”

The more people begin learning about this, the more chatter I see on social media suggesting that they just draw the water from somewhere else, like the Ohio River, the White River, Lake Michigan, even Lake Superior. It really didn’t bode well when Indiana futzed with the Kankakee River basin, which killed migratory wetlands and an estimated twenty percent of migratory birds in the early 1900s, for example, and it’s unlikely to play out well now. The following two books explain that kind of thinking and why it’s terrible for, well, just about everything.

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan

I’m kind of a nerd about science writing because it takes several types of technical skill and expertise to thread the needle so the layperson can follow along. This book, which won awards from all kinds of industry bodies, is wildly readable considering that it’s about the intersection of biology, commerce and hydrology. Egan covers the ways that people leverage water to meet their needs, which often means treating critical waterways like a cross between a highway and a landfill.

The Great Lakes Water Wars by Peter Annin

As communities around the Great Lakes basin grow, as as climate change progresses, it’s likely we will see a lot of scuttlebutt around lake water diversion. It’s extremely likely these will turn out to be the biggest environmental and resource conflicts in the coming decades. The author lays it all out, and the updated version includes three new chapters on water fights and, alarmingly, the effect of the invasive Asian carp, a voracious species that reproduces at a disturbing rate—which is transforming the ecology of the river as it makes its way through the Chicago River diversion and ever closer to Lake Michigan.

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