Smart, resourceful, and generous.
These were the first three adjectives Urban Light Community Development neighborhood pastor Neil Kring used to describe the residents of the southside of Muncie. Neil says these traits weren’t built from having things handed to them but from lessons they’ve learned through challenges and hardships that have plagued the southside for years.
During his 32 years living in Muncie, Neil has met people who have grappled with mental health issues, homelessness, food insecurity, substance abuse disorder, and gun violence. However, these struggles are often a direct reflection of a generational issue — one that is more intricate than meets the eye.
Muncie has a long history with the act of redlining. Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institution defines redlining as a discriminatory practice that consists of the systematic denial of services such as mortgages, insurance loans, and other financial services to residents of certain areas, based on their race or ethnicity.
To Neil and many other residents, the impact of redlining in Muncie is still being observed today through unintentional segregation and economic decline that has created a community of people “bound together by their struggles.”
“It’s difficult to see people try to succeed and grow when they’ve been put in a position to do the exact opposite,” Neil says.
A long and racist history
Muncie has a man-made divider — railroad tracks — and a naturally occuring divider — the White River. As early as the 1930s, wealthier residents nestled in the northwest side of Muncie, while Black and white families from lower socioeconomic status planted roots in the northeast and southside.
The Industry and Whitely neighborhoods, located on the northeast side of the White River, have long been home to the established Black communities in Muncie. The Muncie Memory Spiral dated Muncie’s first Black community back to the mid-nineteenth century, and documented a rise in the Black population during the Great Migration as millions of African Americans moved to industrial cities.
However, they were greeted with both physical and emotional barriers that encouraged isolation and segregation.
According to The Muncie Times Newspaper, a discontinued bi-weekly publication that served the Black community in Muncie, the Whitely neighborhood was originally created to be a white-only factory town, but after struggling to sell the land, developers turned it into a neighborhood for African Americans.
The newspaper documented a 1940s meeting where city fathers wanted all African Americans in Muncie to live in Whitely only. Black residents refused and told the paper they recognized the plan as an attempt to move all African Americans to one space in order to eradicate them.
City developers weren’t the only ones playing a large role in upholding segregation. According to the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond, in 1937, the Ball Brothers created the Westwood neighborhood on the northwest side of Ball State’s campus with a racially restrictive covenant.
These covenants, according to the University of Minnesota, were clauses inserted into property deeds to prevent people who were not white from buying or occupying land.
Racially restrictive covenants are no stranger to Indiana, as they’ve impacted Black communities all around the state, including in Gary and Indianapolis. The director of the Black Heritage Preservation Program at Indiana Landmarks, Eunice Trotter, has theorized that covenants and redlining, no matter where they occur, prevent the movement of people and therefore stunt growth and opportunities for Black communities.
“[Black community members] feel trapped because they can’t afford to get out of their place. How can they get out if they can’t get credit? How can they get credit if where they live helps drive what their credit score is?” Trotter says.
Detrimental impact
The Fair Housing Act of 1968, according to the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice, made it unlawful for direct providers of housing, such as landlords and real estate companies, to discriminate against people because of their race or color. However, Neil still sees the cycle of struggle that redlining initiated continuing in the community due to the “historic disinvestment into
these neighborhoods.”
“The folks are just resource poor. They just barely have enough to make it,” Neil says.
According to Move for Hunger, the impact of redlining in other areas of life beyond housing is evident. Redlining results in neighborhood economic decline that prevents people from having access to basic services.
President of Muncie’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) branch, George Foley Jr., acknowledges that many neighborhoods that have experienced redlining are also food deserts and lack access to affordable healthcare including the Whitely and Thomas Park-Avondale neighborhoods.
As many homes in Muncie fall into disrepair, because homeowners can’t afford to keep up the appearance or maintenance, neighborhoods are struggling with blight, or homes that are considered problematic. As a result, these issues lower the property value of the land and leave the houses susceptible to being bought by state investors, Neil says.
“People are waiting until enough people leave that they can package all those properties together and sell them to developers who have displaced the historic neighbors who have lived there,” Neil says.
In her time at Indiana Landmarks, Trotter has noticed a pattern of cities allowing properties to be abandoned and boarded in places that have a higher crime rate as a way “to run people out of that area.” As a result of that neglect, investors come in and bundle the properties into a new development. This process creates a domino effect that snowballs into a phenomenon called gentrification.
According to Merriam-Webster, gentrification occurs when an influx of middle-class or wealthy people renovate and rebuild homes and businesses that increase property value and displace previous residents.
While Neil isn’t sure Muncie is in danger of gentrification, because the city is struggling with economic development, he says that if economic development were to occur, neighborhoods that have experienced redlining are at risk of being gentrified.
A community effort
Muncie has been in the midst of economic decline for the last 50 years. According to the Center for Middletown Studies, in 1972, 21% of Muncie’s population was employed in heavy manufacturing. However, by the end of the century, only 7% of the city’s population engaged in industrial work.
Factories that employed residents, including the Muncie Chevrolet Plant and the BorgWarner auto parts manufacturing plant, closed their doors before 2010, and left thousands without jobs.
These events have left many people wondering why people choose to stay in Muncie rather than moving to a city where they may have more opportunity.
Part of the reason many people, including Neil and George, have decided to stay in Muncie is simply because it feels like home. There is a comfortability that leaves residents anchored to the city in a way they can’t find anywhere else.
There is a desire to see neighbors, residents, and people who are on the streets thriving and living a good life, says Neil. Tackling challenges created by generational poverty is an effort that not only Neil, but other large organizations as well, have made their main focus.
“No one group, no one organization, is going to be able to do that [address complicated challenges], but we may be able to do some of those things together,” Neil says.
Getting control of the properties around Muncie in order to transform them into livable homes for residents has been a top priority. Organizations such as the Muncie Land Bank have been working to acquire abandoned and blighted properties in order to preserve them for people who have historically lived in those communities.
Neil and George both emphasize the importance of listening to the voices of the community to allow them to share their needs and what will help them thrive in the long run.
“The people who are connected to those challenges sometimes are the ones who have the possible solutions,” Neil says.
Sources: Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institution, Muncie Memory Spiral, The Muncie Times Newspaper, Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond, United States Department of Justice, University of Minnesota, Move for Hunger, Merriam-Webster,
