Indianapolis: Super Bowl city not so super

Not so super Indianapolis, Indiana's State Capital and largest city, as it was when it hosted Super Bowl XLVI, an event which, ironically, followed one of the absolutely worst seasons ever for the Indianapolis Colts.  Originally posted on Examiner.com--GF

 

By all standard measures, Indianapolis’ first hosting of a Super Bowl, Super Bowl XLVI on February 5, 2012, was a resounding success.  Certainly that’s shown by glowing press coverage.  The Associated Press’ Tom Coyne penned a February 5 story, “No more Naptown: Super Bowl boosts Indy’s image,” that was long, detailed, extensive and fulsome in praise of Indianapolis in snagging Super Bowl XLVI.    “Scoring High Marks,” a February 7 story by Robert King in the Indianapolis Star, the city’s daily newspaper, specifically noted the very favorable impression as Super Bowl host Indianapolis had garnered among the professional sports news broadcasters and networks.  By all press reports (of which those above are only two), Indianapolis had successfully carried off one helluva splashy party that Super Bowl week.

 

But for us who live in Indianapolis, one successful special-event weeklong party doesn’t a successful city make.  For its residents, as opposed to those who came into town from outside specifically for the Super Bowl activities, Indianapolis is still beset by many, many problems and drawbacks.

 

For one thing, participating in Super Bowl week events, not to mention attending the big game itself, was prohibitively expensive for many residents.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the Indianapolis-Carmel metropolitan area (Carmel being a suburban town just north of Indianapolis) still had an 8.6% seasonally-unadjusted unemployment rate in January 2012, which meant 76,500 living here were out of work, while many others had only part-time jobs when they wanted full-time, or had dropped out of the labor force altogether.  (Including these, by BLS methodology, nearly doubles the “official” unemployment rate, which measures only those without jobs who are actively seeking work.)

 

Further, parking one’s car in downtown Indianapolis, where the activities that week were, cost $20 per day; and although downtown was served by IndyGo, the city’s public bus system, many parts of Indianapolis aren’t served by public transportation at all, nor are any of the outlying suburban communities.  Just one of the reasons IndyGo is dubbed IndyDon’tGo or IndyWon’tGo by many Circle City residents.  (The moniker comes from Indianapolis having at the heart of downtown Monument Circle, a circular roadway enclosing the War Memorial, the city’s central landmark.)  Nor is public transportation all that convenient even for those areas that are served:  there are long waits between scheduled buses, and because of this, spending six hours’ time at Super Bowl activities could often cost bus riders eight-ten hours’ time when considering the wait for buses.

 

Downtown Indianapolis also presents a sharp contrast between the very rich and the very poor—intermixed with all the high-class hotels and upscale shops, restaurants and bars is a large population of homeless, many of whom are highly-visible street beggars.  Downtown is also home for the city’s missions that provide beds and meals for some of the homeless, though with harsh restrictions.  But they don’t even come close to serving all the homeless.

 

Back in fall 2011 Republican Mayor Greg Ballard succeeded with his plan to privatize the city’s parking meters, resulting not only in a considerable rise in parking rates, from 75¢ an hour to $1.00 an hour an even $1.50 an hour, but also extended the time parking fees had to be paid from 6 PM to 9 PM and eliminated Saturday free parking.  Ballard touted the “convenience” of the new meters which had to be installed, because they now made it possible to feed the meters by credit or debit card—but of course, only if the credit or debit card isn’t maxed out, which isn’t the case for many, including myself at the time (as I was unemployed during Super bowl week, and subsisting on only $150 per week unemployment compensation).

 

 Then there’s Indianapolis’ famous sewer overflow, a perennial problem and health hazard every time there’s a major rainfall or snow melt (neither of which occurred Super Bowl week, so the tourists didn’t have to notice—unlike year-round residents).  This problem stems from a sewer system that was put into place in the 19^th Century and not expanded essentially since then, despite considerable population growth.  The result is sewer water flooding the streets and overrunning river banks during heavy rainfall and snow melt, and it’s a problem that has plagued Indianapolis now literally for generations.  When I moved to Indianapolis in December 1979 residents were then grousing about the sewers, and had been for many years prior; and although everyone acknowledges the problem, political bickering on how it is to be financed, and who is to pay for it, has stymied action.  Due to the conservative nature of Indiana politics generally, which carries over into Indianapolis, the financing plans proposed so far have been regressive, substantially exempting rich property owners while disproportionately soaking the middle-class and poor instead.  The result has been gridlock over the truly-needed extensive overhaul and expansion of the Circle City’s sewer system.

 

While Indianapolis has 43% of Indiana’s college graduates according to the BLS, as

noted in an October 19, 2008 Indianapolis Star story, “Indy area is flourishing while rest of state falters,” it doesn’t mean that having a college degree in Indianapolis automatically translates into a high-paying, high-skill job for many of these graduates.  This results in many college degree-holders being rejected by many employers in low-education, low-skill Indiana as “overqualified,” and thus stuck in low-skill service jobs or only temporary employment.  (After all, 48.6% of Indiana’s college graduates leave the state upon graduation, precisely because of the lack of degree-level jobs.)  I can attest to this firsthand myself, as one who scored the standardized state system standardized tests in a local temp job that requires a college degree and temporarily but regularly employs nearly 1,000 college graduates during the yearly-recurring test-scoring season, but which provides employment only four-six months a year.  Since then, I’ve “moved on” to a permanent, full-time blue-collar warehouse job, grateful that my economics degree from Indiana University was simply ignored, not used against me!  And that was the only permanent full-time job offer I’d even received in the previous ten-and-a-half years.  My personal observations, plus anecdotal evidence, tells me that many of Indianapolis’ college graduates are insecurely employed, working strictly temp jobs when work is available, or if among the better-paid, are working as servers, bartenders, or other tipped employees in Indianapolis’ upscale restaurants, bars and hotels where no college degree is required.

 

Tom Coyne’s story cited above credits long-serving (1976-1991) Republican Mayor Bill Hudnut with making Indianapolis an eventual Super Bowl city.  Hudnut’s goal was to capture an NFL team for Indy, capitalizing on Indiana’s sports mania.  As Coyne put it:

 

In the 1970s, then-Mayor Bill Hudnut decided that sports was the ticket to revitalizing the city and putting it on the national map.

It seemed to be a good fit. Indianapolis was the capital of a sports-crazed state that had Notre Dame winning national football championships in the north, Indiana University winning national basketball championships in the south, the Indianapolis 500 in the middle and a high school basketball tournament that created Hoosier Hysteria.

 

Although Indianapolis already berthed the NBA Indiana Pacers, the team’s uneven playing record, propensity for brawling, and lack of fan support did not make basketball a big-ticket item.  To Hudnut and others, that required snagging an NFL team, which Indianapolis did in 1984, when the then-Baltimore Colts sneaked out of Maryland in the wee hours of the morning, under cover of darkness, and arrived in Indianapolis at dawn.

 

But even that didn’t do it all by itself.  The real ticket to NFL success in Indianapolis all came down to one man:  Peyton Manning, Indianapolis Colts’ quarterback from 1991 until released by Colts owner Jim Irsay on March 9, 2012.  It was Manning’s stellar playing for the Colts that made the team a top-rated NFL contender that went on to play in two Super Bowls and win one of them.  His reputation was key not only in getting Indianapolis to be the site of Super Bowl XLVI, but earlier, in persuading Indianapolis and the State of Indiana to specifically build for the Colts the brand-new Lucas Oil Stadium and tear down the still-serviceable, not-yet-paid-for Hoosier Dome the Colts now found inadequate, threatening to leave Indianapolis if a new stadium were not built. 

 

But as CNN reported, before Peyton Manning the Colts were a “laughingstock.”  They may become so again—during the 2011 NFL season, with Manning out the whole time because of recovery from neck surgery, the Colts were 2-14 for the football year in which Indianapolis hosted the Super Bowl!  The only honor the Colts snagged that season was the dubious one of having first choice in the upcoming NFL draft because of its bottom-of-the-barrel last-place finish.

 

Indianapolis’ turn-around from Naptown (where everyone napped) and IndiaNOPLACE has been based on an economic development strategy that could be called Third World:  using not just big-name sports, but conventioneering, upscale shopping and tourism as well, to attract big spenders from out-of-state and the affluent suburbs surrounding Indy to make the city flush with money.  But that success has come at the price of long neglect of those who actually live in Indianapolis—for the Circle City, along with Indiana as a whole, continues hemorrhaging well-paying manufacturing jobs and replacing them with low-paying service jobs, while, as mentioned above, nearly half the college-educated continue to leave the state.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2009 Indiana ranked below both the national and the Midwest averages for educational achievement among those 25 and older, and each year from 2006-2011 had a drop in per capita income, according to the Department of Commerce.  In just the last year, two major manufacturing plants in Indianapolis, the General Motors foundry and auto parts manufacturer Navistar, permanently closed their doors, further devastating an already-devastated East Side, once home to 100,000 manufacturing jobs.

 

So yes, while in certain ways Indianapolis has turned around, in other, also-crucial, ways it hasn’t at all.  Indianapolis still resembles all too much the final line in that venerable jazz standard, “You Came A Long Way From St. Louis”:  “You came a long way from Missouri/But baby, you still got a long way to go.”