An American Progresses?

This is a now abandoned steel factory in our “valley of ashes”: Gary, Indiana. Gary is not our typical “nice neighborhood”, but a place where “passengers on waiting trains can stare at a dismal scene”(Fitzgerald 24). I actually have ridden a train through Gary, and when I read this exerpt from Gatsbty, I remembered this depressing train ride, (and it was depressing for the senses at least)For my family as a whole, Gary is a place to drive through to get to “nicer” places, like my summer camp in michigan, or colleges in Michigan to visit. One experience I would like to mention, involving my family, is to make an example of this desolate town, my parents purposefully took a "detour" on our way to South Haven (a "nice" town) to look at Gary. They said something to me, similar to what Nick Carrway's dad said to him in the opening chapter: "Just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages you've had"(Fitgerald 1). They were delivering this speech as we drove through Gary's neighborhoods, containing abandoned houses with broken windows, fire damage that no one has done anything about, and disgusting furniture piled on lawns.
This place was once a booming industry town. Now it's a desolate wasteland in a constant depression since factories left to go overseas. I looked at a graph of its population since 1950, and the curve only gets lower and lower. Its caucasian population has decreased more drastically than its minority inhabitants. The quote, "Middle class whites had been moving out and they were being replaced by poor blacks squeezed out of the south side"(American Pharoah) reminds me of our discussion of Garfield Park, where Mr. O'Connor mentioned that his family was one of the last white people to live Garfield Park, and today, Garfield Park is a place where poor, mostly African-American people live.
Gary, similar to Garfield Park, “badly needed economic uplift that a major university would bring”(American Pharoah). Even something that wasn't a major university, maybe a company, a working factory, some tourist attraction, would bring so much to this depressed town. History is repeating itself in this instance, because we, as a country, continue to neglet these areas and make them worse by doing nothing to help them. Literally, nothing. Progress? I don't think so.