The Indiana Bears? Why an interstate move for a cherished NFL team may work out | Chicago Bears

You think you’re locked out of the housing market? The Chicago Bears have been renting since Warren G Harding was president.

They started out in the NFL as tenants at Wrigley Field, sharing the baseball cathedral with the Cubs for 50 seasons before the league insisted all teams play in a stadium with a capacity of at least 50,000. So in 1971, the Bears decamped to Soldier Field, where they’ve been ever since – save for a season-long “road trip” in 2002 to the University of Illinois’ Memorial Stadium during renovations. Soldier Field is prime football real estate: neoclassical, on the downtown lakefront, with sweeping views of one of America’s most sumptuous skylines. But the lease terms are crazy, the city park district (which owns the stadium) is a borderline slumlord, and the Bears – star-crossed to play in the league’s oldest and smallest stadium while representing its third-largest market – have outgrown the place.

So the Bears are doing what anyone would do in this situation: exploring their options. A forever home outside the city. Way outside. In Indiana.

Last week, Indiana lawmakers unanimously passed an amendment clearing the way for the Bears to move out of Illinois and across state lines to Hammond. The news hit as hard as a loss to the Green Bay Packers. An Axios fan poll found that 74% would “carry a grudge” if the franchise skipped town. Ex-pros James Harrison and Joe Haden called it another classic case of NFL teams choosing money over community. Fox Sports analyst Rachel Nichols urged the family that has owned the team since Prohibition to sell “if you don’t have the resources to keep the Bears in Chicago”. Local media are scrambling to the desolate industrial patch where these so-called “Indiana Bears” hope to plant their flag just to prove the folly of the idea. But what if they’ve got it backwards? What if Hammond has been the solution all along?

People hear “Indiana” and picture Indianapolis or Bloomington – try-hard city centers rising from cornfields and soy bean rows. But for many in Chicago’s south suburbs, Hammond is a routine pit stop, an escape from Illinois’ high gas prices. It’s a half hour from downtown Chicago by car or train, closer than the 49ers are to San Francisco, and a shorter commute from Manhattan than Giants and Jets – whom, I hasten to note, play in New Jersey.

Like the Big Apple, the Second City once fielded two NFL teams. But the Cardinals couldn’t make their borrowed setup at Comiskey Park work either. Decades of chronically poor attendance drove them out in 1960 for St Louis before they finally arrived in their current home in Arizona. When the Bills move into New Highmark Stadium next season, the AFC East still won’t have a single team actually playing inside the big cities where they were hatched. Say this much for the Bears, who started out life as a semi-pro outfit based in the central Illinois rail town of Decatur: at least they’re still trying to hold fast to their metropolitan roots.

No major bridges or tunnels stand between Chicago and Hammond; venture too far east on 142nd Street, and you’re liable to run straight into it. And if your car radio happens to be tuned to Power 92, just know: that Chicago hip-hop institution has been broadcasting from studios in Hammond for more than two decades. Hammond has always been part of “greater Chicagoland”, the metro crescent hugging Lake Michigan from the Wisconsin border up to Gary, Indiana – the Hammond sister city also in the Indiana sweepstakes to land the Bears. Hammond is a damn sight closer than Champaign, Illinois – and Chicago fans made that 140-mile commute work when the Bears played on the Fighting Illini’s home turf while Soldier Field was being renovated. Not that the team’s 3-5 record there made it worth the trip.

Hammond is no farther from Chicago than Arlington Heights, the north suburb that, until last week, was the frontrunner to be the Bears’ new home. Sci-fi renderings envisioned a palatial indoor stadium that would double as a year-round pleasure center for concerts and gaming – fun that is currently off-limits to the Bears, with the city park district controlling Soldier Field and the land beneath it. But the estimated $5bn cost for the whole Arlington Heights project would have put it in league with SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, the most expensive sports venue ever constructed.

Rams owner Stan Kroenke spearheaded the SoFi build with Walmart money – but the McCaskeys, the family that inherited the team from Papa Bear George Halas, while well resourced, aren’t that rich by NFL standards. Most of their net worth is tied up in the Bears, the rare NFL franchise still majority-controlled by descendants of its founder. Renting at Soldier Field doesn’t leave a whole lot of cash for era-defining mega-projects. The Bears were only willing to put up about $2bn out of pocket for the Arlington Heights stadium itself, asking for government assistance to cover the rest.

Unsurprisingly, their request met pushback from local taxpayers and became a major sticking point for Illinois lawmakers, who wanted control over the mixed-use portion of the Arlington Heights project in exchange for financial support. In the end, that deal isn’t much better than the one they have at Soldier Field, where the city still has them on the hook for hundreds of millions in renovations on top of their annual lease – an arrangement that sits just below the city’s sale of its parking meters to the United Arab Emirates’ sovereign wealth fund on the chart of epic municipal misjudgments.

Hammond, of course, promises greener grass. In Arlington Heights, the Bears’ mixed-use development plans hinged on finding private partners and public support to finance the remaining $3bn beyond the stadium itself. But Indiana’s statehouse vote last week marked a critical first step toward creating a stadium authority with the power to finance and build the team’s dream home – one the Bears would have total control over for the same $2bn investment. If that feels like kicking the tax burden across the border, consider the knock-on effects.

Northwest Indiana has been trapped in perpetual decline ever since the auto plants, steel mills and ironworks started closing shop in 1970 – the same year the Bears were forced to play a game at Northwestern University’s Dyche Stadium while Wrigley was being renovated, adding fresh indignity to their seemingly eternal tenancy. Hammond went from one of Indiana’s largest cities to a husk, while neighboring Gary – home town of Michael Jackson and countless other music luminaries – became a postcard for industrial ruin.

A Hammond stadium doesn’t just look like the kind of sweetheart deal that could make the Bears more competitive on and off the field. It could help restore a rust-belt crown jewel and breathe new life into a south Chicago community battered by economic crosswinds. At a time when teams across pro sports are white‑flighting out of the cities they claim to represent – the Golden State Warriors abandoning Oakland for San Francisco, the A’s moving from Oakland to Sacramento and then Las Vegas, the Chiefs planning to leave Arrowhead for glitzier digs in Kansas City, Kansas – the Bears would actually be deepening their community ties by leaving the state.

Where does that leave Arlington Heights? The Bears fans up there would be about an hour’s drive from Hammond, depending on traffic – and any road tolls would be taken through the northern suburbs. JB Pritzker, the Illinois governor, has vowed to press past the shock of the Bears’ crystallizing Indiana plans and work with team president Kevin Warren on keeping the franchise in‑state, even as he publicly rebukes the team’s praise of Indiana’s legislative progress. But for those who scoff at the idea of the Bears’ stadium becoming Indiana’s third publicly funded major league venue after the Colts’ Lucas Oil Stadium and the Pacers’ Gainbridge Fieldhouse – altogether, taxpayers have been squeezed for more than $33bn to cover the construction costs for stadiums in the US and Canada from 1970 through 2020 – it’s worth noting that those prior arrangements were designed to generate revenue from the people most invested in them: the fans rocking up to watch the games. If you’re going to do sports welfare, may as well pass the costs along to those most committed to the cause.

No, Caleb Williams, Ben Johnson and the boys won’t have “Bear Weather” on their side in a climate-controlled, artificially turfed field of dreams. But they’d still have the lakefront, the skyline and gratuitous shots from the giant Bean and the Wiener’s Circle hotdog stand to offer up to eager TV producers. They’d still have navy and burnt-orange clad fans waiting years for season tickets and trooping out to the shiny new stadium en masse. “I still believe that the best place for the Chicago Bears to be is in the city of Chicago,” mayor Brandon Johnson said in the wake of the news. “I’m just gonna say it like this: Arlington Heights and Indiana ain’t Chicago. It’s not right.” (Meanwhile, never mind the park district drawing up plans for life after the Bears.) This much, however, appears certain: whether it’s Arlington Heights or Hammond, the Bears are moving out.

As long as they have the city at their back and that Wishbone-C on their helmet, the Bears will remain Chicago’s flagship team – no matter how loudly critics or opposing fans protest otherwise. The Hoosier dome would be just a matter of semantics – a place to truly call home.