Homes for sale in
East Chicago.

The land that became East Chicago was originally swampland unsuitable for farming, sold off by the state of Indiana to railroads and speculators after 1851, and settlement stayed slow into the 1890s. East Chicago incorporated as a town in 1889 and as a city in 1893, named simply for its location east of Chicago, Illinois. The 1900 census counted just 3,411 residents, but the arrival of Inland Steel in the early 1900s transformed the city into an industrial powerhouse and the population climbed past 19,000 by 1910, driven by immigration from across Europe and the United States. A lasting Twin City identity developed between Indiana Harbor, the East Side home of Inland Steel and most working-class families, and East Chicago's West Side, the residential enclave of the older business community. In 1917 the planned worker community of Marktown was built for the Mark Manufacturing Company and designed by renowned architect Howard Van Doren Shaw, and it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.

Inland Steel dominated the city's economy through the twentieth century, expanding its integrated Indiana Harbor mill into one of the largest steelmaking complexes in the country. The city's population peaked in 1960 at 57,669, then began a long decline as suburbanization, cheaper automobiles, and new highways let workers commute from less industrial suburbs. The steel crisis of the 1970s and 1980s hit hard, and the population fell to about 34,000 by 1990 and 29,000 by 2010. Inland Steel was acquired by Ispat International in 1998, the mill was absorbed into ArcelorMittal in the 2000s, and it was sold to Cleveland-Cliffs in 2020, which now operates it as Indiana Harbor Works. The 2020 Census counted 26,370 residents.