Is South Bend a Prosperous College Town or a Struggling Rust Belt City?

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — This city, according to Americans with only a vague notion of it, is a down-home, run-down, industrial, beautiful, Catholic kind of place. It is progressive and conservative, country and urban, dangerous and quaint. A college town, really, but with high poverty. And corn.

South Bend has proved oddly illegible to the rest of the country, ever since its (now-former) mayor, Pete Buttigieg, attracted national attention with his campaign for president. What you make of him may depend on what you make of the place that is at the foreground of his entire biography in government. But is that place a prosperous university town? A struggling post-industrial city? A community that has combated blight like Detroit, or that more closely resembles Ann Arbor?

Many voters, Mr. Buttigieg said, have indeed been confused.

“They often assume because of the link to Notre Dame,” he said, “that this is a tidy, white, wealthy, homogeneous college town.”

Notre Dame is next to — but not in — South Bend, so that impression is understandable. But Mr. Buttigieg has built his campaign on the story of reviving a struggling and poor post-industrial city. Tidy-wealthy-white South Bend isn’t just inaccurate; it’s the opposite of what he has been describing.

We were curious about the gulf between these descriptions — and how two such diverging perceptions could map onto the same modest-sized Indiana city — and so we asked 2,200 adults to tell us something, anything, they associate with South Bend. Here are the bulk of their answers:

About a quarter of people, in a national poll conducted by Morning Consult, said they didn’t know enough to take a stab at the question. Among those who did, Notre Dame and variations on football, basketball and “college town” dominated the responses.

Three people referred to Michael Jackson (his family is from Gary, another post-industrial Indiana city an hour to the west). Two said South Bend is “mostly white” (it is 53 percent non-Hispanic white).

Other answers were, collectively, at odds: About as many people called the city “conservative” as did “liberal” and “progressive” combined. Some said safe, others dangerous. It was behind the times, but also innovative. Declining, and up-and-coming. Diverse and lacking diversity. “Nice,” and also “a mess.”

Cities can be many of these contradictions simultaneously, depending on which corner of town and whose experience you survey. But South Bend has seemed particularly immune to the categorizations that broadly frame how we think about different parts of the country — and about the problems they face.

Because it has a nascent start-up scene, Axios suggested, South Bend is starting to look like a coastal city. If it’s more of a true college town, Vox’s Dylan Matthews offered, that would make Mr. Buttigieg’s pitch that he relates to the broader Midwest harder to buy. The region around South Bend, Dave Wasserman at the Cook Political Report has noted, is the smallest metro area in the country to contain all of the retail outlets often associated with liberal bubbles: Whole Foods, Lululemon, Apple, Urban Outfitters and Pure Barre. Make of that what you will.

In our survey, we also asked whether people imagine South Bend as closer to a college town or a Rust Belt city. About two and a half times as many people picked the college town (they more accurately pegged Ann Arbor as a college town and Flint, Mich., as a Rust Belt city).

“South Bend is not a college town, not in any way, shape or form,” said Richard Pierce, a historian at Notre Dame who has lived in South Bend for 24 years.

So what is it?

“This is a very strange city,” he said. “It doesn’t fit most people’s models. And it’s because you have this decaying industrial footprint, while at the same time a thriving and growing university that is world renowned. Most places don’t have those two things.”

Or if they do (think Johns Hopkins and Baltimore, or Yale and New Haven), their mayors aren’t running for president.

Part of the issue, suggested Aaron Renn, an Indiana-based researcher and writer on cities, is that Americans often don’t know what to make of the middle of the country. Denver, Austin and Nashville conjure a sense of place. Regionally, we have an idea of what “New England” is, what “the South” means.

“Most of these places in the Midwest are sort of ciphers to the world,” Mr. Renn said. Many Midwestern communities, he added, have their own internal debates about identity, too, precisely because they were long defined by industries that no longer exist.

In South Bend, the Studebaker car manufacturer has been more central to the city’s identity over the last century than Notre Dame has ever been. At its height, it employed about 26,000 people. Seemingly as many local families drove Studebaker cars. Studebaker occupied the equivalent of a college campus adjacent to downtown.

The company’s collapse in the early 1960s remains the event against which time is marked in South Bend — before and after Studebaker; when there was prosperity, and when there wasn’t. Today, the ornate red-brick building that once housed the company’s administrative offices and its vast six-story assembly plant across the street sit empty.

Any memory of Studebaker’s connection to the city has faded for the rest of us (only a handful of people surveyed mentioned it, some in the context of the Studebaker museum that lives on). But in South Bend, people still see these buildings every day. The old Oliver smokestack, from the Oliver Chilled Plow Works that once supplied plows to the world, still punctuates the horizon. In and around downtown, the city is pockmarked with empty blocks where old industrial sites and the businesses that thrived thanks to them used to stand.

In South Bend, there is a mix of amusement and irritation that outsiders would equate the city with the golden dome of Notre Dame and not scenes like these. The mental error doesn’t just miscategorize the city; it denies something about the experience of life surrounded by industrial decline.

“I grew up knowing I’m not going to Notre Dame — that’s definitely not going to happen — and that’s the case for most kids in South Bend,” said Jacob Titus, 27, who has stayed in his hometown to participate in its revival. “How do you have this shared identity when you have such a wealthy institution that attracts people just so unlike me, and unlike most of the people in South Bend?”

Today he does graphic design work and records podcasts about the city from inside an old dry-cleaning plant. He recalls playing inside other vacant industrial buildings when he was a child. He didn’t realize until he went to college (at Indiana University in Bloomington, a true college town) that empty buildings like those weren’t a normal feature of all American communities.

Until recently, Notre Dame had a long history of walling itself off from the city. It is technically across the South Bend city line. It has its own ZIP code, its own post office, its own police and fire departments, its own power station. It long encouraged students to stay on campus, and faculty to live in the suburbs.

Judith Fox, a law professor who does legal aid work with poor residents in the city, recalls the tongue-in-cheek joke when she was recruited to Notre Dame 35 years ago: The cost of living in South Bend is low. But there is a cost to living in South Bend.

It wasn’t, in other words, a great place to live.

That has begun to change. There are new restaurants downtown, new hotels, some of the first new market-rate housing built in the city in years. Notre Dame has crossed the city line to back a huge mixed-use development near campus (that’s where the Urban Outfitters and Pure Barre are).

Ms. Fox offered another analogy for thinking about the challenges that still persist: “It’s more like a Youngstown, or a Newark,” she said. “If you look at Cleveland, if you look at Buffalo — that’s the kind of problems we have.”

The economy still needs more of the good jobs that could replace the old manufacturing ones. There are food deserts. Gun violence persists. Transit doesn’t necessarily take residents where the jobs or grocery stores are. Housing values are so low that it can cost more to fix up old homes than what those repaired homes could rent or sell for.

These are the kinds of problems Mr. Buttigieg claims particular expertise in. Sure, he ran a relatively small city of 100,000. But the things that city has dealt with, he argues, are akin to the problems in hundreds of other places. That message doesn’t quite work, though, if voters are picturing tidy Notre Dame.

That voters are talking about South Bend at all can still seem surreal.

“Isn’t that something?” said Gladys Muhammad, 76, who works for the South Bend Heritage Foundation, a community development organization that operates primarily on the city’s lower-income west side. She grew up in a poor neighborhood on the far western edge of town, as far from the university as you can get. Her father worked at the Studebaker foundry, just like seemingly everyone else.

“When I was growing up, if you said you’re from South Bend, they’d say, ‘Where’s that at?’” Ms. Muhammad said. “When Studebaker was alive, you could say, ‘Studebaker’s in South Bend,’ and they got it. Or you said, we’re 100-some miles away from Chicago. Or we’re 60 miles away from Gary, and they’d know that.”

At least more people have some idea of the place now.

“Whatever ride Pete’s on,” Ms. Muhammad laughed, “he took us with him.”


Quoctrung Bui contributed production.



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