Everyone has their own story about why South Bend’s population declined, the most common being a lack of jobs. But the problem is not that South Bend lacks good-paying jobs—the problem is that its residents do not hold them.
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This week we welcome Kathy Burnette to South Bend on Purpose. Kathy is the owner of The Brain Lair, a bookstore in South Bend focused on developing empathy and building community with inclusive books.
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If you lived in South Bend during the 90s, it was easy to think that the city’s collapse had come and gone decades ago. But this was not true. In the year 2000, the worst was yet to come.
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Abigail Gillan opened The Ragamuffin Bakery in April of this year—an uncertain time, to say the least—and proceeded to sell out day after day. I visited on the shop’s one-month anniversary, and this is what I saw.
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We’re told that South Bend was doomed to decline when Studebaker closed its doors—but is that the whole story? Not at all.
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Over a 50 year period, South Bend lost a quarter of its population while the country’s population rose by over 40%. How? Every neighborhood in the city lost people.
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Introducing an article and podcast series by Joe Molnar that will explore the process of how South Bend, which had grown for nearly its entire 120-year existence up to 1960, began a half century of decline.
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Chuck Fry, Ryan Blaske, and I are teaming up to tell stories about South Bend and we’re exploring a new membership model to do it.
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Indiana Avenue was once the commercial heart of South Bend’s old Hungarian neighborhood. Today, it is a one-sided string of storefronts looking out over a vast field, at once echoing our city’s complicated past and pointing to a new, hopeful, fragile future.
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Heather Smith is a farmer in South Bend. Today, she tells the story of Golden Hour Flower Farm, her 16-bed micro urban farm in the Monroe Park neighborhood.
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