Today, tens of thousands of people work in South Bend and enjoy her amenities, but deliberately live just outside the city limits. Why? In the early nineties, the city and her suburbs fought a war over this question.

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.

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.

We’re told that South Bend was doomed to decline when Studebaker closed its doors—but is that the whole story? Not at all.

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.

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.