As a kid in my hometown of South Bend, Ind., I hoped our modest city would one day achieve true national prominence — but I soon understood that it probably never would.

I remember scanning the pages of an almanac in the 1970s to find our population, about 125,000, and thinking naively that there was plenty of room to grow. But I would learn that outside of Notre Dame football weekends, ours was like hundreds of other struggling cities and towns across the Midwest, a place from which young people often wanted to escape.

The presidential campaign announcement of an improbable but fast-rising candidate, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, could be the sort of star turn that has eluded the town for so long. Yet its newfound notoriety has come in a form that no civic booster could have foreseen. South Bend is notable now not as a special city but as a stand-in for all of the underdog places like it, a postindustrial Everycity, worthy of interest in part because it is so ordinary.

For decades the city was defined economically by the 1963 shuttering of the vast Studebaker car factory, which had roots in horse-drawn wagon production going back for a century.

The company’s failure and the ensuing population plunge gave an early warning of what would become of the Rust Belt. It was part of the dismal lore passed down to local kids like Buttigieg and me, and a bit like a scary bedtime story for other struggling cities. Be good, or you could end up like South Bend.

Some of the failed revival schemes of the ’70s and ’80s sound familiar in cities like Chicago, 90 miles to the west, such as banning traffic from a prime downtown area (State Street in Chicago, Michigan Street in South Bend) to attract pedestrians and compete with suburban malls. As in most cities, that effort backfired and the cars were allowed back.

South Bend remained a solid place to grow up — we had strong arts programs, a diverse community that cared about education and a supply of professors like my dad who helped coach sports teams. What we lacked was momentum, or a belief in why the city might still be relevant. Few of my friends in the ’80s or ’90s looked forward to building a career in the area, and many of us left for places with wider opportunities. In 2011, the year of Buttigieg’s first successful run for mayor, Newsweek listed South Bend among the nation’s top “dying cities.”

For many neglected towns across America, the story stops there — or gets worse. South Bend found a way forward. As Buttigieg said at his Sunday presidential campaign announcement, “We took it as a call to arms.”

The turnaround

South Bend’s comeback built quietly over the past decade, but some of the changes are striking. The most noticeable transformations have been the return of residents and life to the downtown area, investments in parks and streets, and the demolition of unoccupied houses across the city. The University of Notre Dame, still the largest local employer, seems like less of an anomaly.

Even the once-abandoned Studebaker complex is now home to new tech companies and training programs. At his campaign kickoff, held in the renovated behemoth of Studebaker Building 84, Buttigieg noted that the complex has attracted “industries that didn’t exist” when the carmaker went under. He also criticized the “myth being sold to industrial and rural communities: the myth that we can stop the clock and turn it back.”

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The changes haven’t all been smooth. In areas like the racially diverse neighborhood where I grew up, the fast pace of house demolitions brought calls for more investment in affordable housing. Local council member Regina Williams-Preston, who pressed the mayor to seek more community input, has said she hopes the criticism helps prepare him to be president.

Longtime South Bend Tribune political writer Jack Colwell recently summed up the mayor’s role in the city’s turnaround: “Buttigieg neither claims nor deserves total credit for resurgence of his Rust Belt city. But shaking off the rust mentality is real and due in no small measure to Buttigieg.”

That intangible change of spirit may be South Bend’s best lesson for other down-on-their-luck towns — places such as Flint, Mich.; Youngstown, Ohio; and many others.

South Bend’s model can’t be easily repeated, but it offers hope that other towns’ arduous efforts to rebound are worthwhile. It’s the hope that even though old industries may never come back, building a new economic foundation can convince more young people to give those places a second look.

After all, America’s small cities and towns far outnumber their bigger, supposedly hipper counterparts. Maybe this is a moment when kids in those forgotten places start to see a better future right where they are.

Jeremy Manier is a communications professional in Chicago and was born and raised in South Bend.

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