We are a Rust Belt city on the move.



South Bend’s illustrious past is something of legend. Oliver Chilled Plow, Studebaker, Bendix Corporation, and Singer Sewing Machine once dominated their respective industries in both invention and mass production. The result was a prosperous city known around the world for its out-sized impact on a rapidly industrializing America.

Fortunes turned in the 1960s when Studebaker’s closure became the first in a string of crises ending in economic hardship, widespread population displacement, and a community largely bereft of its identity.

Today, South Bend is in the midst of a resurgence, due in no small part to Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s leadership. Taquerias are opening, developers are eyeing dilapidated industrial buildings, young people are enfranchised to start new things, and neighborhoods are imagining a future that just might be better than the past.