Over the past couple of weeks, South Bend has begun to receive national media attention at a rate which is no doubt unequaled in many decades. The motivation is clear. Mayor Pete Buttigieg has suddenly found himself polling in third place in a crowded Democratic field. The attention is a mixture of novelty, excitement, interest, confusion, dismissal, and trepidation, emotions which can frequently be found juxtaposed next to one another within the same article. Buttigieg is not yet 40 years old, and his resume feeds the cyclical frenzy that has begun to surround him. It is tantalizingly impressive and frustratingly short. As the media circles, they hone in on what is perhaps the singular question that surrounds his candidacy. Is his essence that of Barack Obama or John F. Kennedy? Or is it rather à la Herman Cain or Carly Fiorina? In this way, focus has turned to Mayor Pete’s six years at the helm of South Bend, a small city previously best known for its association with the University of Notre Dame. In particular, it’s his record on the demolition of vacant houses which has received the most scrutiny.

Vacant Homes in South Bend

South Bend is frequently characterized as typical of the Rust Belt. In many ways this is true. The city experienced its strongest growth in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its economy revolved largely around the manufacturing activities of a single corporation, as in many small Midwestern cities such as Flint. In 1950, manufacturing accounted for more than 50% of employment. In 2000 it accounted for 16%, a figure which is likely lower today. South Bend’s history is sprinkled with archetypical Rust Belt elements. It’s a story of growth and decline, immigration and white flight, minority in-migration and minority oppression, suburbanization and urban destruction. The only truly peculiar element to South Bend’s history is the growth of a small Catholic university into a major research institution just as the rest of the city fell apart around it. Perhaps if one crossed Flint and Ann Arbor they would arrive at a decent approximation of South Bend. In the last 15 years, South Bend has begun to reverse a long standing population decline with very modest growth. For the first time in a very long time, there is development downtown and even in some neighborhoods. And of course, Notre Dame continues to boom just to the north.

From 2014 to 2017 I attended Notre Dame, graduating in December of that year. My perspective on Buttigieg’s candidacy has undoubtedly been shaped by my time there. As a student keenly interested in politics and urban economics, I followed his tenure closely, and experienced some of the effects of his governance firsthand. I will acknowledge immediately that this experience took place inside my privileged bubble at school, a school which is not even actually within the city limits of South Bend. Nonetheless, I think that the intersection of my studies of the urban economy, my first-hand experience of South Bend, and my four years of residency in another neglected Rust Belt city, Milwaukee, gives me at least a small amount of insight into this city, those like it, and Buttigieg’s time as mayor.

In my opinion, the concentration of media organizations in cities such as New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and San Francisco has begun to softly shape the contours of the discussion on South Bend, and how Buttigieg’s legacy as mayor will be viewed by the general public, and thus probably how his candidacy will be viewed. I’m not going to disparage the media in the Presidential fashion. What I mean to emphasize is that the narrative that surrounds non-sunbelt American cities is really two distinct narratives- the story of our coastal cities and the story of the interior (though with a few exceptions, such as Minneapolis, Chicago, and Baltimore). It’s a familiar story, and there are many shared elements, but their stories begin to diverge around the 1980s. A conception of the particular issues faced by each group are incomplete without an understanding of the nature of this divergence. When an organization such as Buzzfeed News or the Huffington Post writes an article that tries to dissect Mayor Pete and South Bend, I don’t believe that they’re doing so in bad faith. Rather, I think their view on his actions is filtered through a very different lens than the one which guides the self-conception of the people of South Bend and the urban areas of the broader Midwest.

As mentioned, the narrative arc of legacy American cities is one of general growth then rapid decline, followed by an emerging interest in the 2000s and 2010s in preservation and renewal. This reflects a generational urge to have access to and live in good urban places (I emphasize places because many of them are in suburbs rather than cities themselves). Differences begin to emerge in the decline stage, as the nature of decline in coastal cities was counteracted by strong overall metropolitan population and economic growth. In a city such as Washington, D.C., central city population fell from a peak of approximately 900,000 following the end of World War 2 to the nadir of 572,000 at the time of the 2000 census. Despite this, during the same time frame the metropolitan population increased by approximately 3.5 million people. Its metro economy has long been counter-cyclically buoyed by the presence of the Federal Government and is one of the wealthiest metro areas in the country. Recently, as center cities are again perceived as attractive places to live, the population of DC proper has begun to rapidly increase once more, with the addition of over 130,000 residents since 2000, most of which have come since 2010. This pattern can be seen in cities such as Boston, New York, Miami, LA (though annexations and sprawl meant consistent growth), SF, Portland, and Seattle.

This growth has largely been very good for these cities as governing entities. An influx of wealthy resident has meant that coffers are full once more, and money that was unavailable for decades has been poured into schools, infrastructure, public services, libraries, and art. However, in spite of the positives, this growth has a truly dark side. Cities are where America’s surging inequalities and structural unfairness are most strongly visible. The rising tide has decidedly not lifted all boats.

The beneficiaries of urban revival are young, well educated, and white. Restrictive zoning, decades of under building, weak inclusionary zoning measures, and a dearth of public housing has meant that housing prices have surged, enriching the already wealthy homeowners and squeezing poor and minority residents to crisis levels. A longtime black resident of the Shaw in DC will have seen a tumultuous 60 years where white residents excluded them by any means possible, fled to the suburbs when it was no longer possible, destroyed minority neighborhoods with urban renewal and highway construction, enforced metro level segregation through insidious means such as housing covenants, redlining, and mortgage discrimination, took all of the well paying jobs to the suburbs, and left the city and its schools and infrastructure to rot. All this before doing a sudden about-face where they suddenly re-appear in the places they forsook, act as though they were urban saviors, and do so in such great numbers and with such little regard for longtime residents that now poor and minority resident have been displaced to the suburbs in great numbers.

Journalists- concentrated as they are in the areas most in the throes of coastal urban crisis- can be forgiven for acting with suspicion towards a mayor whose primary policy goal was any form of urban revitalization. Even well-intended iterations have led to predictable outcomes- developers and the wealthy benefit most, invariably leaving poor and minority residents worse off than had they just been ignored entirely. It can often seem as though disadvantaged areas of American cities face only two recurrent states: passive neglect and active destruction.

This coastal perspective on urban investment has proven to be very useful in the Midwest as some of the nation’s poorest and most neglected urban centers such as Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and others once again enjoy downtown investment. It has tempered the palpable excitement and energy that residents feel. I believe that this outside attention and perspective is resulting in a more inclusive, though imperfect, growth in the cities of the Midwest. For example, in Milwaukee, where I live, a major hotel project was recently proposed in the Triangle neighborhood just Northwest of downtown. The developer has proposed using an innovative financing model that would allow residents of the neighborhood to individually purchase small shares in the development that would represent, in sum, a substantial minority of the total shares of the development, thus allowing longtime residents who are most likely not homeowners to benefit in a tangible financial way from the development. It’s not perfect and doesn’t obviate the need for other steps to be taken to protect the vulnerable. But I do think it’s a very good thing, and one that recognizes that existing residents are important stakeholders. I doubt this sort of financing would have been proposed if not for the harsh light shining on anything that smells of gentrification.

So I do believe that the skeptical attitude which journalists are beginning to apply to Pete Buttigieg’s campaign is, on the whole, a good thing. I also believe that the lived experience of journalists in the national media, in so many ways beneficial as we try to spot the catches in our modest revivals, also means that there are blind spots in their analyses of the situation in South Bend, and thus in their perceptions of Buttigieg. Midwestern metro areas have not experienced the strong net growth of their counterparts elsewhere. While the Washington metro area is over 3 times as populous now as when the core city population peaked, Midwestern metros have experienced slight positive to negative population growth rates, growth far under what would be expected due to natural increases, indicating a net outflow of residents to more opportune areas of the country. South Bend’s metro population stands at an estimated 270,000 in 2017, versus 238,000 in 1970. This represents a compounded growth of .25% per year. Milwaukee’s metro population has experienced growth of .247% per year. The Washington Metro area has grown by 1.63% per year over these 47 years. Washington grows more every 9 years than these Midwestern cities have grown in nearly 5 decades. The primary issue faced by interior cities is not the problems associated with growth, it’s the complete absence of it. The metro-wide scale of decline distinguishes the path of interior cities from their counterparts on the coasts. Central city disinvestment, neglect, and institutional racism are a part of our story, too, and minorities have borne the vast majority of the negative consequences of the decline of their metro areas. But while our coasts are a Tale of Two Cities, the metro areas of the Midwest, outside of the 312 area code, experience the tale of a single city, quickly or slightly less quickly dying a quiet death.

Mayor Pete’s pledge to demolish or renovate 1000 homes in 1000 days is not borne of some desire to make the city ready for development, though I will not deny that the areas of the city most proximate to the Notre Dame campus have registered redevelopment in non-insubstantial amounts on lots that were cleared during the program. The plan is not even one that, unlike so many from white politicians over the years, is well meaning but blind to the potential consequences. It was his central campaign pledge in 2012 in a city which is over 40% minority and extraordinarily poor across races (though I will again note that poverty there hits minority residents hardest). It was borne out of the need to make the city a better place to live for those who remain.

Buttigieg campaigned on demolition because voters of all stripes believe abandoned and neglected properties to be a major issue in South Bend. These two images, using data from 1980 and 2017, sourced from Social Explorer, show visually the massive depopulation of central South Bend. There are census tracts which have a third of the residents that they did in 1980. Abandoned and neglected properties were and still are a major issue facing South Bend. Abandoned properties lower housing values for those who have chosen to stay and invest in their community- and not in the same way that racists and classists will claim apartment buildings are an issue. Blighted properties pull city expenditures away from residents, lead to increases in crime, can cause fires that endanger nearby properties, and generally make a neighborhood a worse and more depressing place to be.

South Bend population density in 2017

South Bend population density, 1980

Given that 1000 homes in 1000 days was Buttigieg’s central campaign plank, his re-election serves as the most valuable indicator of public approval for the process, given the dearth of public polling on the subject. He increased his percentage of the vote from 74% to over 80% in 2015. In a city which is poor and 40% minority, this cannot be interpreted as anything other than intense support for what he had pursued in his first term. Articles such as the Buzzfeed News piece “What Happened When Pete Buttigieg Tore Down Houses In Black And Latino South Bend” are clearly well intentioned. Their concern for the most vulnerable is commendable. But in a piece with such a sharp tone, would it not have been valuable for Buzzfeed News to conduct some sort of opinion polling on how actual minority residents in South Bend feel about his tenure? Would it not be insightful to examine data on whether the gentrification that they smell is actually occurring?

The median housing price in South Bend proper, as measured on Zillow, stands at $65,700 in 2019. It was $59,400 the month of his election in 2011. Housing prices, then, have grown at an average pace of 1.3% during his tenure, far below the national rate of over 5% since that date. Just the mention of the terms “gentrification” and “displacement” in the same sentence as South Bend are bizarre. In the author’s own city, Cleveland, the University of Minnesota Law School estimates that only 950 residents have been displaced over the past decade plus. This in comparison to the nearly 30,000 low income residents who have left the city for more prosperous areas of the country during the same time frame due to poverty. The levels of development in South Bend are not even close to those occurring in downtown Cleveland. It’s no surprise that the article relies primarily upon the anecdotes sourced from Buttigieg’s main political opponent in South Bend as well as a singular landlord stymied by bureaucracy. There just is not evidence that will support the sorts of assertions and insinuations made in that and other articles. And though this is personal opinion, a deeper reading of the Buzzfeed News piece seems to reveal that Buttigieg was extraordinarily sensitive to the feedback provided and took steps to ensure that his program would not have the impact some feared.

It’s surely beneficial for us closely watch for the early indicators of gentrification and displacement in our region. It’s a topic that progressive urbanists in our cities will no doubt keep a close eye on. But as it stands, there is substantial room for our cities to grow on the vast swathes left vacant before we run into these issues on the sort of scale experienced by our coastal counterparts. The population of the City of South Bend stands just above 100,000 and peaked at 133,000. This figure actually understates the magnitude of hollowing out which has occurred there. Nearly every midwestern city grew by annexation from the early 1900s to the 1980s. I found it very difficult to find data on the physical size of the city in 1950, but I did find a US Census document which shades in the contemporaneous city limits. My approximation, below, is imprecise and not ideal. I do believe that it generally corresponds to what is shown in the Census report, though. If I had to guess, I would estimate that the built area of the city (excluding the large area in the northwest of the city occupied by the airport) has increased by approximately 30–70% since 1950. South Bend essentially has 25% fewer residents living in an area 50% larger than 1950.

Pink outline shows estimated borders in 1950. Red outline shows current city limits.

To understand the attitude of those who live in the urban Midwest, journalists must realize the toll decades of region wide decline has taken on our collective psyche. On Twitter, a healthy and diverse community of urbanists cheers every time a new project is announced. While I will obviously not claim that their views are representative of all Midwest minority urban residents, the preponderance of minority urbanists in the Midwest versus the rest of the country should provoke thought in journalists attempting to apply the framework generated by their lived urban narrative to the Midwest. Why is it that there is a vocal contingent of poor and minority residents who cheer when shovels hit the dirt on a new tower? These cities, our collective cities, have spent five decades on the edge of a precipice. If you’re still here, it’s because you care deeply about your city. You love it through the warts and corrupt politicians and vacant lots and racism and broken roads and abysmal public transportation. You realize that neglect and abandonment are much bigger foes to conquer than the problems bred by hypothetical success. As we listen to our coastal brethren who instruct us on the pitfalls of growth, they would do well to remember that its absence is a scourge as well.