South Bend: Reinventing a “Dying City”

Overview

Less than 10 years ago, Newsweek declared South Bend, Ind. a “dying city.”¹ Today, South Bend is teeming with palpable energy, optimism, and new momentum as it repositions its economy for the digital age.

For most of the twentieth century, South Bend enjoyed a robust industrial economy. Much of this growth was driven by the Studebaker Corporation, a major U.S. auto manufacturer headquartered in South Bend. In the 1800s, Studebaker was founded as a blacksmith’s shop, then became a major wagon manufacturer during the Civil War, before entering the auto industry at the turn of the century. For the first half of the twentieth century, Studebaker was one of the “big four” automobile manufacturers, with sales exceeding $100 million.²

The company’s success spurred its sponsorship of prominent buildings across town and contributions to the community’s commercial, social, religious, and civic life. Rebounding from bankruptcy during the Great Depression, the company operated until 1963, when it finally shuttered operations in the region for good, eliminating 7,000 local jobs. The closure devastated the city—a situation that current mayor Pete Buttigieg called “an economic equivalent to a tornado”—and ushered in a long and steep downturn.³

In the intervening years, the city focused on education, healthcare, and small business growth as its economic priorities while struggling to maintain levels of manufacturing critical to the aerospace and automotive production that is the hallmark of the region, but failed to recover the level of productivity, economic growth, or population it enjoyed as home to Studebaker.

While the leadership of Honeywell, local hospitals, and the University of Notre Dame certainly showed interest and leadership in resuscitating the city, many cite the election of Mayor Pete Buttigieg in 2012 as the start of a new era. The new era saw South Bend's future as an innovation center, using its origins as an industry leader to build new technology, develop and support entrepreneurialism, repurpose industrial spaces, and experiments with new approaches to public works and education.

Led by Mayor Pete, South Bend has emerged from economic decline and positioned itself toward the future. With several flagship initiatives, the city has attracted national attention as an early pioneer in preparing for the future of work. Buttigieg has taken national leadership on issues at the intersection of technology and workforce development, chairing the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ automation task force and giving keynote addresses to workforce and technology-based summits all around the country.⁴ His views on automation look at both the risks and promises that technology can offer to American workers in all fields.⁵

What the Data Say: Automation Risk in South Bend

South Bend’s exposure to automation follows similar trends to the United States overall.

1) South Bend’s automation risk mirrors the United States as a whole. Just over one in three jobs are at high risk of automation in the greater South Bend–Mishawaka metro area.

2) Automation risk in South Bend is associated with lower paying jobs, while high paying jobs are at least risk. Examples of high risk, low paid jobs include occupations that employ a large number of South Bend area workers, such as retail salespeople, cashiers, fast food workers, office clerks, secretaries, and administrative assistants, as well as workers on the assembly line. On the other hand, higher-paying jobs that face low risk of automation include registered nurses, general managers, financial managers, physicians, and software developers. A few occupations buck this trend. For instance, several low-paid health and care jobs have a low risk of automation, while accountants and loan officers are examples of highly skilled, highly paid positions that are at high risk to automation.

How South Bend Is Preparing for Technological Change and Automation

Embracing Technology, Data, and Innovation

Mayor Pete Buttigieg has aggressively embraced technology, data, and innovation as the cornerstones of a plan for the city’s economic transformation. In a highly visible and symbolic move, the city of South Bend has repurposed the old, hulking Studebaker complex into the centerpiece of the city’s new tech-forward vision. “This building now, which was a symbol of our decline, is going to be a symbol of our renewal,” said Buttigieg.⁶ The renovated Studebaker complex is now home to a growing number of technology firms taking advantage of infrastructural vestiges from the Studebaker glory days, including a vast road and railway system and a fiber-optic cable “highway” that runs through the Studebaker building.⁷ The region’s naturally cold climate is also ideal for limiting data center cooling costs.

Lifelong Learning

With philanthropic support and a partnership with the Drucker Institute, the city of South Bend is setting an ambitious vision to become the “City of Lifelong Learning” to help its residents continue to gain skills and knowledge throughout their life.⁸ Supported by Google.org and Walmart, the South Bend Lifelong Learning System has an explicit focus on inclusion, with an emphasis on making learning accessible to economically vulnerable residents. The multiyear initiative’s aim is provide all of South Bend’s roughly 100,000 residents with access to an online portal that comprehensively maps skills needs for the city and helps connect citizens to educational opportunities to attain and receive recognition for those skills. In addition to this digital component, the program also will offer lifelong learning in physical spaces in partnership with the local library system.

Leveraging the Resources, Talent, and Research of Local Universities

In recent years, the city of South Bend has engaged in more proactive partnership with the University of Notre Dame to harness the potential of the university’s research, resources, innovation, and talent pipeline. Since 2006, the university has and invested in two local technology parks.⁹ Notre Dame and the city of South Bend have also partnered more closely in efforts to retain local talent in the region. Mayor Buttigieg has prioritized tapping the highly educated graduates from Notre Dame—students who historically have migrated out of the region after their education is complete—for the South Bend workforce. In 2012, Notre Dame and South Bend introduced a to offer recent graduates an opportunity to stay in South Bend to work on a civic project in the community for a year.¹⁰

Stronger Together

South Bend has benefited greatly from a holistic approach to preparing for a future in which people earn income differently and expect different services from their community—from quality-of-place initiatives to transit planning—and has demonstrated an understanding that preparing workers also means preparing to give workers a place to make an affordable, enjoyable life.¹¹ The region’s leadership knows that weather, size, and perception all present not only a talent attraction challenge, but also a retention one.

Around this issue, the community’s workforce and economic development leaders have shown a deep collaborative energy. One such example is the city’s robust work-based learning scene, led in part by the Chamber of Commerce. South Bend also understands its identity as both a city with unique challenges and a hub within a region facing broader questions of resident migration, mobility, and opportunity. South Bend has played a vital role in efforts like the South Bend | Elkhart Regional Partnership, which does innovative talent connection work in northern Indiana.¹² Among other things, the partnership is focusing on the importance of building social capital for students and workers who lack networks as a means of preparing them for an increasingly fluid world of work in the future.

South Bend has benefited greatly from a holistic approach to preparing for a future in which people earn income differently and expect different services from their community.

Conclusion

South Bend enjoys an energized leadership team and the blessing of being small enough to get things done and big enough to do things that will matter to cities much larger than itself. It has made great strides in focusing on work-based learning, building on local university resources, and seeing its manufacturing history as an asset and not a deficit.

However, there is work yet to be done. Like many other cities, the key challenge is ensuring that automation-resiliency plans are truly comprehensive. With such a strong legacy of manufacturing and so much energy around building data realty, tech, and entrepreneurialism, design conversations (and participants) are in danger of being male-dominated. Paired with the disproportionate immediate vulnerability of South Bend’s women workers in fields like retail, food service, and administrative support, the region will need to design automation response efforts that engage women. Additionally, South Bend is more than 40 percent nonwhite, and leaders must make sure that program design and implementation involves people of color to ensure that the future workforce is representative—and that opportunity is equally accessible.