You Can't Understand the Rust Belt Without Understanding Its Suburbanization
“To understand why South Bend lost tens of thousands of residents, we must understand why those residents did not flee to Florida or Arizona, but instead settled right across the city borders. ”
The vacant field in South Bend, IN where Joseph Molnar’s grandfather’s childhood home once stood.
Picture a Rust Belt city. A Dayton or Akron, Ohio; an Erie, Pennsylvania; a Flint, Michigan; or perhaps South Bend, Indiana? You know the history, right? We all do. Industrial jobs moved overseas or were automated, factories closed, economic opportunity shrank, and people moved away from the region. Older residents retired to the warmer climes and friendlier tax regimes of the booming Sunbelt states. Behind them they left a legacy of shuttered storefronts and neighborhoods dotted with vacant homes...right?
There's something almost perversely romantic that attracts people not from the region to viewing a place like South Bend as a relic of bygone times, done in, no doubt, by the closure of the iconic Studebaker car company and the other economic losses that followed.
The real history, though, is a fair bit more complex than that. One South Bend resident—and Strong Towns member—is tired of seeing his city painted with a broad brush, and he has written an excellent mythbusting series that digs deep into South Bend's postwar demographic history to examine what really happened to the city—and what didn't.
Joseph Molnar is the author of the article and podcast series More People—you can click that link to read the whole, seven-part written series and find podcast episodes on your platform of choice. We've been enjoying Molnar's work this year, and we wanted to draw it to the attention of the broader Strong Towns audience. It's relevant even beyond South Bend and places a lot like it. It dispels some common myths, among them the following:
Myth: The story of the Rust Belt is a story of uniform decline.
Reality: South Bend, the city, has shrunk since 1960, but metropolitan South Bend, the region, has grown. And not only are many of its suburbs home to the region’s most well-to-do residents, a large number of those residents work in the city of South Bend. This is a commonly overlooked story in the Rust Belt, because if you don't pull apart the components of growth and internal migration, you don't easily see it. As Molnar writes:
From 1960 through 2000, South Bend captured just 6% of household growth in the county. This inability to capture suburban growth, more so than deindustrialization, led to South Bend losing thousands of residents.
If there's a single culprit for South Bend's population losses and vacant homes (and of course there isn't just one), Molnar says, it's "suburbanization, not Studebaker."
Myth: A falling population necessarily means good jobs are disappearing.
Reality: South Bend, like its peer cities, does have its share of abandoned factories. But these, too, attract outsized attention, especially in the caricatures of the Rust Belt embraced by people who do not live there. Here’s the more nuanced reality, according to Molnar:
What if I told you, South Bend has plenty of well-paying jobs? In fact, what if I told you Mishawaka and St. Joseph County have a larger percentage of low-paying jobs than South Bend? Decades of suburbanization and white flight have led us to believe that all well-paying jobs have left South Bend. But that’s not true. The problem is not that South Bend does not have well-paying jobs, but that its residents do not hold them.
A full 72% of all people employed in the city of South Bend do not live in the city limits. Imagine if those numbers were reversed and three out of every four people who held jobs in the city also lived here. Imagine how that would impact poverty rates, household income, or crime rates. It certainly would have stemmed population loss.
South Bend streetcar in 1969.
Myth: A falling population necessarily means people are packing up and leaving.
Reality: Shrinking household sizes explain a lot of the population loss in cities all over the U.S., not just South Bend. Families are smaller today than they were in 1950 (with some exceptions, such as many Hispanic / Latino immigrants). This is a sneaky sort of population loss, because a neighborhood can steadily lose people without its outward appearance changing much. And yet, these changes do change the character of the place, its ability to support a local business community, and the ability of the city to fund services.
The real problem, writes Molnar, comes not when population shrinks because people have smaller families today than in a bygone era, but when the city doesn't allow built form to adapt to these changing life circumstances:
Sunnymede – and really all our pre-1960 neighborhoods – were built for a world expecting that the vast majority of households would be families with two adults and 2-4 children. That world no longer exists, and it hasn’t for a while. These neighborhoods had clear demand for people to live in them - and still do - but they did not add (and even lost some) housing units.
The freezing in amber, via zoning, of these neighborhoods of large, old single-family homes is an example of how public policy contributes to locking in patterns of slow decline, even in places that aren’t experiencing any sort of devastating economic collapse. The housing needs of Americans have changed dramatically: only 1 in 5 households, nationwide, is a nuclear family. But in South Bend, as in other places, Molnar shows us how the physical housing stock hasn’t caught up to that reality. Instead of a virtuous cycle of redevelopment and incremental growth in the city’s stable, successful neighborhoods, South Bend experiencing stagnation in the older parts of town and suburban dispersal into subdivisions outside city limits where houses were more likely to meet modern expectations.
Read Molnar’s entire More People series for these and many more insights. Among other things, he delves deep into the factors—both national and locally specific—that powered suburbanization, and the bitter war between South Bend and its own suburbs over annexation, and with it the vital question of who would control how much of the region’s tax base.
“Our neighborhoods hit hardest by decline still have thousands of residents going about their lives and making their way in the world every single day. While I may see a vacant field and think of what had once been, that very same field is part of the current neighborhood where residents still live.
People still call my grandfather’s old neighborhood home. It is not a memory of what had been, but it’s their present and likely their future.”
Molnar also examines the tragic fallout of “the worst decade in South Bend history,” and if you’re thinking that refers to the period of peak deindustrialization of the 1960s or 1970s, think again. He’s talking about the fallout of the early 2000s housing bubble and crash, which was as catastrophic for the Rust Belt as anywhere in the nation. The 2000s, not before, were when poorer South Bend neighborhoods truly went into freefall. And the repercussions are nowhere near over.
If there’s a “real story” of South Bend in the post-1960 years, it’s not simply one of deindustrialization or decline. It’s of a region whose development pattern—the colossal suburban experiment undertaken all over North America—rendered it fragile to economic changes, and unable to adapt the way it had in the past: by building incrementally on already-productive places, and capturing the benefits of the resulting wealth.
Cover image via Unsplash.
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is also a founding member of the organization. His work at Strong Towns focuses on housing issues, small-scale and incremental development, urban design, and lowering the barriers to entry for people to participate in creating resilient and prosperous neighborhoods. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota, with a concentration in Housing and Community Development.
Daniel’s work with Strong Towns reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children.