Great profile in Politico on the mayor of South Bend, who most of us really just know as the long-shot candidate for DNC chair.
What I really took away from it was the constituent work and attention to detail. It’s easy to make a big name in national politics with bold tweets and cable news appearances, but the work he’s done in helping rebuild an ailing blue-collar Midwestern city in a way that serves residents instead of big developers and corporations, is impressive.
We cut over on Jefferson Boulevard, one of several roads his administration retrofitted as part of a $25 million Smart Streets project. The running joke used to be that a South Bender could fire a shotgun downtown after 5 p.m. and hit nothing; a series of one-way highways stunted pedestrian activity. Buttigieg hosted dozens of public meetings and reviewed land use research from across the world, and then tempered public frustration over two years of heavy construction, during which the city overhauled 15 miles of its streetscape, adding two-ways and dedicated bike lanes. Nearly complete, South Bend’s core now feels like a destination, not somewhere just to pass through anxiously.
Twelve months before he took office, Newsweek had listed South Bend as one of America’s 10 “dying” cities. Sure, the methodology was sloppy, but the magazine was tapping into an underlying pessimism that had animated civic life since before Buttigieg’s birth. The once-pristine Chase Tower had fallen into receivership; the old Drewrys Brewery on the Northwest Side, reduced to rubble, looked like somewhere you would take your punk band to shoot cover art. Sometimes Buttigieg uses the terminology of natural disasters to describe the effects of deindustrialization: “The economic collapse is no different in its physical impact. It just takes longer.”
Several people I spoke with compared the 14th floor of the County-City building, where a diverse staff of six and an army of decorated interns work to solve the city’s problems, to a shrunken version of Capitol Hill. (I met one Harvard grad student who, during her summer internship, was using a busted copier as a standing desk.) As an urban petri dish, South Bend itself is an attractive place to put theory into practice—small enough that a topic feels manageable, big enough for the eventual solution to make a difference. ...
Then there’s the economic development piece, in which City Hall plays a key promotional role. Early on, Buttigieg and his team set about demolishing or repairing 1,000 abandoned homes in 1,000 days, an almost asinine goal that required staffers to digitize 8-foot-tall piles of code forms just to figure out which properties they should target and who owned them. Over the years, the administration helped incubate what some are calling the “Silicon Prairie,” reimagining South Bend as a tech hub where startups, some affiliated with Notre Dame, can take advantage of low costs and a concentration of fiber optic cables. (In a poetic turn, a handful of companies have set up shop on the remediated Studebaker site.)
The remainder of Buttigieg’s second term will see multimillion dollar investment in parks and trails, along with a push for citywide early childhood education. Unemployment has been cut in half since 2012. Hip restaurants are sprouting. Empty factories are being retrofitted. The population is modestly increasing.
I only mention the “first gay president” thing because it’d make history… and also because he has made it a non-issue in the Indiana city that is home to Notre Dame, the nation’s most famous Catholic university. That shows just how impressive he is, I think.