The Best Reason South Bend Should Become Famous
It’s a stroke of luck when your small city has national exposure because a hometown guy becomes a plausible Presidential candidate.
But frankly I’d rather we became famous for a different reason: let’s be the community that finally figured out how to manage gentrification. That would be huge, pretty close to curing cancer, according to most economic development folks.
And if you haven’t been noticing, a coalition of South Bend people from a variety of neighborhoods have been meeting, planning, and developing over the last few months with a new anti-gentrification framework in mind.
You could call this new breed of developers “entrepreneurs” except I think this word is about used up. Especially if you still harbor romantic images of Steve Jobs in his garage or Mark Zuckerberg in his dorm room, the two of them happily inventing the “disruptive” future that we’re all now flailing against.
The entrepreneurs we want and need are more like the six women (five of them women of color) featured on the Zoom call (you can watch it here) on South Bend Small-scale Development Demo Day last Friday afternoon. The session was sponsored by the Women’s Entrepreneurship Initiative at St. Mary’s College and hosted by their director, Willow Wetherall. Other sponsors were the City of South Bend’s Engagement and Economic Empowerment Team and the Incremental Development Alliance.)
The presenters Friday were a mix of younger and older in age. But their shared focus is not on $300,000 townhomes or single-family homes with 800-sq ft master bathrooms.
Instead, the presentations were about neighborhood development via residential, mixed-use, and light industrial projects. Small projects. Lots of them!
These women are part of a national movement to recruit and train small developers — usually people with zero background in this area — who want to strengthen their neighborhoods through a strategy of local ownership and step-by-step (thus “incremental”) improvements. (If you think about it, just like our grandparents and their parents did it.)
So if you want to know, “What is the opposite of gentrification?”, incremental development is as good an answer as I’ve found.
Incremental folks talk about “cultivating” their neighborhoods, creating development “farms” that can grow over time. Their goals are to make it easier for neighbors to transform their own neighborhoods, to adapt quickly to opportunities and changing conditions, and (more specifically) to restore the great gap in most of our cities today: the Missing Middle (i.e., the two-flats, four-flats, cottage courtyard buildings that once housed so much of the American middle class).
Here’s a quick overview of the Demo Day presenters and their work, all located in the city of South Bend:
- Barbara Turner’s Revive Homes is doing a project on Elmer Street, one which likely captures some of the work she has done in places like Chicago, where she renovated an apartment on the 68th floor of the John Hancock building. Her business has done 24 projects in just the last 3 years. Her goal with the Elmer Street project is to create nothing less than a subdivision of local owners and renovators.
- Maricela Navarro is developing a mixed used building at 630 W. Indiana in the Studebaker corridor, an area with very little retail. Planned as a hub for entrepreneurs, the project will create four new retail/office spaces renting for $500/month. The grand opening is slated for May 2021.
- Octavia Ray heads up Righteous Estates and has a mixed-use project underway at 1314 Mishawaka Avenue in River Park, an area which is 63% owner-occupied.. It offers 6 residential/retail units, including workspace for 2 family-owned businesses and 3 1-bedroom units in the two-level property. Ray expects the project to be fully occupied by Dec. 1.
- Ann Voll, with a background in manufacturing, is working in the southeast neighborhood (SOAR) to develop the Sibley Center, a 50,000 sq ft high-quality industrial makerspace. Her plans include work-based learning options for student internships at the space.
- LaQuita Aldridge-Hughes operates and is now redeveloping Milestone Academy at 121 Huey St. in the LaSalle neighborhood. A licensed childcare provider, she plans to expand her center — with a planned opening date of May 2021 — by purchasing an adjacent property.
- Consuella Hopkins, with a business background that includes her own CPA service, is running multiple projects, including her Swella’s Ville Offices, Suites, and Studios at 2201 Lincolnway West and the Village (Olive St area). The completion date for the 7,600 sq ft project is November 30. Her longer-term vision is a Lincolnway West corridor project, related to which she once commented to Mayor Pete, “It’s time to heal the West Side.”
I personally believe this work, as it continues to aggregate and be adopted by entire neighborhoods (the Near Northwest has done just that), may become a national model for doing the impossible: resisting the power of outside, overscaled, extractive development. The result would not be just placemaking but placekeeping, as Jim Walker of Big Car in Indianapolis calls it.
As they say in East L.A., our goal is not gentrification but (playing on the Spanish word for “community”) gente-fication. More to come on all this.
