Covenants, red lines, and the public-housing record

1938 – 2011

The covenant that is still in the deeds: Normain Heights, the veterans' subdivision at Main and McKinley built in the later 1940s, was platted with a racially restrictive covenant barring ownership by non-Caucasians. The South Bend Tribune's 2002 examination found the covenant still written in the subdivision's deeds — unenforced and unenforceable since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but unrepealed in the text. The subdivision's geography and building course stand in the neighborhoods file; the covenant is this section's accounting item: it is the one piece of Mishawaka's exclusion written into its land records that the modern record has re-read, and its present state is that it stands, void but legible, in the deeds. (The culture file carries the same examination; the two files are conformed, not duplicated.)

Two redlined districts stand on Mishawaka ground: the neighborhoods file owns the geography whole, and this section takes the racial frame at anchor size. The LaSalle School Conservation District's bounds — Panama and Ewing to the south, Logan Street east, the railroad tracks north, Ironwood Drive west — were the same bounds as a redlined district twenty-two years before the conservation project: redlined about 1938, "conserved" about 1960, with over $1.5 million spent, some $500,000 of federal capital announced in July 1959 and a first federal grant of $277,000 in early June 1960, 600 homes assessed by rehabilitation director Zano Vannoni in 1960, and 88 demolitions documented in the district. The Dodge Park Project of 1960 cleared and redeveloped ground east and south of the Dodge Manufacturing plant in the city's other redlined district. Renewal at its widest, on the Hooligan Heights neighborhood history's figures, put some 1,500 acres under scrutiny and demolished as many as 2,000 residential units citywide. Whether the federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation's own survey descriptions — South Bend is a mapped city in the Mapping Inequality project, added in 2023, with Gavin Moulton's essay on its redlining and his follow-up in the Tribune of 28 January 2025 — extend in their text onto Mishawaka ground is not verified in any source reached; the downloads at Mapping Inequality are the settling source, and the two-district geography above stands on the local record meanwhile, not on the federal maps.

The fair-housing fight, at boundary size: the valley's organized fair-housing record is South Bend's — the South Bend–Mishawaka Citizens for Fair Housing Committee of 1961–62, the realtors' board's three denials of William Morris between 1954 and 1964 and Judge Dempsey's ruling of 10 March 1967, and the ordinance fought to March 1968 — and it stands whole in South Bend's file. The joint committee's name is the one Mishawaka fact in it. No Mishawaka open-housing ordinance of its own surfaces in any source reached; the settling source is the Mishawaka City Council Records, 1845–1977, twenty reels of microfilm in the University of Notre Dame Archives, and until that film is read the city's own ordinance record is printed as a gap, not presumed in either direction.

Public housing, at its Mishawaka share: the Mishawaka Housing Authority (HUD code IN020) administered, in its HUD PHA Plans across 2005–2011, 299 public housing units and 307 Section 8 / Housing Choice Voucher units, in developments the plans name: Barbee Creek Village at 601 East 11th Street, River View 500 at 500 Lincolnway East, and Battell School Apartments at 120 East Battell Street. Neither the authority's founding date nor any record of its racial composition, integration, or waiting-list history appears in any source reached; both are named gaps, settled by the authority's own records and HUD's. (A web result celebrating a housing authority's sixtieth anniversary in 1966 surfaced's searches and was tested and rejected: it is the Cherokee Nation's authority in Oklahoma, not this city's.)

Sources

1. South Bend Tribune (2002), the Normain Heights covenant examination — via the culture and neighborhoods files of this record, conformed.
2. Neighborhoods file of this record — the LaSalle School Conservation District and its bounds against the redlined district of twenty-two years before; the Dodge Park Project of 1960; the renewal acreage and demolition figures.
3. Mapping Inequality (University of Richmond) — South Bend as a mapped HOLC city, added 2023; Gavin Moulton, "Redlining in South Bend"; Moulton, "A New Look at the Details of Redlining in South Bend," South Bend Tribune, 28 January 2025. The Mishawaka extension of the survey text: not verified, named as a gap.
4. South Bend black-history file — the fair-housing record whole (committee of 1961–62; the Morris denials and the ruling of 10 March 1967; the ordinance of March 1968). Boundary: South Bend's record, pointer here.
5. Mishawaka Housing Authority, HUD PHA Plans, 2005–2011 (PHA code IN020) — 299 public housing units, 307 voucher units; Barbee Creek Village, River View 500, Battell School Apartments.