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NO TOWN OR TOWNSHIP PROJECTION EXISTS; THE COUNTY'S, READ AGAINST WHAT HAPPENED
At town and township level, the forecast record is an absence with a reason: the Indiana Business Research Center's official projection program is county-level, and STATS Indiana's township table prints projections as "n/a." No projection of any vintage specific to Penn Township or to the town of Osceola was found in the searches this section ran; any township "forecast" in circulation is a third-party model, not an IBRC or STATS product. The county record exists and can be scored. The current vintage (IBRC, released July 2024; base year the Bureau's Vintage 2022 estimates) projects St. Joseph County at 272,672 (2020, the estimate base) rising to 273,415 (2025), 274,650 (2030) and a peak of 274,754 (2035), then easing to 274,059 (2040), with the release's own words carrying the rest: modest gains through 2035, then slight declines, ending 2050 below today's level. The base-year wrinkle prints with it: the projections grow from a 2020 estimate of 272,672, while the 2020 census itself counted 272,912 — 240 more people than the base the forecast stands on. The previous vintage scores worse: the 2018 release, as the South Bend Tribune reported it on 10 April 2018, put the county's projected 2050 population at 270,600 — and the 2020 census counted 272,912, passing the reported 2050 figure thirty years early. (The IBRC journal's own report of the same release, "a modest gain of approximately 2,500 residents during the projection period," does not perfectly agree with the Tribune's number; both print as found.) The present state, dated and by basis: the Bureau's Vintage 2024 estimates program carries the town at 2,584 (2020), 2,580 (2021), 2,588 (2022), 2,599 (2023) and 2,600 (2024), from its modified-count base of 2,587 — estimates, printed as estimates beside the count of 2,590 and the survey's 2,593, three honest numbers for one small town, none of them interchangeable.