Landmark acts III: the annexation wars

1866 – 1990s

The easy century: For its first hundred years the city grew the ordinary way, taking in ground as it filled: Lowell in 1866, eighteen months after incorporation, and thereafter the platted additions at its edges, decade by decade. As late as the 1950s the mechanism still worked in the city's favor — the postwar subdivisions, Edison Park and Miami Hills among them, were built inside the limits, and South Bend captured its own suburbanization. The city's land area today, and the household growth of 1940–1960, rest on that era's annexations.

The turn: After the war the ground beyond the line began to develop at urban density while refusing the city — unincorporated, untaxed by it, and organized against it. Through the 1960s and 1970s South Bend attempted large-scale annexations and lost them, usually in court, to the remonstrance of the county residents themselves. The Notre Dame campaign of 1969–71, told in Mayor Allen's profile, was the famous defeat; the same night the council dedicated its new chambers in the County-City Building, 12 January 1970, it passed Ordinance 5137-70, annexing some 177 acres west of Michigan Street between Ireland Road and the bypass — the scale of what was still possible, set against the 2,000 acres that were not.

The Kernan plan and the state's answer: The last great attempt was Kernan's. In late 1989 his Mayor's Housing Forum, charged with finding how the city could bolster its housing stock, recommended as its most substantial measure an aggressive, massive annexation to make land available and to spread the tax burden. The resulting Annexation Policy and Plan, and the study Kernan commissioned in 1992, recommended a program that would have doubled the city's land area — most of Clay Township, the Knollwood subdivision, the unincorporated Notre Dame ground. The fight that followed — speeches, articles, court cases — ended at the Statehouse: the legislature enacted a law restricting annexation for cities in St. Joseph County, a law that applied to no other county in Indiana, pressed, in the local account, by the representatives of Granger, the county's premier unincorporated suburb. Unlike Indianapolis, which consolidated its county in 1970, or Fort Wayne, whose boundaries grew massively by annexation, South Bend was left with the limits the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had given it — and with the fiscal shape Mayor Allen had warned of in 1972: the need inside the line, the wealth outside it.

Sources:

1. Joe Molnar, "More People: The Great Annexation War of South Bend and Her Suburbs" and its companion parts (West SB) — the five decades of resistance from the 1940s, the defeated annexations of the 1960s–70s, the 1989 Housing Forum and its recommendation, the plan to double the city, the St. Joseph County annexation law and its Granger sponsorship, the Indianapolis and Fort Wayne contrasts; and the city's 1992 report on annexation.
2. City of South Bend, Ordinance No. 5137-70 (passed 12 January 1970) — the annexation of approximately 176.9 acres west of Michigan Street between Ireland Road and the U.S. 31 bypass.
3. The Mayoralty of Joe Kernan record — the annexation entry: the 1992 commissioned study, the doubling recommendation, Clay Township, Knollwood and the unincorporated Notre Dame.
4. Notre Dame Magazine, "New Horizons" — the 1969–71 university annexation defeat (see Mayor Allen's profile).