The collapse of 2008–09 · South Bend's face of the Great Recession

2008 – 2010

The national collapse reached South Bend as a doubling: By the Bureau of Labor Statistics' local area series, the number of unemployed people in the South Bend–Mishawaka metro area stood at 8,072 in 2007. It rose to 10,470 in 2008, to 17,318 in 2009, and to 17,785 in 2010 — more than double the pre-collapse count, on the series' own figures. The Indiana Business Research Center's forecast of November 2008, written while the fall was still happening, recorded the metro's first leg down: 3,500 jobs lost between September 2007 and September 2008, total nonfarm employment down from 143,000, manufacturing employment at 19,000, and unemployment rates already at their highest since the early 1990s — with Elkhart's rate surpassing South Bend's for the first time. Elkhart County's collapse was the deeper one and is Elkhart's story, printed here only as the boundary: its recreational-vehicle industry drove the county's unemployment to 16.8 percent in June 2009, the figure that brought a president to Elkhart to talk about recovery. South Bend's collapse was the broader, shallower kind — no single industry, no single announcement, a metro economy of hospitals, a university, and remaining factories taking the national recession at full strength.

The collapse's physical residue is what distinguishes it in this city's record: Foreclosure and abandonment hollowed out whole blocks, and by 2013 the city counted 1,347 vacant and abandoned houses — the count that produced the thousand-houses initiative whose argument belongs to City Controversies, and whose ground is carried in the Story of South Bend section and Government. The 2008–09 collapse is the third of the city's great economic ruptures, after 1963 and the long unwinding: the first was a company's decision, the second a generation's drift, and the third a nation's — and it is the one that left its damage in houses rather than in factories.

Sources:

1. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Local Area Unemployment Statistics (annual averages, not seasonally adjusted), as compiled for the South Bend–Mishawaka metropolitan area — unemployed persons: 8,072 (2007), 10,470 (2008), 17,318 (2009), 17,785 (2010).
2. Indiana Business Research Center, Indiana Business Review (Winter 2008), the November 2008 outlook for South Bend–Mishawaka — 3,500 jobs lost September 2007 to September 2008, total nonfarm employment of 143,000 in September 2007, manufacturing at 19,000 jobs, rates at their highest since the early 1990s, and Elkhart's rate surpassing South Bend's for the first time; Elkhart County's 16.8 percent of June 2009 printed as Elkhart's figure, not this city's.
3. This build's Spine and Government sections — the 1,347 vacant and abandoned houses counted by 2013 and the city's response.