The retail map as it stands

VERIFIED NOVEMBER 2026 · WHAT STANDS, WHAT IS EMPTY, WHAT IS PLANNED

The map, whole: South Bend in November 2026 shops in four places, and none of them is the place it shopped in 1970. The region's largest center stands across the line in Mishawaka — University Park Mall, at 137 stores in its owner's current listing, with the Sears box vacant since 2019 — and the Grape Road corridor around it remains the retail capital of the county. Inside the city, the south side holds the Ireland Road node: Erskine Village trading on the Scottsdale ground behind Target, Kohl's, and T. J. Maxx, and Erskine Commons a mile west behind Walmart and Lowe's, with Broadmoor's plaza still standing at the Miami corner where the city's planned retail began. The northwest holds the Portage–Cleveland node behind its Meijer. The campus gate holds Eddy Street Commons, complete since 2021. The neighborhood centers of the older grid are in their second lives or their studies: LaSalle Square under its 2008 redevelopment plan, its Target box in charitable use; the Portage Street Market under its 2018 repositioning analysis; North Village's ground cleared since 2010.

Downtown's present: Downtown retail is the smallest of the four and the most deliberately rebuilt. Its one purpose-built modern retail project, Leighton Plaza — dedicated August 18, 1999, a partnership of the city, Memorial Health Systems, and Trammell Crow — put 11,500 square feet of Michigan Street shops under a 644-car garage, a 65,000-square-foot office building, and the Memorial Leighton Health Plex, at a cost the Commission put at approximately $36 million; by January 2012 the Commission's minutes record the plaza's retail space 100 percent occupied. Around it the downtown of small shops, the Chocolate Café's Grid Iron Row block among them, trades at storefront scale beneath the bank tower and the convention center. The framework over all of it is new: the Downtown South Bend 2045 Plan, adopted in July 2025, is the city's standing plan for its center — the document that also preserves, in its own history pages, the record of the Hole and the renewal era that this section's second entry is built on. What the plan proposes for the next twenty years is the city's to publish; what this section can state is the shape of the present: a city whose enclosed malls are both demolished, whose downtown is a storefront district again, and whose big shopping stands open-air on the corridors — the fourth house of South Bend retail, and, for now, the settled one.

Sources:

1. Simon Property Group, University Park Mall property listing (current, November 2026) — 137 stores; the vacant Sears anchor.
2. Cotswold Group, Erskine Village property page; LoopNet listing material, 560 West Ireland Road (updated October 22, 2026); Meijer store locator (current) — the Ireland Road and Portage Road anchors as they stand.
3. South Bend Redevelopment Commission, annual organizational meeting minutes, January 7, 2000 — Leighton Plaza substantially complete: the 644-car garage, 11,500 square feet of retail, the 80,000-square-foot Memorial Leighton Health Plex, 65,000 square feet of office, approximately $36 million; the first three retail tenants; and the Commission's regular meeting minutes, January 24, 2012 — the Leighton Plaza retail space reported 100 percent occupied.
4. Indiana Business Magazine, "Real Estate Around the State" (2000) — Leighton Plaza opened mid-1999, developed through a partnership of the City of South Bend, Memorial Health Systems, and Trammell Crow.
5. City of South Bend, Downtown South Bend 2045 Plan (adopted July 2025) — the standing downtown framework and its history of the center.