The forecast record: what South Bend predicted for itself

1929 — 2020

South Bend's forecasts are now old enough to grade, and the grades run in one direction: The first entry belongs to the confident decade. When Union Station opened on 27 May 1929, Mayor Chester R. Montgomery predicted the city would reach 200,000 residents by 1939 — a doubling of the 104,193 the census was about to count, in a single decade. Five months later the market crashed; the 1940 census counted 101,268, fewer than the city had held ten years before, and South Bend has never reached 200,000, or three-quarters of it, in the century since. The prediction is printed as its makers' record — the arithmetic a boom makes reasonable — and its station still stands.

The second entry is graded by the forecasters' own successors. The county and city's 2002 comprehensive plan, reviewing the 1973 Transportation and Land Use Plan it replaced, recorded the verdict in its appendix: the 1973 plan's land-use component had been "plagued by inaccurate population and employment projections," the product of questionable technique meeting demographic and economic turns no projection of the confident years contained — among them, a county subarea projected forward on the old curve against a 1990 count that arrived at 26,300. The same 2002 plan set the era's competing projections side by side to the year 2020: the most aggressive, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis's set, carried the county past 300,000 by 2020. The 2020 census counted 272,912.

The third entry is the modern, professional one, and it missed high as well, by less. For the city's 2005 plan, the Indiana Business Research Center projected South Bend at 108,368 in 2010 and 110,045 in 2020, holding roughly two-fifths of a county it projected at 270,266 and 283,885 in those years. The censuses counted the city at 101,168 and 103,453 — the projections overshot by 7.1 and 6.4 percent — and the county at 266,931 and 272,912, overshot by 1.2 and 4.0 percent. The pattern across a century of South Bend forecasting is uniform, and it is the mirror image of the county balance in the series table: every forecaster, booster and professional alike, projected the city as though its share of its own ground would hold, and the ground kept moving out from under the line. The live forecasts stand ungraded: the Bureau's estimates have the city at 103,201 in 2025, and no projection in the record carries it back to its 1960 peak.

Sources:

1. South Bend's Union Station histories, on the station's opening of 27 May 1929 — Mayor Chester R. Montgomery's prediction of 200,000 residents by 1939; the outcome is the 1940 census figure in the series table.
2. St. Joseph County / City of South Bend, Comprehensive Plan (2002), Appendix A — the review of the 1973 Transportation and Land Use Plan's projections and their failure, the 1990 subarea count of 26,300 against its projection, and the projection sets to 2020 (Bureau of Economic Analysis, Indiana Business Research Center, straight-line) charted there, the BEA set carrying the county past 300,000 by 2020.
3. Matt Kinghorn and the Indiana Business Research Center, "Planning a City's Future: The South Bend Population Projections," In Context (July 2005) — the Center's projections for the city plan: South Bend 107,889 (2005), 108,368 (2010), 110,045 (2020); St. Joseph County 266,371 (2005), 270,266 (2010), 283,885 (2020); the outcomes are the census figures in the series table.