The Studebaker signature and the suburban shift

1960 — 2020

A factory closing does not appear in a census the way it appears in a newspaper; it appears as a slope: Studebaker's board voted to close the South Bend plants on 9 December 1963, and the last cars were built on 20 December, as the Studebaker section establishes from the documents. The first census taken afterward, in April 1970, recorded the city's first decline of the industrial era: 125,580 people, down 5.2 percent from the 1960 peak — while the county around it still grew, up 2.7 percent to 245,045. That divergence is the closing's demographic signature in the record. The people who left the payroll did not all leave the county; they left the city, or their children did, and the county's growth that decade was entirely suburban growth — the county outside the city added 13,296 people in the 1960s while the city was losing 6,865. The steepest fall came a decade later, in the count of 1980: the city down 12.6 percent to 109,727, and the county recording the only decline in its entire series, down 1.4 percent, as the second wave of factory losses — the Bendix and Singer contractions and the long Oliver aftermath — compounded the first. By that census the county outside the city held more people than the city itself, and it has ever since.

The slope then shallowed into the long tail the series entry prints: −3.8 percent in 1990, the small recovery of +2.2 percent in 2000, −6.1 percent in 2010, +2.3 percent in 2020. In absolute terms the city of the 2020 census is 28,992 people smaller than the city of 1960, while the county is 34,298 people larger — the whole of the region's sixty-year growth, and more, happened outside the city line. The boundary contrast completes the picture. Mishawaka, the separate city downriver whose own record belongs to its own history, grew through the very decades South Bend shrank: 33,361 in 1960, 36,060 in 1970, and a record 51,063 in 2020, having declined only once in its series, 1.2 percent in 1940. Printed here as a boundary series only, its line is the control experiment for South Bend's: the same county, the same decades, the same factories' shadow — and a city that kept growing, on ground its own boundaries let it suburbanize into.

Sources:

1. The decennial census table in the series entry; all changes, balances and differences are computed from it. Mishawaka figures from the decennial censuses as compiled in the Census Bureau's incorporated-place series; its full series is printed in the metro entry below as a boundary series.
2. Studebaker section of this history — the board vote of 9 December 1963 and the last cars of 20 December 1963, cross-referenced and not retold here.