South Bend today

2020 — PRESENT

The city at the bend today is a smaller, steadier place remaking itself on the old ground: It covers 42.4 square miles astride the river. The census of 2020 counted 103,453 people — up 2,285 from 2010, the second increase since the peak after the upturn of 2000 — and the Census Bureau's 2025 estimate holds the city essentially there, at 103,201. It remains Indiana's fourth-most populous city, the seat of a metropolitan area of 324,501 (2020). Its people, by the 2020 count: 50.2 percent white (non-Hispanic), 25.2 percent Black, and 16.7 percent Hispanic or Latino of any race — the Polish parishes of the west side now sharing the city's Catholic map with a growing Spanish-speaking community, in the third century of the same story of work and arrival. The government is led by Mayor James Mueller, the city's 33rd mayor — a South Bend native and Notre Dame graduate, with a doctorate from the University of Delaware, who had been his predecessor's chief of staff — sworn in on January 1, 2020 after Pete Buttigieg, whose 2012–2020 tenure and subsequent presidential campaign had made the mayor's office of South Bend a national dateline, and re-elected on November 7, 2023 by a wider margin than his first election.

The economy is the one the remaking built. The largest employer in the city and county is no longer a factory but a hospital system, Beacon Health (7,088 employees in the 2017 accounting); Notre Dame is second (6,086) and still growing on the city's northern edge, its Innovation Park technology district across the road from the campus since 2009. Honeywell still makes aircraft wheels and brakes at the Bendix works; AM General keeps its headquarters in the city, its vehicle plants in Mishawaka; the Pokagon Band's casino and hotel stand on the south side; and Ignition Park rises, parcel by parcel, on the Studebaker ground. The races run kayaks and make power; the South Shore trains run to Chicago as they have since 1908; the dome is still the skyline. The city that geography drafted at the southernmost bend of the St. Joseph — Potawatomi portage, traders' station, county seat, mill town, factory city, arsenal, and the place a great company left one December — stands in its third century at 103,000 people, having outlasted, so far, everything that was supposed to replace it.

Sources:

1. U.S. Census Bureau — the 2020 census count of 103,453 and the metropolitan population of 324,501; the 2020 composition (white non-Hispanic 50.16 percent, Black non-Hispanic 25.23 percent, Hispanic or Latino 16.67 percent); the 2025 population estimate of 103,201; and South Bend's rank as Indiana's fourth-most populous city.
2. City of South Bend — James Mueller as the 33rd mayor, sworn in January 1, 2020, and re-elected November 7, 2023; Beacon Health System (7,088) and the University of Notre Dame (6,086) as the county's largest employers in the city's 2017 accounting; Innovation Park completed in 2009.
3. population section, this record — the full census series of the city, 1850 to the present.