I Still Believe in the South Bend Renaissance

South Benders have a strange sort of relationship with their hometown. Our hometown pride is mingled with a constant disappointment in the current state of affairs. Older generations mourn the loss of Studebaker. Younger folks dream of "getting out." South Bend is a pit, but it's our pit.

This schizophrenic relationship with the city has even made it hard to celebrate the resurgence the city has seen the last several years. Any improvement is met with a hefty dose of skepticism, or deflected with a signal to the pervasive rates of crime and poverty.

"Sure, Downtown is a nicer place to hang out," they say, "but yesterday the Speedway on the West Side got held up again."

Or, "sure there are a bunch of new restaurants, but are they really that good?"

Or, lately, "they spend twenty million dollars on those so-called Smart Streets but they can't fix a pothole?"

While I don't want to discount that there are still some real problems in South Bend, the idea that the city hasn't improved is absolutely ludicrous.

I say this as a local musician, an entrepreneur, and a citizen.

As I've said before, I moved back to South Bend eight years ago because I believed that the local music scene could be something special. And while we've always had enormous talent scattered in our city, it's taken some time to get people to buy into that. When River Lights Music Festival had its third year in June, it still seemed like the majority of the people I talked to had no idea that South Bend had a music scene at all.

But now, every show I have played or attended since January has blown my mind with turnout. At one show, the promoter had to turn people away at the door because the building reached capacity. The civic theater's most recent production had to add more dates because tickets sold out too quickly, and those dates also sold out within a few hours.

Just three years ago when my wife opened her shop, we were one of the few creative businesses in town, besides the art museum and a Wine and Canvas in Granger. Now, a handful of galleries have opened across the city. At the end of the month, a couple friend of ours are celebrating the grand opening of a new printmaking shop.

It would be easy to see these businesses as competition. And in a smaller, less healthy artistic community, it might be true. But we have seen absolutely no detriment to our own business as these other creative businesses open up. Rather, we're bringing in more business than ever.

And as we talk to other artists and business owners, our experience is not unique. Citywide, there is a resurgence, and it is palpable. Which, again, isn't to say it's all rainbows and meetups. We still have a lot of room for improvement.

But that doesn't mean we haven't already improved by a large margin. And if everybody complaining about crime on the neighborhood Facebook groups would get off of their couches and do something, they might actually see it.