I had gotten a crash course in urban planning after becoming mayor—both literally, in the form of a seminar organized by the National Architecture Foundation and the Conference of Mayors, and figuratively, in meetings and meals with members of my administration trained in architecture and New Urbanism. All of them seemed to agree that our city’s downtown was nothing less than a tragedy of misguided “urban renewal.”
Old photos corroborated the memories of people like Bob Urbanski, showing people crisscrossing busy downtown streets full of shops, theaters, and hotels. But by the time I took office, downtown streets were about one thing: cars. The two main north-south roads in town had been converted, decades earlier, into a pair of four-lane, one-way streets that shunted traffic as quickly as possible through—and out of—downtown. The result was a quick commute through the heart of the city, but also a central business district that felt hostile to pedestrians. Going between my office and a restaurant a couple blocks away felt like walking alongside a highway, which is technically exactly what it was. The roads functioned to evacuate the very area I was trying to fill in.
Other cities, from West Palm Beach to Louisville, had begun reversing this sixties-style road design, restoring two-way patterns to slow traffic a little and encourage more of a pedestrian-and bike-friendly downtown. The idea seemed radical to many, since it often involved actually reducing the carrying capacity of roads. Growing up, I had only ever heard of roads being widened; now my planners were speaking of “road diets,” a concept that I knew immediately would be difficult to sell.
The plan also required us to install roundabouts, in order to properly distribute traffic through the redesigned road network. These were particularly controversial among residents who refused to believe that drivers could learn to use them, or that trucks and snowplows could fit through them (even though, obviously, we had checked).
Still, to me it was clearly the right way forward. And after over a year of refinement, dozens of public meetings, and a series of council votes to approve the vision and arrange the funding, it was set to become a reality. It also quickly became a campaign issue. Kelly Jones, my Republican opponent, made opposing it a central part of her campaign. One op-ed writer in the Tribune predicted that it would “kill any prospect of true revitalization and future growth above the ground floor.” A man-on-the-street interview for a TV station yielded this plainer assessment: “I think the roundabouts are stupid.” And in a debate, Jones sarcastically invoked my policy of public downtown Wi-Fi access as she predicted such long traffic jams that people would turn to in-drive entertainment. “I’m glad we’ll have Wi-Fi, so those people stuck in traffic will have something to do.”
I was convinced that the community would eventually embrace the vision once they could see the results—an improved downtown and more business investment. Indeed, now that the project is complete, the result has been an estimated $90 million in new investment that has come to downtown from businesses saying the street projects were a major factor in their decision. Traffic, meanwhile, has only slowed by a minute or two in most cases. But during the 2015 reelection campaign, most of the improvements hadn’t been completed, and people couldn’t yet see the results. This, too, would cost some votes—but how many?
FORTUNATELY, EVEN FOR A VOTER who disagreed with my decisions in the police matter and was skeptical of the plan for roundabouts and two-way streets, there was no denying the city’s accelerating trans formation. Unemployment had been cut in half, and had gone from well above the national average to within one point of the U.S. rate. Meanwhile, census estimates showed population levels increasing after a decade of contraction.
Experience corroborated the numbers. The twenty-five-story Chase Tower, the tallest building in our city, had gone vacant after a bankruptcy and receivership, its condition deteriorating so quickly that I had asked staff to estimate the cost of blowing it up. Now a buyer had emerged and was investing over $30 million to restore the building and open a new hotel there. Another problem property, the eerily empty former College Football Hall of Fame, also saw a buyer emerge and build a hotel on adjacent land, mentioning that our streetscape plan had helped motivate them to invest. A new owner had acquired the South Bend Cubs and invested millions to enhance our baseball stadium. Customers were dining on sushi in what had been a vacant former chicken wing restaurant downtown, while in one of our lowest-income neighborhoods, newly built co-op housing was emerging on formerly vacant lots in the wake of our “1,000 houses in 1,000 days” effort.
No less promising was the activity around the industrial area that formerly hosted decaying Studebaker buildings, largely thanks to industries that had not existed when cars were being manufactured there. On a grassy expanse so serene that it was almost impossible to imagine the decade of work it had taken Mayor Luecke’s administration just to remove the collapsing factories that once covered it, a sleek new building had now been built for a data-hosting and analytics company first incubated on the campus of Notre Dame. It would soon receive a neighbor, in the form of a high-tech laboratory for turbomachinery research, drawing top aerospace companies to the area. Meanwhile, another data-center entrepreneur had purchased the eight-hundred-thousand-square-foot main assembly building of Studebaker—a six-story brick mass extending a fifth of a mile, long quiet but almost too stout even to demolish—and was proposing to create a mixed-use technology center in what had been literally the biggest physical symbol of our city’s decline.
Progress was palpable. Especially after the city’s 150th anniversary celebrations that spring of 2015, I could say with a straight face that our city was experiencing not just a comeback but something akin to a miracle.
WOULD VOTERS AGREE? If applause at the debate and general sentiment among people I ran into were anything to go by, I was in good shape when the sun came up on November 3. I knew what it felt like to go into a losing battle and a winning one, and this felt like the latter. But what if I had misjudged my popularity? It seemed at least possible that voters might say one thing out loud but feel another when it came to my sexual orientation, my handling of a sensitive issue, or even my leave of absence for military duty. We would only truly know when the results came in.
Huddled with a few key staff and loved ones in a small room off to the side of my office, home to the only working television set on the top floor, I fiddled with the antenna as the signal cut in and out, watching the local news. When the numbers finally did appear, they disproved what I had said to Mike that first election night: we won with 80 percent of the vote. It didn’t only vindicate the work we had done over those four years; it showed that I would be judged based on that work alone. Our socially conservative community had either moved forward in its acceptance of minority sexual orientations, or decided it didn’t care. Either way, I had a mandate to continue our work, and a deep sense of acceptance in the community.
Of all the speeches I’ve given, the short one I offered in the West Side Democratic Club that night was perhaps the most heartfelt yet:
Four years ago, I turned up as a political unknown, a rookie proposing a fresh start. And when I showed up asking for that fresh start, you gave me an opportunity to, you endorsed me as a leader and you supported me as a friend. A year ago when it came time for me to step away from the job and the home that I love to go overseas and take up arms under the colors of our nation you supported me as a brother. Earlier this year when I was at the most vulnerable moment in my public and private life, you embraced me as a son. The City of South Bend means the world to me. I love South Bend.