The City of South Bend’s 20-year Comprehensive Plan.
About the City’s 20-year Plan & Resident Engagement
The comprehensive plan is a City plan that outlines a vision for all of South Bend for the next 20 years and key goals to help the community prosper. The City hired the Drucker Institute and Funkhouser & Associates to engage with residents on this plan and ensure it is developed in an inclusive and collaborative way. They met with individual stakeholder groups and holding public workshops to gather input on the community’s priorities and areas of opportunity. In addition, they worked with City departments and teams to envision how the City can best serve our residents.
The City’s comprehensive plan is a separate process than the Downtown South Bend 2045 Plan. To learn more about the Downtown South Bend 2045 Planning process, visit Together South Bend.
South Bend 2045 Speaker Series
- Housing: Joshua McCarty, Chief Analytics Researcher at Urban 3. Access the recording of the Housing lecture here.
Economic Development: Michael Hicks, Ph.D., George and Frances Ball Distinguished Professor, Ball State, “South Bend Considerations for Change”. Access the recording of the Economic Development lecture here. - Transportation and Housing: Kristie Chin February 9, 2023, at the St. Joseph County Public Library Auditorium. View the recording of the Transportation and Housing lecture here.
- Sustainability: Chris Castro, Chief of Staff at the US Department of Energy’s State & Community Energy Office. View the recording of the Sustainability lecture here.
A long-range plan serves as a big-picture guide for what the community and local leaders want South Bend to achieve and aspire to over the next 20 years. South Bend 2045 will be our collective vision for those goals and will lay out how we plan to achieve them. This plan will be unique from prior comprehensive plans in that it will also have a financial focus and contain recommendations for new funding mechanisms.
The state of Indiana mandates that we submit a comprehensive plan every 20 years. But it’s also just smart practice to step back every once in a while and assess where we’ve been as a community, how we’re doing now, and how we’d like to grow. South Bend 2045 will go beyond the basic state mandate and will be a comprehensive set of goals for areas such as housing, workforce development, open space, transportation and more. Many, if not all, mid-size and large cities engage in similar long-range planning.
South Bend 2045 will not sit on a shelf and collect dust. It’s meant to be an iterative guide and reference for policymakers and our community stakeholders as they set out to achieve their community goals. We expect this plan to help inform decision makers each year as they consider their priorities.
Every person’s point of view matters and we want to hear from as many of you as possible so that the South Bend 2045 Plan reflects our whole community. The first round of engagement and feedback will inform how we write the plan by helping us: prioritize the city’s goals, identify areas for improvement, and understand what is currently working well for our city’s residents. After the draft plan is complete, we will again seek your feedback on the proposals and vision laid out in the draft.
Contact us
planning@southbendin.gov