Understanding Mayor Pete's Appeal

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36. I read a long article about the housing issue.

When he first ran for Mayor, citizens complained to the then candidate about the vacant houses that littered the city, which had been declining in population since 1960, leading to people simply abandoning homes as they left the city.

After winning the office, the new Mayor set up a task force that studied the vacant housing and substandard housing issue. The article said that just over 1900 homes were identified, of which around 1400 were abandoned or falling down, with caving in roofs and walls. The article pointed out that the city made an effort to find the owners of the vacant and delapidated homes, it also pointed out that NO OCCUPIED home was demolished. One current councilwoman, Regina Williams-Preston (running for mayor to succeed Buttigieg) had three unoccupied investment homes demolished after she and her husband failed to fix them up. She won a seat on the council and brought the issue of demolition of vacant homes that people had plans for to Buttigieg and the council, the result was that demolition was slowed and the city obtained around $2 million to assist owners of vacant homes repair the homes up to code. In the article, Williams-Preston was quoted as saying that the mark of a leader is admitting that some things were done wrong, she said Buttigieg did that AND made changes to make the project of removing blighted homes work more smoothly and he enlisted more people from the communities affected into that effort.

It should be pointed out that the article gave the demographics of South Bend, around 52% White, the rest African American, Hispanic, American Indian. It has been pointed out that Buttigieg won reelection with more than 80% of the vote.

The article pointed out that there are some concerns. As people return to South Bend, there is gentrification taking place (that happens everywhere when a once downtrodden city gets it's mojo back and start attracting higher paid resident back into it). But the article pointed out that Buttigieg has made adjustments to city planning to better deal with gentrification.

On a personal note, living in Florida I see houses that should be torn down. When driving into some places I see abandoned shops and homes. I wish that my city was more proactive in dealing with those problem, but it isn't. I noticed one abandoned shop that was broken into and who knows what is happening inside that building, eventually code inspectors will get around to dealing with it, but there seems to be no urgency in doing so.