It's a bad sign that the question is even posed, isn't it?
Is South Bend a dying city?
Thursday a group called the Young Professionals Network sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce of St. Joseph County had a chance to weigh in. They also got to learn about what's being done to move the city forward.
The story refers to the Newsweek article that put South Bend in the "dying city" category and noted, among other things, the decrease of young people 18 and under living there. I don't know what can be done about that. We interviewed 14 high school students last week and this for our Sterling Sentinel journalism scholarship, and one of the questions we asked everybody was, "Where do you see yourself in 10 years?" Not in Fort Wayne! one of them blurted out. The rest were less forceful, but a majority of them planned to move elsewhere after college, the East Coast being the favored destination.
Kids in most cities think "there's nothing to do here" and dream of better lives elsewhere, and many cities get caught up in mostly futile efforts to stop brain drain. I think the best thing that can be done is to do everything possible to make a city a place people want to come back to. I can't count how many people I know who moved away from Fort Wayne but decided to return when it was time to settle down and raise a family.
