In South Bend Walmart closure, city candidates see a chance to attack leaders

SOUTH BEND — West side candidates for mayor and city council are portraying the looming closure of Walmart on Portage Avenue as the most recent example of incumbent officeholders’ “toxic positivity” clashing with reality.

“I’ve been going door to door, I’ve knocked on a thousand doors over the past month. What I’m hearing from the residents is that they’re fearful. They’re anxious,” said Nick Hamann, who’s running in the May 2 Democratic primary against 1st District Common Council member Canneth Lee.

“They feel like there’s no plan for this district,” Hamann added. “They feel like they're being cut out of the future.”

Hamann joined Democratic mayoral candidate Henry Davis Jr. and 2nd District candidate Jorden Giger in the Walmart parking lot Friday, days after Walmart said it will close its store at 3701 Portage Ave. by April 21. The store is in the 1st District.

The candidates lumped the Walmart closure into broader concerns about area institutions that may close, including Portage Manor, a residential health care facility owned by St. Joseph County, as well as Clay High School, which is operated by the South Bend Community School Corp.

Schools:South Bend school consolidation explained. An in-depth look at when schools will merge.

Lee, who’s been on the South Bend Common Council since July 2020, told The Tribune that he and leaders in the Department of Community Investment are in touch with Walmart officials. He said city officials are trying to determine the retailer’s plans for the property and how the building might be reoccupied.

Lee said he learned from Walmart leaders that the store’s roughly 270 employees will either be offered jobs at other Walmart locations or paid severance through June. The councilman didn’t know the exact breakdown between those options.

Walmart did not immediately return a request Friday afternoon to confirm how many employees worked at the store or to share how many will be retained.

Meijer, which will soon be the largest grocer on the far northwest side of the city, has said it can accommodate new shoppers and pharmacy prescriptions, Lee said. There’s also an Aldi nearby.

But Lee didn’t try to paint the closure of the Walmart, a store he often shops at, in a positive light.

“This is a tragic situation for the residents of the 1st District, and I'm extremely angry this has happened,” Lee said in a phone call. “We’re going to try very hard to find someone else who will be in that Walmart building.”

The retail giant has been closing a handful of stores across the U.S. in recent years, citing poor performance without elaborating, according to Business Insider. A Walmart spokeswoman told The Tribune this week that, “While our underlying business is strong, this specific store hasn’t performed as well as we hoped.”

Candidates use the closure to make a statement

Davis, the 2nd District councilor who organized the press conference, is seizing on residents’ concerns to make a broader argument that the upward momentum South Bend enjoyed during the 2010s has halted.

“How do you squander the opportunity of the momentum that was created during the Buttigieg years?” Davis said. “Everybody was excited. Now everybody’s looking at, again, school closings, high crime, more taxes, an affordable housing crisis.”

Davis said the “crash” seemed to happen as soon as South Bend Mayor James Mueller took office in January 2020.

Davis did not, however, acknowledge that two months later, a pandemic shuttered businesses and has since led to significantly higher prices, particularly for food and housing. Cities around the nation, including South Bend, also experienced an uptick in violent crime during 2020 and 2021.

Calling Walmart’s closure “a setback for our community,” Mueller said in a statement Friday that he supports Lee’s and Community Investment’s “efforts to connect affected workers to new opportunities and bring the building back into active use as soon as possible.”

Mueller said he’s encouraged by the county’s choice to delay closing Portage Manor while advocates scramble to come up with a proposal to avoid that outcome.

Portage Manor:Advocates start work to save Portage Manor: 'Cannot … waste a minute.'

Regarding Clay High School, Mueller acknowledged the school is “an important asset to our community” and the district’s leaders “face tough decisions as they work to right-size the district.”

Lee said that “to tie Portage Manor, Walmart and Clay together is a stretch.”

“I’m not about all of this negativity and showboating and stuff,” Lee said. “I’m about the results. How is this going to affect our residents? How do we help them navigate through this?”

In west side districts, growth has been limited

Hamann, 38, fit the Walmart closure into a general deterioration he’s seen in the Near and Far Northwest neighborhoods over his lifetime growing up there. He said the area’s been a food desert since Martin’s Super Markets closed its small-format store, Portage Meat & Market, in January 2020.

Though he acknowledged improvements in South Bend over the past dozen years, Hamann said the 1st and 2nd council districts are repeatedly “the lowest on the pecking order.”

Private investment in those poorer, diverse districts has been scarce because of market forces, city leaders have said. Economic inequality has in turn deepened, Hamann argues, “causing this sort of divide between the haves and the have-nots in the city.”

“There’s this denialism here,” Hamann said of South Bend leadership. “There’s this toxic positivity. …

“We need to be realistic. We need to understand when there are challenges and we need to be honest about them. And then we need to come up with an honest plan that includes everybody, and doesn’t just lop off some parts of town.”

A pillar of Hamann’s platform is to revive Portage Midtown, an area where recent growth is being led by a loose organization of developers and small businesses.

Portage Midtown:From beeswax balm to challah: The Portage Collective set to open in the near northwest neighborhood

What the mayor's administration has done

Under Mueller’s leadership, the city rolled out several initiatives in 2022 to save developers thousands of dollars on new infill housing. The city also targets west side neighborhoods with an annual Home Repair Program, which offers grants to homeowners to pay for certain fixes.

In a letter sent this week by his reelection campaign, Mueller touted “hundreds of new jobs” and “over half a billion dollars into new development” during his tenure.

He said in a recent debate that, with city incentives, developers have built or plan to build about 1,500 housing units across the city, a quarter of which are tailored to lower-income renters.

More:South Bend Democratic mayoral candidates offer starkly different visions of city's health

After the mayoral debate last week, Lee spoke about his distress over Davis’ portrayal of South Bend as "living a nightmare.”

Lee, a pastor and longtime activist leading efforts to intervene in and curb gun violence, agreed with Mueller that South Bend has “turned a corner” following a difficult pandemic.

“We’re not where we need to be,” Lee said, “but we are moving in the right direction.

“And you have to speak positively over our situation,” he added. “Our words are so powerful. If all we’re speaking is negativity, then what happens is that’s what manifests. We have to keep speaking hope and looking at opportunities.”

Email South Bend Tribune reporter Jordan Smith at JTsmith@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter: @jordantsmith09

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: South Bend municipal candidates seize on store closure ahead of May 2 primary