Community leaders are addressing the elephants in the room: Diversifying the economy, creating housing options, and attracting and retaining talent.
This story by Rasmus Jorgensen originally appeared in The Elkhart Truth.
These are issues that have been discussed for years, and yet RV manufacturing continues to dominate local business, tens of thousands leave Elkhart each day after work, and the city has seen little population growth in the past two decades.
But if city officials are successful, that will soon change. How? Through the Elkhart 2040 plan.
After a diversification study by the Indianapolis consulting firm Thomas P. Miller & Associates made the issues clear, the city this summer decided to hire that same firm, as well as local Insight Strategic Concept, led by its president and founder, Shelley Moore.
The city and private investors are spending millions on redeveloping the River District, which is becoming a walkable community that will see more than 1,000 new housing units built over the next few years, with many of them already under construction. The Elkhart Health & Aquatics Center, which opened this summer, is meant to attract people from across Michiana and create business for nearby shops and restaurants.
If the plan doesn’t work, the future could be bleak. Cities that don’t grow eventually will start seeing a decrease in population, she said, and that is difficult to stop.
“Once that momentum starts to go down, your survival rate becomes diminished. It’s like anything in physics – when downward momentum starts, it’s harder to bring it back up again,” she said. “Now is our time to be proactive.”
As for the local economy, the diversification study suggests it is necessary. Sixteen of the city’s top 18 “core industries” are RV-related. That’s great in good times but catastrophic in bad ones, as seen during the Great Recession, when the unemployment rate in Elkhart reached a national high.
Now, as Elkhart sets the standard for low unemployment rates, that’s a problem too, because thousands of jobs go unfilled, limiting the productivity of local businesses.
And the RV industry isn’t going to stick around, Moore believes, in part because of the lack of available workers.
“They will have no choice but to built plants elsewhere, where there is people,” she said.
She said not to count on the RV industry to be the economic engine of Elkhart forever.
“It will leave, just like pharmaceuticals did, and band instruments and manufactured homes and marine. It’s only natural,” she said.