Like many residents of South Bend, Indiana, Laura Jensen has known Pete Buttigieg for years. In 2012, just after he was first elected mayor, Buttigieg started visiting the preschool where she worked. He would walk the halls and read books aloud to her students.

It was a nice gesture, but what really impressed her were the quieter, more technical fixes Buttigieg made behind the scenes. In 2018, Buttigieg allocated $100,000 of South Bends budget to early childhood education and asked Jensen, by then the CEO of the local United Way chapter, how he should spend it. She told him that the county had recently been awarded some federal grants and needed to expand its capacity to take advantage of them. It may not have been the sexiest policy in the world, but Buttigieg agreed to spend the citys funds on hiring teachers and expanding classrooms.

I cant tell you how much it meant to have someone listen when we said we had to build our capacity, Jensen said. It was never about ego. It was always, I want to know your thoughts. That was huge.

Buttigieg, who officially announced his presidential candidacy on Sunday, spent his tenure as South Bend mayor applying his skills as a management consultant to nearly every problem the city faced. From sewer overflows to gun violence to garbage pickup , Buttigieg collected data, sought out technical fixes and set quantifiable goals.

By the numbers, he has done a remarkable job. Since 2012, South Bends population has ticked upward for the first time since 2000. Unemployment has plummeted from 11.8% to 4.1%. Good-governance initiatives have yielded extra funding for parks and millions of dollars in federal grants . Following a Smart Streets redesign that slowed traffic and expanded sidewalks, downtown South Bend has attracted more than $90 million in private investment.

But Buttigiegs singular focus on gathering data and improving statistics has also led him astray at times. While South Bends economic fortunes have improved overall, homelessness and displacement have worsened. Buttigieg has sold a park to private developers and given tax breaks to luxury condos. Less than a mile west of South Bends booming downtown, its African American and Latino residents continue to complain of police harassment, rampant evictions and a team of code enforcement inspectors who fine them every time they forget to mow their own lawns.

Buttigieg has become the most prominent example of a management style that has taken over American cities. From Baltimore to Kansas City to Los Angeles , urban policymakers have become increasingly enamored with data-driven policies and increasingly reliant on quantitative approaches to social problems.

But these methods are not as impartial as their proponents suggest. Throughout his tenure as mayor, Buttigiegs fixation on measurable goals at times led him to overlook weaknesses in his policies and concerns among his constituents. His initiatives may have achieved their targets, but they also ended up harming his citys most vulnerable residents.

Hes obviously a person of privilege and highly educated and from a well-off background, said John Shafer, the director of Michiana Five for the Homeless, a South Bend-based charity. Its hard for someone in that position to relate to people in poverty. That may be his biggest weakness.