Dayton View as Lost Cause.

You really realize what a tragedy Dayton is after checking out Dayton View.

Most cities have a surviving Victorian or early 20th century mansion district. Examples in the region are Old Louisville and Broad (or is it High) Street in Columbus, between downtown and Bexley. Or certain parts of Cincinnati.

Dayton lost its premier mansion districts to urban renewal, downtown expansion, and so forth, so very little survives.

What does survive is Dayton View, and it is the historic district that makes one consider how what a lost cause this city is.

Here is an example of a Dayton View mansion of the old grand manner. It looks like its being restored. And you'd have to wonder why anyone would bother.



Will anyone make any money on this place, or even break even, if one should decide to sell? Who would even consider buying a house like this in the middle of a drug-infested ghetto (with dealing going on in broad daylight on a corner half a block away)?

And, whats’ more, why isn’t anything being done to clean up the neighborhood and why are there are not more restorations going on in the neighborhood?

Then there is this restored apartment building across the street, probably from the 1920s, as an example of what could be...

Yet around the corner is this ruin. Maybe a more realistic fate for the multifamily things left in the neighborhood...
And finally, the ubiquitous bulldozed block, leaving a nice open space where a ruined house once stood (who knows or even remembers what was here?)


Will this be the fate of more old mansions in Dayton View?

On one hand I really have a lot of respect for the people working on restoration/rehab in this neighborhood as they are working on the best, most distinctive houses in the city, but in the least-likely-to-suceed historic district, so they are doing this not becuase its hip or trendy but becuase they probably have a genuine appreciation of the architecture and the neighborhood.

On the other hand buying and restoring here seems quixotic given the declining condition of the city and the trend to Downtown, South Park and Fairgrounds as the hot new in-town areas.

Dayton View just seems like such a lost cause.

White Folks on Welfare

The racialization of relief was one of the great propaganda successes of the Conservative movement, as a way to play on racist assumptions about blacks in order to destroy political support for the minimal US welfare state.

This was the logic behind Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” comments, as a way of playing the race card to discredit the concept of poor relief.

Yet, there were, and are, a lot of white folks on assistance. A geography of white folks on welfare in Montgomery County will demonstrate this.

First, using the census definitions, we can divide up “welfare” as two kinds…SSI, or Supplemental Security Income, which requires some form of disability to qualify, and public assistance, i.e. “welfare”, which today means mostly TANF. The census doesn’t provide stats for food stamps, which is a fairly important public assistance program.

Combining SSI and “welfare”, around $50M in public assistance flows to white folks annually in this county. Lots of money being pumped into the local economy via poor and disabled relief.




Public Assistance

This is what people think of when they think of welfare or "relief". Nowadays this is mostly TANF, and these numbers do not include the Food Stamp program, which would be quite interesting to map out. Nor does it include things like Section 8 vouchers.

Breaking down the welfare numbers by census tract, looking not at numbers of people but aggregate annual welfare income per tract, showing which tracts are getting the most white folks welfare.


And then mapping it out. Expected concentrations on the east side and North Dayton, but note how this suburbanizes, with concentrations in certain suburban areas (like Miami Twp, Riverside, and Northridge) and then smaller aggregates in suburban tracts. Whats key is that there is at least some public assistance in a number of suburban areas, including Kettering and Washington Township.

A close up for Dayton and close-in areas:
SSI

Supplemental Security Income is administered by Social Security, and according to their website has the following qualifiers to determine eligibility:

Anyone who is:

aged (age 65 or older);
blind; or
disabled.

And, who:


has limited income; and
has limited resources;
and is a U.S. citizen or national, or in one of certain categories of aliens;

So one can see there are a bunch of conditions to be met. Yet a lot of white folk in Montgomery County meet them, as can be seen by the pie chart at the start of the post.

Again, rank ordering the tracts based on aggregate SSI annual income

And mapping it out, again the concentrations on the east side and Old North Dayton show up. But also quite a bit of distribution beyond these areas, including in southwest Washington Township, an affluent suburban areas where one wouldn’t expect people to be on government assistance of any kind.But what’s notable is the widespread distribution of assistance beyond the expected concentrations; SSI in substantial numbers is found throughout suburbia.



What this mapping exercise demonstrates is that, contrary to racist opinions, its not just blacks on public assistance. A considerable amount of money is flowing to the county for white folks’ welfare, both the traditional “welfare”, and conditional SSI assistance. What’s really noticeable, too, are the concentrations and expansion beyond the inner city, destroying the stereotype that welfare of any kind is found only in inner Dayton.

Dayton Beyond the Point of (Almost) No Return

Before Richard Florida there was David Rusk.

Rusk, former mayor of Albuquerque, was the urban affairs analyst who came to Dayton back in the 1990s, on the strength of his 1993 urban policy book, Cities Without Suburbs. Like Florida he spoke a Wright State, giving a presentation on how the Dayton region was doing.

And it wasn't doing too good.

Rusk identified a collection of cities that he identified as "beyond the point of no return". Dayton was on this list.

Cities beyond the point of no return met the following criteria

• Major population loss since peak (20% or more)
  
• Disporportionate minority population (3 to 5 times or more than the metro average)
• Average income levels 70% or less than the suburban levels

Rusk called this the point of no return because no city on the list had ever closed the income gap with the suburbs "by so much as a single percentage point" (through the 1990 census)

However, Rusk, in the revised edition of his book, notes that as of the 2000 census Dayton did close the income gap:

1990: City as a % of Suburban Income= 64.1%
2000: City as a % of Suburban Income= 66.3%

...yet Dayton continued to lose population and become more minority.

Rusk did note that the 2000 census measured things at the top of an economic boom, so may overstate gains. And given the economic decline since 2000 one can wonder if the suburban income levels are also dropping.

Perhaps the city as a % of suburban income number will drop again in 2010, but due to an overall economic decline actings as an equalizing effect, plus some gentrification action in the inner city.

One also wonders though if the incomes improvement that would accrue due to downtown and historic district gentrification would be cancelled out by overall decline in the outer neighborhoods of the city.

Or, alternatively, Daytons numbers might improve due to abandonmnet, as the city becomes less poor, but less populated, too.

Nuns & Subdivisions

Dayton’s interurban suburbia is a little-remarked aspect of the urban sprawl story, but it was the first extensive expansion of development beyond the city. Yer humble host will be doing more investigation of these forgotten places.

Dayton had seven interurban rail corridors leading into the city that experienced some degree of subdivision. The strongest examples of interurban lines driving growth extending well beyond the city were to north, along Salem, Main, and North Dixie Drive, and west, along US 35.

An interesting example of how an interurban line might have driven some institutional suburbanization is the Sisters of the Precious Blood convent complex on Salem Avenue.

This local landmark may have been sited here to take advantage of transit out Salem Avenue



The interurban came up Salem (via Fairview Avenue) to points north around the turn of the last century, kicking off subdivision activity. The furthest out plats were the two Fort McKinley plats (was there ever a fort here?), “Albert” (platted by 1910), the “Maplewood Addition”, and Green Meadow.



The Precious Blood convent was located here in 1923, just beyond the outermost cluster of subdivisions, and held a substantial block of property on both sides of Salem

The interurban line up Salem ended sometime in the 1920s (replaced with bus service), and the depression killed real estate activity (houses of the pre-Depression area on these plats can be identified, usually, by their bungalow and four-square style)

The Green Meadow plat did not survive but the others did, having a small collection of houses from the 1920s and 1930s.



During and after the war new construction first infilled vacant lots on the existing plats. By the late 1940s and early 1950s new subdivisions appeared. Brentwood Village on the old Green Meadow plat was probably the first of the postwar plats. By 1956 the undeveloped property between the prewar interurban plats & Salem Avenue and the Precious Blood land was filling in with subdivisions.





And the situation today. The convent had sold off most of its holdings (the first to go was the 1948 establishment of the Precious Blood across Salem from the convent), including a subdivision just north of Free Pike.

Today a portion of the convent is now a nursing home (Maria-Joseph).

Another view of the red brick convent with church towers, now the Maria-Joseph nursing home (the sanctuary is open to the public, though).




The present day convent:


(I’m not sure about the relationship between the two buildings, or which was built first)

Early 20th century suburban Catholic stuff is probably pretty common in cities with big Catholic communities. A good example of this (akin to Precious Blood) is Techny, in the north suburbs of Chicago.

And interurban suburbia might be an interesting development approach to follow as it is the ancestor of Peter Calthorpes “Transit Oriented Development” model. Though these plats predate widespread use of the auto the people who first moved out here in the 1920s probably did have cars and commuted with them.

Dayton's Lost Highway

Not a cliché but a real no-kidding lost highway…really a forgotten highway, or maybe a never-built one?

I came across this stretch of road while doing some research on uneven development and urban sprawl in west & northwest Montgomery County and was intrigued…

Why build such a big wide-open road with huge median, through a bunch of 1950s suburbia?

It just keeps on going….where could it possibly go !?



Nowhere. The road dead ends in a wooded area just south of Free Pike.


Taking a look at some aerials it turns out this highway, Brumbaugh Boulevard, appears to have been planned to go much further south, and it looks like work was started on an extension south of Free Pike…

…but never completed. The grading is there, and one can even see the start of the median, in this close up.

It turns out Brumbaugh Boulevard was part of a big circumferential highway project, the implementation of a late 1940s highway plan for the county. The idea was to develop a beltway around Dayton by connecting and widening existing roads. It looks like this was one of the connecting highways, connecting with Miller & Infirmary Roads on the south and Turner Road to the east.

Note the date on this new article. 1957. A key year as this was when a limited access interstate highway bypass was authorized for Dayton, route yet to be determined.

One has to wonder about lining a beltway with houses, but one can speculate that the county required the ROW to be set-aside when the surrounding subdivisions were platted, and the wide median would have been cut back for additional lanes when the beltway was complete and started drawing traffic. Requiring frontage roads would have taken up too much developable land



The northern part of Brumbaugh must have been reconfigured when Turner Road was extended to the Trotwood Connector, and one wonders if a row of houses was taken out to make this connection

Will They Ever Finish Brumbaugh Boulevard?

The original beltway plan was an example of how the early postwar planning was even handed, by proposing a true circumferential highway that would open up (and connect) all the parts of the county to suburbanization, especially by creating easier movement between the southern & eastern and northern & western parts of the county.

That Brumbaugh Boulevard was abandoned (and literally so, with road construction apparently stopped in its tracks), and only the eastern & northern part of a beltway built (today’s “Wright Brothers Parkway”) demonstrates how resources were shifted to “favored sectors”, which reaped the development benefits of better highway access.

It is an example of uneven development in Montgomery County.

West/Northwest Montgomery County would have to wait until the Trotwood Connector/Turner Road extension of the 1990s, 40 years after Brumbaugh Boulevard, before being connected to the regional highway system.

Commenting back on

Since blog posts here transfer to Dayton OS, which had a comments feature, I had turned comments off here, so posters could surf over to OS to comment.

The idea was that since OS gets more readers, there would be more comments there, and maybe more discussion, and I would just use this blog to push content to OS.

Now I see Dayton OS has turned off comments to their blog feeds, so it's back to enabling commenting here, again (if anyone feels they really, really have to say something pertinent to the post).

Louisville's Innovative New School Plan

Taking a break from the Dayton area, with its’ myriad political dysfunctions and insoluble social and economic problems, looking at solutions being tried elsewhere.

If one surfs in here frequently one knows that Louisville is often used as a case study for solutions that could be applied to Dayton, if the political and economic situation permitted.

In this case Daytonology will look at an experiment in school integration that is about to be tried in Louisville, due to a recent Supreme Court decision that invalidated school assignments solely based on race.

Louisville’s Experience With Desegregation.

The background was that in the 1970s’ there were three systems, the Louisville City, Jefferson County (the suburban system), and Anchorage (a very small suburban system). The Louisville and Jefferson County systems were being considered for desegregation order for various reasons. While this was happening the city system went bankrupt, and was ordered to merge with the fiscally healthy county system.

Then desegregation via bussing was ordered by the courts, around the same time the Dayton schools desegregated.

Integration started in the mid 1970s amid riots and other civil disobedience (yer humble host was busted for rioting and sent to juvenile court for it). Though the violence and protest quickly subsided, racial integration continued in various forms till this year.

Interestingly, given the initial violent opposition, at first there wasn’t massive white flight from Jefferson County, as surrounding counties could not absorb big population moves, and the Catholic system refused to become a white flight haven. Countywide integration also precluded white flight from the city, and is probably why Louisville didn’t turn into a racial and socioeconomic Bantustan the way Dayton did.

In recent more and more whites began to leave the system, particularly the younger students, though it remains predominantly white today, unlike the Dayton system, which has resegregated.

What Kind of Integration?

However, with the new court decision the Jefferson County system took a new look at what “integration” means, and what it was trying to achieve.

The decision was to move toward socioeconomic integration, as opposed to strictly racial integration (which is becoming more complex as there is a growing Latino community in Louisville).

The theory is (and this is a gross simplification) that kids of a lower socioeconomic status will be lifted up by being in an academic environment predominantly made up of students average and above average socioeconomic backgrounds.

This is probably the first attempt in the US to deliberately try for socioeconomic diversity of students at a metropolitan scale (Jefferson County is still the dominant county in the metro area). Though this sounds radical, socioeconomic diversity would just mimic the kind of countywide rural systems common in Kentucky, were students of all sorts of backgrounds attend the same elementary and high school in the county seat.


How It Works

So the plan was to identify disadvantaged area (“Area A”) and then integrate the students with average or above average area (“Area B”)

Here are the two areas, by elementary school attendance district…Area B in yellow and Area A in blue:



The criteria for the two areas are:

Area A
(Must meet all three criteria)
...Below the district average for income
…Below the average education level of adults in the district
…Above the district average for the percentage of minority students who live there.

Area B
…At or above the district average for income
…Or at or above the average level of education of adults in the district
…Or below the district average for percentage of minority students who live there

Then, schools from Area A are clustered with schools from Area B, but schools must maintain a range of students from 15% to 50% from Area A (I think 50% is too high. Maybe 25% as an upper limit would be better).

There are two cluster proposals:

Contiguous


Non-Contiguous

…and there are pros & cons of both cluster approaches, which can be read at this Courier- Journal (local newspaper) website (source of the maps).

A positive outside appraisal comes from this article from In These Times, a social-democratic journal of opinion.

In any case this is what’s possible with a countywide school system. What’s also possible is to develop magnet schools for science, arts, and other things, akin to Stivers, but drawing on the entire county for talented kids (and on the entire county for revenue to fund these enhanced programs).

In retrospect the merger of the city and county system in the 1970s was the precondition for this approach, which would not have happened if not for the bankruptcy of the city system and a subsequent court-ordered merger.

Lessons for Dayton

There are none.

It would take similar catastrophic failure of the city system and outside intervention to bring about a similar merger here, in order to permit a countywide diversity plan. The end-result would be a return to white flight, this time from Montgomery County to Warren, Greene, and Miami.