Mapping Dayton's Suburban Foreclosures

Interpreting Montgomery County foreclosures as of 4th quarter of 2007 (October, November, December). The map color codes the foreclosures using red for auction notice, black for bank repossession, and yellow for default notice.



(found this at the Centerville website)

Since the city is way too densely packed with foreclosure activity, and to demonstrate that this crisis is not limited to Dayton City, I enlarged parts of the map and circled & labeled some clusters of suburban foreclosure activity, to give a brief tour of the foreclosure districts.

Note, that though this looks like a lot, there are a lot of houses and condos in these areas, so if one actually plots these on a street map it won’t be as dense. At this scale, however, clusters of activity do show up well.

South Suburbs.

Going around the county in detail, counterclockwise, southern part of the county, one can see largish foreclosure clusters in the older river valley towns of Miamisburg and West Carrollton (quite a bit in West Carrollton, actually, including the areas south of Alex Bell, around the high school, & east of Springboro Pike), and then the plats east of Dixie Drive, say Huber South and plats along Lamme Rd.

Then a smaller cluster in the southern part of Southern Heights, north of Dorothy Lane. There are clusters developing in the older parts of Centerville and in Germantown Most of Miami & Washington Townships and newer parts of Centerville seem to be fairly free of foreclosures.


East County

Here one sees a surprising cluster in the southern part of Oakwood, and less surprising ones in the older parts of Kettering (I noted this in an earlier post about declining Kettering, but using 2006 data). One can smaller clusters in Eastmont, southern Riverside, and along Woodman Drive. Kettering and Oakwood west of Far Hills, and the plats between Wilmington and Far Hills south of David seem to be fairly stable. And so does a lot of Riverside.

North County.

Clusters in the Avondale part of Riverside, various clusters in Huber Heights, and one forming up in northern Vandalia. One is starting to see foreclosures becoming endemic in subdivisions. Areas without foreclosures are mostly small farms and open or industrial land. West County

Foreclosure activity everywhere. Small but tight foreclosure areas in Liberty and New Lebanon, quite a few in Trotwood, and also in Englewood (maybe not as dense as in Trotwood yet).

As we’ve seen before, a lot of the open area here is farmland, so the magnitude of the crisis is pretty severe in this particular suburban area; nearly every developed area seems to be getting some foreclosure activity, some more than others (compare New Lebanon with Brookville). Is De-Industrialization Impacting the Foreclosure Numbers?

I did some quickie maps of production workers (which we’ve seen are mostly in assembly and metal work/plastics) in numbers and by % , just to see if there are some correlations between concentrations and foreclosures.

Recall that the census numbers are from 2000, and the foreclosure numbers are from Oct/Nov/Dec 2007, so an assumption that hard times could be befalling unemployed and downwardly mobile factory workers trying to hold on to their houses, since some reports say industrial employment has dropped by a third.


Productions workers as a % of the total workforce in 2000: Tracts with most production workers in 2000: Then the 4th Quarter 2007 foreclosure map again, with an outline of the county for reference: One can compare these three maps. It’s really hard to say if there is a strong correlation. Some areas with concentrations of factory workers are seeing foreclosure clusters. And areas that don’t have these clusters are also seeing foreclosures.

One would need maybe a better time series of foreclosure locations, but the sub prime crisis still would be masking the impact of de-industrialization on redunant workers’ (vs. early-retirees) ability to keep their homes.