Friday, February 13, 2009

Dayton: America's Fifth Most Empty City

Behind all the hoopla about the hockey arena and "Greater Downtown" is the reality that Dayton is a shrinking city at the center of a stagnant metropolitan area. If one has been following this blog over the past year and half one will know all about this as 'emptying out of the city is recurrent theme (and check the thumbnail pic to the left for a sample of board-up land). Though we think of this as an city issue, take a drive out Salem Road or down Kauffman in Fairborn to see how suburban shopping centers have gone vacant, too.

This "news" is now national as Forbes has ranked Dayton as Americans 5th emptiest city based on homeowner and rental vacancy rates.

From Forbes:

No. 5: Dayton, Ohio

Rental Vacancy Rate: 21.7% (second)

Home Vacancy Rate: 3.6% (tied, 15th)

Average Rank: 8.5

The other 4 are

1. Las Vegas

2. Detroit

3. Atlanta

4. Greensboro

(the tie was for housing vacancy was with Cincinnati and Charlotte)

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

So, why don't we just give up and let this 'dying thing' take its' course?

Jefferey said...

I prefer to think of the process as shrinking not dying.

Anonymous said...

Be careful. The Most Metroids have a tendency to try to kill the bearers of bad news. They believe that 'proper subjective consciousness' can overcome can overcome objective consciousness, but then, so did Pol Pot.

Anonymous said...

So, Anonymous -- What's your solution? Go to the Greene?

Anonymous said...

The greater downtown forum only allowed one comment per meeting-
but, a lot of the historical downtown housing could be reused with some changes to the building codes, and to allow new SRO/rooming house type set ups- to help get lower income, mobile people back in the core.
http://esrati.com/?p=1680
I also thing that we could maje a huge impact with new federal legislation with unlimited H1B visa's to HUBzones http://esrati.com/?p=250
Which would start changing things immediately for Dayton.

Jefferey said...

There isn't much historical housing left in the traditional CBD....just two prewar buildings (after the Moraine/Schwind debacle), and they're not SROs.

There are some good example of modern SROs out in California. The Baltic in San Diego for one.

Matthew Sauer said...

Hey - look at it this way: we're in good company!

Anonymous said...

Dear Mr. Metro Easy Mark,

I prefer Dayton as is. Entropy is a beautiful thing.

Anonymous said...

It's very easy to enjoy entropy of other things. It's almost as easy anonymity on the internet. Stealing the pride and optimism of those who take the harder route is a sad state affairs.