Rhine McLin's statemen on her gay rights vote.

The Dayton Daily News posted the full text of Rhine McLin’s statement on her gay rights vote:

I have been challenged by friends on both sides to make the right decision. Clearly, the right decision for me personally would be to "abstain" or find some obscure rationale to vote "no."

This would be politically expedient, but would it be the right thing to do as mayor of the city of Dayton? In searching my soul, I have been renewed by the words of Coretta Scott King.

"I have worked too long and hard against segregated public accommodations to end up segregating my moral concern. Justice is indivisible. Like Martin, I don't believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others."

If that is not clear enough, listen to what she said on March 31, 1998.

"I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people and I should stick to the issue of racial justice. But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said, 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.'"

It has been nine years since the City Commission first discussed this issue.

Justice delayed is justice denied.

It is time to do the right thing.


Rhine McLin was in political trouble prior to this vote, but she pretty much committed political suicide by voting for this gay rights law. So I have to admire her vote, that she voted based on principle, not on political expediency.

The Grocery Gap Part II

More news today on the Kroger situation in West Dayton..it looks like there is some community activism springing up around the issue. Good to hear this.

A grass-roots group of West Dayton clergy, civil rights and community leaders are calling for an immediate boycott of all Kroger stores.

The call to action came Monday night at a community meeting of about 130 residents at the Westwood Center, where Kroger Company officials answered questions about the closing of their Gettysburg Avenue store.

I also like how they are going to try to quantify the amount spent on food. Though ad-hoc this is conceptually in line with what some of the national retail redlining activists are trying to do:

To prove the buying power of West Dayton residents, all were asked to make copies of their grocery receipts and pass them on to their church secretaries. The receipts will be collected and tabulated at the Wesley Center.

I've been looking at groceries in the area, and there is a dearth of chain supers in West Dayton.

In fact, north to south, between Wolf Creek and German Township, and west of the river to probably New Lebanon….all of West Dayton, Jefferson Township, and the southern parts of Trotwood…. the only national grocery chain (once Kroger closes) is Aldi, in West Town (ironically this is not even a US chain: Aldi is based in Germany).

There are, however, roughly around 30 stores listed in the yellow pages as "groceries" for that area, but I suspect few are true supermarkets with a good selection of produce, meats, etc. A lot are called "carry-outs", which sounds like another name for liquor store.

Another way of looking at this is at the lack of transportation. Here is a map of census tracts where there is a substantial lack of vehicle availability (based on 2000 census SF 4 data available Amercian Factfinder custom tables).

Note that these numbers are very high, higher than one would expect, but explainable in some cases via elderly housing concentrations. Yet also, even at the lower %s, nearly a quarter of some tracts are transit-dependent.
...the next step is to overlay grocery locations on this map.

(The odd way the census looks at this is by connecting vehicle viability to occupied dwelling unit. I guess they could just use vehicle per household and wonder why not)

Here's a few more links on what's happening at the national level. The International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) sees this as an emerging issue. One of the urban affairs think tanks, Brookings, is apparently doing some policy analyses on the issue:

Check out the ICSC page, with a link to a member survey: what retailers see as issues with urban markets.


The Brookings white paper is a .pdf in the San Francisco Fed’s “Community Development Investment Review”page (if you surf in, check the link list to the right for “Brookings Urban Markets Initiative...”


I think it's appropriate that this issue, one about access to food, is coming up during the Thanksgiving season.

The Oldest Commercial Building Downtown?

I think there are only six 19th century commercial buildings still standing downtown at their original location. The best known is the Kuhn's building, from the 1880's (a good example of the increasing scale of the post Civil War downtown business block).

There is at least one building that predates Kuhn's.

From the 1875 Combination Atlas by L H Everts come these illustrations of 136 & 134 east 3rd: Wm. Sander Central Wine Depot and Lowe Brothers Paints and Varnishes (Successor to Stoddard & Co.)


They are shown as separate buildings in the atlas, but going on a site visit one sees 136 & 134 are really one building...
...and the illustrations just feature one side or another.
Street numbers change through time, but these retain the same address. One can tell they are the same building by inspection of architectural detail, such as the window arches and especially by the cornice detail:
Next door is a superficially similar structure, perhaps from the same era.


Yet, note that the differences in window details, particularly the arch treatments. The cornice pattern is different, too. though some cornice details are the same (perhaps the same manufacturer, but a different model).

Most of this part of downtown was destroyed by fire during the 1913 flood, so perhaps enough of this building survived to permit reconstruction rather than replacement.

So, 136 & 134 is the oldest commercial building downtown (that I can date), at or before 1875, but it’s a substantially reconstructed building, dating from after 1913 or later.

This little exercise also demonstrates that the Everts atlas is a fairly accurate source for images of Dayton from that era. (at least it was in this case).

The Dayton Gloom: Life in Grayscale

The Dayton Gloom. Not my term; coined by a former co-worker who was also not from here, responding to my complaints about the dull overcast or quai-overcast days here.

Days when the sun trys to come out, but never quite makes it, and city seems colored in grayscale.

Sometimes I like this weather, amost like a Franz Kline or Robert Motherwell black and white painitng, when the sky isn't quite that dull, and the overcast seems a luminous white or light gray, or when there are breaks and shades to the sky.

But sometimes it's just plain old dreary and glum...

The Grocery Gap

The closing of the Kroger on Gettysburg Avenue got a mention at DaytonOS, but no discussion. The DDN has been providing good coverage, though (and check out the comments section: it’s like watching a train wreck)

The issue is more than just one store.

This is an ongoing problem in urban areas, the development of the "grocery gap" between poor inner-city areas and suburbs (though Gettysburg isn't really inner city). This has also been called the "food desert", part of a larger phenomenon of "retail redlining".


Retail options are confined to small stores (if there are any) with limited selection. For people without cars this imposes a real hassle, as one is forced to arrange rides or use a bus to reach supermarkets. Given RTA's poor schedules this is can be a real chore in the Dayton area, riding and waiting hours for buses and transfers just to reach a supermarket. Some of the research implies health and nutrition issues arising from food deserts.

The concept arose in England (I think), but has certainly been put on the agenda in some US cities. Here is a report on the issue from WMAQ Channel 5 in Chicago: City Planners Want Oasis in Food Desert.

…and a map of the Chicago food desert, with an oasis noted.
It's not impossible to have supermarkets serve urban markets Two I'm familiar with are Delray Farms and Butera, up in Chicago. In Dayton the closest approximation is the Mexican supermarket on Troy Street, which is part of a small chain based in Columbus (though this operation is geared to the Mexican community, not a general purpose super like Delray or Butera).

Another approach, also from Chicago, is to use the TIF mechanism to prep abandoned or underused sites for urban shopping centers in poorer neighborhoods. I think this was used to redevelop a part of the old Sears site at Homan and Roosevelt Road into shopping, serving the Lawndale neighborhood (the “oasis” in the above map) . From what I recall this center had a large laundromat ("Spin Cycle"), a video store, a supermarket (Dominick’s , a Chicagoland chain), a cineplex and some other things.



The New York Times reports what sounds like a similar project in the Kenwood neigborhood on Chicago’s south side.

A TIF approach could be used to develop centrally located sites, like some of the vacant/underused land along Edwin C Moses or the old McCall site off of US 35, into a small shopping center, and perhaps recruit one of the Chicago regionals as anchor.?

Why hasn’t the grocery gap been put on the local public policy agenda?

Perhaps a blind spot with city government? I brought up the lack of good groceries once, in a public forum a few years ago, to the head of the Downtown Dayton partnership, and was given the brush-off. One can see an intial “oh well” attitude in reaction to the Kroger closing, (though it seems Dean Lovelace is taking a more activist stand).

Or perhaps parts of Dayton could be just too poor and depopulated and crime-ridden to support supermarkets, even smaller ones? Kroger claimed that their Gettysburg store has been unprofitable for years, so they were either just breaking even or absorbing a loss, perhaps using this store as some sort of tax write-off?

In any case grocery shopping options for the west/northwest side have become even narrower. And the hassle and nutrition and public health issues arising from lack of grocery stores won’t go away.

For a future Daytonology project, mapping Dayton’s food desert?

Dawn Cooksey at the Nite Owl.

Yer humble host made a rare mid-week stop at the Night Owl last week and discovered this rather interesting local folksinger. Dawn Cooksey. Just a girl and a guitar, heartfelt delivery, and some very, very good songs

I picked up her CD, which has additional backing on some tracks, including harmonica, which really enhances the sound. This is one excellent piece of work, very professional.




Googling her I see she is a Dayton native, lived in Austin for awhile, and then returned to the area to live in Yellow Springs.

Unfortunately, not much in the way of live music dates in the future, but I would make the drive to YS to see her again.

Sounds like: (a too easy comparison) Tracy Chapman, maybe just a touch of the Indigo Girls, though closer to trad/roots music, a certain kind of rootsy country, and modern folk than they are. There is a unique voice here, yet working in and interpreting a music tradition.

So keep an eye out for her. Certainly worth a listen.

BTW, the CD is available her myspace page, linked above.

Gay Rights Issue Heats Up.

The Dayton Daily News has two articles on the developing local gay rights controversy, one on the local clergy wanting to put the breaks on the move to pass antidiscrimination protection, the other on Ohio not having such protections.

It seems that not only the clergy but the NAACP opposes the ordnance, which is ironic as one sees a minority civil rights organization opposing the extension of civil rights protection to other minorities. Civil rights for me but not for thee?

Also, one can see the ministers are quite au courant on the buzzwords to bash lesbians and gays, making a verbal tie between homosexuality and child molestation (a somewhat new meme from the cultural conservatives that I have seen elsewhere):

"If homosexuals and lesbians should have special rights and privileges because of a sexual preference, what is next? With a growing number of sexual predators, pedophilia and other offenders, will they secretly grant these people, groups, special rights do to their sexual preference?"

(from a flier circulated by the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance)

This blatant attempt to rattle some cages is unfortunate and detracts from the message, but the larger issue is worth considering. Apparently the call is to :

A. Stop the city commission vote

B. Have a sort of community discussion on the issue.

C. Put the issue up to a vote via referendum.

Two ways to look at this:

1. Debate, then referendum, ensures if this protection is passed there is solid community support behind it. Some form of community consensus has been reached, pro or con, and the referendum validates this.

2. Unpopular minority groups will never see civil rights protection via direct democracy, as their very unpopularity will lead to defeat of such proposals at the polls.

Yet, is it even relevant if Dayton city passes or doesn't pass such a law?

One wonders if it would be better for the county commission to consider GLBT rights. I prefer this approach as it is both more relevant to the issue and more "regional", covering the bulk of the population and businesses in the Dayton metro area. A countywide antidiscrimination ordnance would also be a "first" for the Dayton area, as no county in Ohio has such a law.

I will be blogging more on the issue as it develops.