Riding the Poverty Train in Montgomery County

I understand that the Columbus Dispatch series is about the core cities of Ohio, but it perpetuates the mind-set that city and suburb are seperate, which is a common belief in the Dayton area.

And in many ways Dayton and suburban Montgomery County are the two solitudes.

But in one way, economics, they are not. Dayton is one metropolitian area and one economic market. So it's interesting to see how the long term economic decline of the region is not confined to Dayton city.

I find this map a very good demonstration of this. It maps the change in poverty over the 1970-2000 time frame, the period when the Dayton metro area stopped growing and saw some big job losses. It shows which census tracts saw an increase or decrease in poverty, even if it meant the actual poverty rate was very low. ...in other words, tracts in, say, Kettering, may have moved from 0% to .05% poverty, a very small amount, but still an uptick.

What the above map demonstrates was that poverty was incerasing across Montgomery County, not just in Dayton, even in outer suburbs like Vandalia, Englewood, Fairborn, Huber Heights, and so forth. Then this chart (based on County Business Patterns data), showing the decline in manufacturing employment in Montgomery County.

The map does not show the big drop at the start of the 1970s when NCR shut down manufacturing here. I would love to find the 1970 number for the county, but one can still see the long term slide down, even starting at 1977. The reason I harp on manufacturing is that this sector had three things:

1. A lot of jobs for unskilled workers and people without college degrees.

2. Jobs that paid a living wage.

3. Jobs that had health benefits and pensions and seniority due to unionization.

Take all this away and one can see how median income could decline, and that at the bottom of the job market more would be forced into poverty.

So, perhaps one is seeing is the local development of a national phenomena, the transformation of the USA into a two-class economy or society by cutting blue and pink collar workers out of the middle class via the reduction in living wage jobs.


What's also interesting is that a Dayton region with widespread prosperity is within living memory of the older generation. Seeing this go away may account for the local pessimism and negativity.

The Fall of Main Street, Block by Block

An investigation of Main Street and how it got that way. Block by Block. Looking at Main Street as a street (per Jane Jacobs). I look at street front retail, storefront business that has some public interaction (no professional offices or beauty schools), but things like stores, loan companys, restaurants, theatere, and so forth.

No arcade or lobby business (as much as possible)...just things that face the street, as a gauge on how active or lively the street is

Here is the rough cut, where I graph the businesses. I also lay in things that affect the retail environment, particularly the suburban competition.
Then a look block by block, from Monument to the railroad embankment.
Then looking in some detail at the blocks. I note physical changes (like the opening of a larger store) that impacts the count. First, the two blocks north of Third:
Next, the two blocks south of Third:
Note that some of the largest drops are from physcial alterations driving removals of buildings, reducing the number of storefronts. This implys that, though retail was declining, some urban renewal and new construction decisions also had an impact, and accelerated the decline.
I will take a look at a the retail mix next.

For a more in-depth treatment follow this link:

The Decline and Fall of Main Street