Dayton 1923: The Klan on the March...

The 1920s Klan is a really fascinating footnote to US history, as it might have been as close as the US got to one of those "shirted movements" of European fascism.

Yet instead of a black shirt, brown shirt, blue shirt, etc. etc. they wore sheets. And there also was that good old American secret society/fraternal lodge hoo-haw aspect to the Klan, too.

And in the Midwest it was an urban blue collar worker/small businessmans movement, not a bunch of nightriding rubes.

Reading into some history of socialism in Dayton (there was a connection between the local '20s Klan and the Socialists as they both drew from same potential membership base and may have been competition) there is this great account of a Sept 21 1923 Klan march downtown:

"Last night Dayton was the haunt of ancient ghosts. They came up out of the dusty graves where the common sense of man had long laid them. They possessed the streets. Under a sad and heavy sky, threatening rain, an airplane showing a fiery cross flitted back and forth above the skyscrapers. Brass bands blared 'Onward Christian Soldiers'. And like an eruption from the Dark Ages, an upheaval from the benighted and blood dripping past, the Ku Klux Klan marched. Shrouded figures and hooded heads. Thousands of peaked white masks, ghastly and expressionless as fleshless skulls that have modlered ages in the corroding earth..."


...interesting that the kluxers actually had an airplane with an illuminated "fierty cross" on the underside doing overflights of downtown.

There were about 14,000 members in the local klavern, one of the strongest in Ohio, and parades and gatherings attracted thousands.

Klan strength in Dayton was so strong that the Ohio Klan newspaper, "Ohio Fiery Cross", was composed and printed here. (source: Socialism in Dayton Ohio, 1912 to 1925, MA Thesis by John T Walker.)

This would be something to study a bit more, if the records are still around. Supposedly WSU has copies of the two Klan newspapers published here, "The Kluxer" and the aforementioned "Ohio Fiery Cross". Klavern records are in Columbus, though.

Toast To Dayton.. Econommic Development Study reaching for feedback

This is something really interesting.

A Phd candidate at OSU is doing a study on economic develoment initatives in Dayton and wants your input. She is fighting for feedback, as broad a range of opinion as possible.

Check out this website...it explains it a bit better than I can. Perhaps an interesting example of crowdsourcing.

I'm going to link to this over at the blogroll <-----(see sidebar) on the outside chance this is might be of interest to the few readers here.

Fear of a Black Dayton?

A recent survey of City of Dayton residents by WSU's Center for Urban and Public Affairs as some interesting results on preceptions of downtown saftey:

Respondents were also asked two questions pertaining to their safety while in Downtown
Dayton. First, respondents were asked how safe they feel downtown during the day. More than three-quarters of respondents (77.5 percent) indicated that they feel very safe or safe
downtown during daytime hours. This percentage is similar to 2003/2004 data (which was the
last time the question was asked), when 80.0 percent of respondents indicated that they felt
safe downtown during daytime hours.

Crosstabs by demographic variables revealed that African-American respondents (83.1 percent) were significantly more likely to indicate that they feel safe when compared to Caucasian respondents (73.3 percent). Male respondents (81.9 percent) were also significantly more likely than female respondents (73.2 percent) to indicate that they feel safe.

However, when asked how safe they feel during evening hours, just over half of respondents
(51.3 percent) indicated that they feel very safe or safe. This percentage is almost identical to 2003/2004 data, when 51.5 percent of respondents felt safe downtown during evening hours.

Again, African-American respondents (63.0 percent) were significantly more likely than
Caucasian respondents (44.6 percent) to feel very safe or safe, while males (60.1 percent) were more likely than females (42.3 percent) to indicate that they feel safe.

Note the percentage point differnces for blacks and whites;9.8% for daytime safety and a big 18.4% difference for safety downton at night

Breaking it out by priority board areas, one can see the racial differences play out again:

Feel unsafe & very unsafe downtown during the day/night (day %/night %):

For predominantly black priority board areas:

• Soutwest: 16.6%/38%

• Northwest: 13.7%/34.7%

• Innerwest: 16.9%45.5%

For predominantly white & integrated priority board areas:

• FROC: 22.9%/43.8% (integrated)

• Northeast: 29%/56.3%

• Southeast North: 30.1%/55.6%

• Southeast South: 25.2%/56.8%

On average there is a 12.5% difference between the white and black areas for daytime safety perceptions and a 16.8% difference for night time safety.

While one thinks this might have something to do with familiarity, it seems there are no obvious patterns, as the white and black areas all don't go downtown much.

Never Go Downtown, or go only 1 -3 times a year:

For predominantly black priority board areas:

• Southwest: 33.7%

• Northwest: 27.4%

• Innerwest: 35%

For predominantly white & integrated priority board areas:

• FROC: 29.%
  

• Northeast: 44.6%

• Southeast North: 39.3%

• Southeast South: 33%

...with a 6.8% difference between white and black areas.

So one can see a definite perception difference between whites and blacks.

An Unsafe Downtown as Urban Legend & Community Memory

As most of us who do go downtown quite a bit know, downtown is pretty safe. However, was it always that way? Anecdotal evidence that I've run across, in press reports from the early 1970s, seems to indicate there was indeed a crime problem.

The perception, as well as a reality, of crime also appears in news reports on the problems with the Arcade shopping center in the earl 1980s.

And from a 1998 study on postwar crime trends:

"...in the fifty years following WWII street crime rates in America increased eightfold. These increases were historically patterned; were often quite rapid; and were disporportionatly driven by young, African American men. Much of the crime explosion took place in a space of just ten years beginnning in the early 1960s..."
(Losing Legtimacy, Street Crime and the Decline of Social Institutions in America, by Gary LaFree)

So this observed national trend might have been playing out in Dayton as well, and the racial aspect of it gave street crime a black face to white Daytonians. Since downtown does get a lot of black people due to the RTA hub, downtown "looks black", hence a perception of a potential locus for street crime.

So white people avoided downtown, which was in its death throes anyway, and as time went on, crime rates declined, but the preception of an unsafe downtown did not.

Thus "scary downtown" became an urban legend based on a community memory of a long past crime wave that may have had a lot of young blacks as perps, as well as on the racist assumption that all blacks are potential criminals. This would account for the differential between the white and black perecentages in the survey.

In other words people may hold these views as this is what they've been told by their parents or relatives or co-workers, not based on actual experience of downtown.

At least thats my theory. To really prove this one would have to look at the crime reports for downtown starting in 1960 and then tracking it today; a 40 year time series, and seperate it out by race. If a spike can be shown, there would be some historical basis for modern fears.

Thresher Mill Lots

Reference this post over at the Dayton Most Metro forum. Apparently there is a move afoot to re-use this open space just east of Wayne, north of 4th: A request went out for some information on the history of the site, and that was given at the link above. However, maybe a brief cartographic essay to supplement the DMM discussion.

The site was on outlot 3, next to the Miami & Erie canal extention north. A saw mill was built on the site, with a tail race along Wayne to connect up with Seelys Ditch.

This saw mill was eventually owned by Ebenezer Thresher, a local industrialist. This mill was eventually shut down, after an incident involving members of a mob threatening to blow it up with gumpowder, and the tail race along Wayne and across 5th filled in and subdivided into town lots. Though probably closed (or steam substituted for water power) in the late 1840s in the 1850s the site became valuable as the terminus of the proposed Dayton Xenia and Belpre railroad was next door. This line was planned in the later 1850s, one of the later railroads to originate in Dayton.

The line was to extend into the southeast Ohio coal fields and Hanging Rock iron region, as a source of coal and pig iron for Dayton's growing metalworking industrys. The Belpre terminus would be across the Ohio from Parkersburg, which had a branch of the B&O, connecting Dayton with the eastern seaboard.

The road never got past Xenia (right of way graded to Jamestown, track to Xenia), and was eventually taken over by the Pennsylvania RR. It was first sold in 1865 to the Little Miami Railroad.

A year later Thresher subdivided his mill land into six lots. The 1869 Titus map shows the lots, and some buildings on site, use unknown. ...as well as the DX&B plant just to the east and north. The station buildings would last till the 1929 grade elevation.

In 1875 the combination atlas map of this part of Dayton shows some land use. The buildings on site are ID'ed as a woodworking operation..planing mill, window sash, etc. The DX&B roundhouse and some coal and lumber yards (bulk goods hauled by rail) appear. In 1889 the first Sanborns appear, with excellent detail showing the railroad operations and the woodworking shop on the Thresher lots. In 1898 (see maps at the DMM post linked upthread) the wood shop is still there, but the round house has been replaced by team tracks. In 1919 the wood shop is gone, and the team tracks have been extended all the way to Wayne. A close up of the the team tracks shows a long, but narrow, freight house or shed, and a track extending across Wayne to a factory across the street. These paired tracks are called team tracks as teams of draft horses would haul wagons and buckboards up to the boxcars spotted on the tracks, for public loading of freight.

The haul routes would be the wider spaces between the sets of paired tracks. By the 1920s train movements had become so frequent that there was need to look at ways of avoiding the multiple grade crossings.

The city contracted with a consultant to come up with a grade seperation plan, where the railroad grade of the "Joint Tracks", AKA the Dayton Union Railroad", would be elevated through the center city, increasing rail traffic capacity while also mitigating grade crossing delays.

As part of the study a new freight house and team track set up was recommended for the Pennsy, which would have freed up the Thresher lots for other use. As one can see the old Pennys freight house was still standing. A larger map showing the proposed new freight station complex, with freight houses for incoming and outbound frieght, plus three pairs of team tracks, replacing the six pair at the Thresher lots site.



The grade elevation was built, but the new freight house was not. Instead the team tracks remained in use as late as 1950, serviced by a littel freight office on the south side of the tracks. One can also see the warehouses on the site...loft storage at front (first part build in 1903), and one story storage at rear...the rear storage buildings were built before 1919, and are sheathed in tin, one of the older metal buildings standing in the area.

One can see this old warehouse complex in the background in this pix. Maybe the topic of a later thread as this is so unusual, such an early metal building. There is a lot of neat industrial history in the vicinity, too. The building to the right, the white one, is the old Farmers Freind Manufacturing company, dates to the mid or later 1870s. One of the oldest factory buildings still standing in Dayton?

Dayton Vacancy Crisis II: Funding Demolitions

The ReBuild Ohio report is quite detailed in terms of numbers associated with Dayton’s demolition program. And it does say the city plans on stepping up demolitions to 300/year. Based on that rate the backlog of board-ups as of 2007 will be reduced in about five years.

But were will the money come from?

Here is a proposal to pay for the increased demolitions via an ED/GE earmark. Or,in other words, yer humble host takes an excursion into amateur policy wonkery.

The ED/GE fund is a countywide fund comprised of contributions by local governments and is split into an economic development and revenue sharing sub-funds. The economic development part of the fund is used to pay for various one-time capital investments (infrastructure, etc); it would be this part of the fund that should be used for demolitions, as demolition has the flavor of capital investment, but in reverse.

The following diagram looks at the housing market in a very general sense as a filtering process, where people move to newer and larger housing, from city to suburb, and suburb to suburb. The top of the filtering process is new housing in outer suburbs, while the bottom are vacant units, usually in the city, which eventually get boarded up and demolished.

The fiscal result of the process is that newer suburbs have increased revenue, older suburbs have stable revenue, and the city has declining revenue, thus less fiscal resource to pay for demolitions.

So if all the suburbs plus the city contribute to the ED/GE pool, it could be used to correct a countywide market that results in growth in some places but fails to remove inventory in others, via a commitment to a slice of the ED/GE fund to remove inventory and permit property recycling.


How was demolition paid for in the past, what about abandoned property owners paying for demolitions, and how much do demolitions cost?

Using rounded 2006 numbers, here is how the city paid for demolitions, via a Federal community development block grant (CDBG) and out of the general fund. About 18.1% of the demolition costs were recouped from property owners, so the city does try to get reimbursed.



The net result was that the demolition program cost about $753.5K in 2006


Sizing an ED/GE Property Recycling Fund

At 134 demolitions that year, this translates, on average to $5,723/demolition as a unit cost.

Using this $5.2K unit cost, and applying the goal of 300 demolitions per year, results in $1.7M per year needed for the next five years to clear the backlog of boarded-up properties

Subtracting the 2006 funding (assuming the CDBG continues and the city continues to kick in general fund dollars) leaves a shortfall. Taking the city/Fed split, and applying this to the shortfall would result in about $277,400 of additional general fund contribution.



The balance, $679,100, would need to come from somewhere else, and given the cash-strapped Feds won’t have the dollars, and the right wing Ohio legislature won’t act, this would have to be sourced locally.

The proposal is that this number be the basis of an ED/GE property recycling sub-fund. However, since ED/GE is to be revenue sharing, an ED/GE sub-fund for property recycling would need to include money for the suburbs. Since the need may be less, add $100K to the sub-fund.

Here is what the program would look like. The red shaded area would be the ED sub-fund, and the black line would be the Dayton demo program.

There seems to be a $2M topline for the ED sub- fund. Out of that around 38% would be earmarked for property recycling, the bulk allocated to Dayton’s demo program. After five the bow wave of Dayton demolitions would subside and the allocation could be revisited or eliminated.



As one can see, the city, via the general fund and the Federal CDBG, would still be contributing the majority of funds to the demolition program. The $100K seems small, but it could address 14 spot removal per year in the suburbs, assuming they don’t have the board-up problem Dayton has, or it contribute to things like shopping center removal.

It seems like a paltry amount, but taking around 30% of the ED fund just for one city and for one program, over the course of five years would probably be politically unworkable.

Yet, the concept of a countywide fund would mean the issue of abandonment and obsolescence be addressed countywide as it’s a countywide, or really metropolitan-wide housing filtering process that has failed at recycling property at the bottom of the market.

Dayton Vacancy Crisis I: mapping the magnitude

Make no mistake, there is a housing vacancy crisis in Dayton. And it is severe enough to be getting national attention, making the cover story in this months Governing magazine:

The house at 608 Oxford Avenue is in bad shape, but its neighborhood is worse. Next door sit two vacant lots where condemned residences already have been torn down. Like 608, the houses at 602 and 604 are boarded up, while all that's left of the house across the street is a set of concrete steps leading up to nothing. The story is the same on block after block of this old working-class district, just across the Mad River from downtown Dayton, Ohio. Driving around, Dayton City Commissioner Dean Lovelace points to a big empty parcel of land and says, "Even drug dealers are starting to abandon this neighborhood."


(you can follow the link to the full story, which is a comparison of Las Vegas and Dayton, as both places have lots of vacant units. It’s one of the better journalistic treatments of the situation)

Dayton Most Metro had blog post from Dayton City Commissioner Nan Whaely on this very topic. Whaley’s post has links to a big study and policy recommendations by ReBuild Ohio, apparently a nonprofit advocacy group

Its called “500 Million & Counting, the Cost of Vacant Properties to 8 Ohio Cities”, and it puts some numbers on the problem, and maps out locations of the vacancy, so one can see the geographical pattern.

So one gets a pretty stunning at-a-glance picture of the vacancy crisis in Dayton city (suburbs are omitted, and that would be good intel, too, if it can be shown the crisis is crossing city limits).

Mapping Vacancies in Dayton

First off, the key on this map uses two classifications

• White boxes: Vacant units that are not in the housing market..not being actively marketed as rentals or sales, but “secure”, not boarded up yet. As of Jan. 2007 there was 2,403 of these

• Yellow boxes: Vacant units that are boarded up, or are too deteriorated to board-up. As of Jan. 2007 there was 1,418 of these.

Add to those numbers vacant lots. There were 1,996 tax delinquent abandoned vacant lots in 2006. Vacant lots are not shown here.

Presumably the cities new demolition push will be drawing down the backlog of “yellow boxes”., but the inventory will be replenished by additional board- ups and units deteriorating to the point of needing to be demo’d

So, on to the maps:

The city as a whole:

What should blow your mind is how widespread this problem is. Its as if neighborhoods that are not seeing a lot of vacancies are the exception, not the rule.
East and West of the Great Miami




Now, lets take a closer look, going counter clockwise around the city, starting with southeast Dayton












Finishing up with the neighborhoods west of Gettysburg: Ridgewood Heights, Residence Park, Townview, Greenwich Village, etc.

So it looks pretty intense out there, but note that the scale of the box symbols are large, which makes the situation look worse, yet does show clusters better, where one can see bunching up in certain neighborhoods.

Detroitification?

The Governing article spins the Dayton vacancy crisis as a result of the foreclosure issue. I think the vacancy problem here goes back further, & that foreclosures are a recent part of the story (presumably leading to more “white boxes” on the map), overlayed on an ongoing vacancy and abandonment problem. Actual abandonment and boarding-up might be further down the pike for recently foreclosed properties, but not all of them.

So what is the end state, when will this situation reach equilibrium?

Will we see the Detroitification of Dayton, where large swaths of the city become mostly vacant, with occasional clusters of houses?

(image from a Detroit Free Press series on urban landscapes of Detroit)

Maybe not.

What one is seeing, mostly on the west side, are new houses replacing demolished, in some cases entire blocks of new houses. I think this infill phenomenon is due to a charter school teaching building trades, but not sure if it's just due to this trade school, as there seem to be a lot being built

Making lemonade out of lemons, but two questions:

• Can this new construction keep up with the city demo program’s quicker pace?

• Will there be an upper limit to the market for these new houses in Dayton, after which newly vacant lots stay vacant?

Comparing the Malls to Downtown

The Dayton Most Metro forum has an interesting thread on “why there is no shopping downtown”. A question came up from the board host as to what a comparison of downtown with the malls would look like.

And that is something I was wondering about too. So here are some quickie comparisons of the malls + parking with downtown.

We’ll start out with the mall that probably had the most to do with killing off retail in the center city, the good old Dayton Mall of, 1969-1970. Its interesting to read planning documents of the time, as the planners pretty much saw this as the nail in downtowns’ coffin. This is an older Ariel from 2000, not showing that quasi-new urbanist stuff they put in on the northwest parking quadrant.



Next, some color coding, anchors, mall shops, the “mall” pedestrian spaces”, and the all-important parking.


(an interesting aspect of this would be to map out where people are actually parking in those huge lots. One can sort of do that with the aerials, but one doesn’t know if this would be a peak shopping time or off-time, so you’d want to get an ariel of a peak time, like on a Saturday)

Next, downtown Dayton, more or less. Pretty much the core area of downtown around Main Street; the classic Anglo-American central business district.




Then superimposing the color coded diagram of the mall on Main Street, locating the center of the mall, the atrium in front of Lazarus, at 3rd & Main, but orienting the long-axis of the mall on Third.

Then a second superimposition, again centering the mall on the heart of downtown, but orientating the mall along Main. Interesting to see that long axis is about the size of the core blocks of the Main Street shopping districts, actually a little shorter.



Next lets look at Fairfield Commons...

And again centering the mall on 3rd & Main, more or less the atrium by the food court as the “center”. More compact, but that’s because the mall is double-decker.



Comparing the two malls. Again, Fairfield Commons is more compact, but both have the typical mall design tricks of bending the pedestrian area so one doesn’t see how long the mall space is. Both have similar amounts of parking...Dayton Mall maybe a tad more, and the parking is probably overbuilt (except for Christmas)

The missing piece is the areas around these malls. That is the "rest of downtown". Mall shopping is Main Street shopping, but the peripheral things that would be on the streets parallel and crossing Main, like furniture places, discount shops and appliance and furnituer places, short order grilles, hotels, and so forth...all that is now scattered around these malls.

In fact it would be really interesting to show how these two malls are not alike when it comes to the "mall shopping district" around them.