Foreclosure Map Correction

It looks like I got my abstract political concepts confused. Liberty should have been Union



So the map stands corrected, and I locate Liberty, even though it doesn't have any foreclosures.

Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable....

WYSO for sale?

This was buried in the final paragraph of a recent DDN story on the Antioch issue:

The original deal before negotiations reached impasse was $12.2 million for most of the college's assets.

It did not include WYSO, which the university wanted to keep because it was considering selling the radio station's license, Bates said.


Presumably a license sale would be to a commercial or Christian broadcaster as one would not imagine a non-profit having the cash available. This would mean the end of WYSO as a public radio station.

Note Antioch University didn’t say they are going to do this just yet, just that they want to retain the license for a potential future sale. Why would they sell? For the money, and if their mission is to be a hipper version of the University of Phoenix: providing adult-end via a national network of learning centers. This wouldn’t involve holding a local public radio license.

Interesting that this has not become an issue spinning off the larger Antioch controversy, as to what is Antioch Universities intentions regarding WYSO?

Would the end of WYSO leave a hole? There is a 24 hour public radio station WDPR, which has 100% classical programming and good programming at that. WDPS has a mix of programming, a lot of jazz, but some world music, too. I think some of this is local, some syndicated. WDPS is not 24 hour, on five days a week & going off the air around 4:00 PM.

And the internet is a radio source now and in the car there is satellite radio. So maybe not a big deal for people who are wired enough to get broadcase via other media.

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.

Caught in the Middle: "Ohio, It's so sad to see your story end"

Yer humble host could spend all week blogging about this book. It’s really juicy.

It was written by a journalist, not an academic, so it reads fast and isn’t dry, as academic books can sometimes be.

What’s it about? A cold hard look at the decline of the Midwest. No happy talk or sunny scenarios here. Just a reality check on how economic forces, mostly globalization, but also earlier economic challenges like Japanese imports and work moving South, are changing the region. And how Midwestern values & attitudes don’t help much.

The author is a native Iowan, and he used to be a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. So Iowa places are frequently featured as examples and case studies. Chicago is also featured as a Midwest place that has found a role as a node in the global economy, as a second tier world city. Other places are also featured, like Beardstown, Illinois (for the impact of Mexicans working in meatpacking), and Grand Rapids and Peoria as smaller cities that are finding a niche in the global economy. Most major Midwest cities get a mention.

A strength of the book is the focus on the rural, small town, and small city Midwest, places like Warsaw, Muncie, and Anderson, Indiana (all discussed in the book). Some of this is probably old news (decline of rural America, factories closed due to foreign competition), some is new, like Peoria as a positive case study for a response to globalization.

There are interesting insights on education, particularly higher education, on how the big land grant universities are becoming disconnected from their states due to funding cuts.. The author suggests that it might be better for these universities to become primarily graduate level schools and research institutions, networking & collaborating with each other, funded by corporate and nonprofit grants, corporate research partnerships, and tuition.

State and local government is castigated as fragmented, parochial, antiquated, and irrelevant. The author calls for a true regional approach to economics and education, suggesting in-state tuition to any Midwest university for Midwestern students. The idea is not outlandish as there has been a form of this in the South for decades. An example is the agreement between Kentucky and West Virginia, where students from WVA can go to college at U of K paying in-state tuition if WVU doesn’t offer the program.

The author also makes the point that Midwesterners don’t value education, particularly college, and this is a historic shift.
I agree with this as I can offer anecdotes from co-workers who don’t really care if their kids go to college, that if they want to go its up to the kid to pay for it (from people who could easily help out with their kids tuition). I recall similar attitudes from people I went to high school with in Louisville.

What’s new news is that it’s white Midwesterners who hold this attitude the most. People stereotype black folk as ghetto, but the author cites a Michigan study showing that more blacks think a college education is essential to get ahead than whites.

Yet the author writes about the blacks, a lot of them, as excluded from the economy. The author writes about the black underclass as “America’s single insoluble social failure."

The black underclass will have company. Although he doesn’t say it the economic trends and attitudes Longworth discusses will lead to a Latino (where there are a lot, not Dayton) and white underclass, too. We are seeing that with whites in Dayton.

The book has received some reviews. One, from the Chicago Reader Hot Type column , has a discussion about Longworths call for a regional news source, either a newspaper or website, but touches on other aspects of the book (article based on e-mails between the Reader columnist and Longworth). Dayton gets a mention here

The Rust Belt Reader

Unfortunately, even papers that do try to tell this story find their readers in denial. “Every once in a while a paper will rear back and really try to do a job—a big series on economic changes,” Longworth told me. In the last few years, “the Cleveland Plain Dealer did this, with a long series called ‘The Quiet Crisis.’ . . . An editor at the paper told me the series was generally well received, ‘but the two pieces specifically on globalization and immigration landed with a dull thud.’ The Dayton Daily News did a good series, which most of the local leaders seem to have put down as useless negativism. This is a town that has already lost more than half its population.”

As befits a book by a journalist there is discussion of Midwestern journalism, including points about excessive local news that would be familiar to DDN critics.

Another article, from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, uses one of the mentions of Dayton as a warning to the Pacific Northwest about economic complacency:

Longworth cites the example of just one Midwestern city: Dayton, Ohio, home of the Wright Brothers, holder of more patents per capita than any other American city, the birthplace of cash registers, microfiche, bar codes, the parking meter, the movie projector, the parachute, the gas mask, the pop-top can and the stepladder.

So what happened? "In many ways, the Midwest is the victim of its own success," Longworth writes. "These were company towns, totally dependent on one big corporation. Their founders had one really good idea, and that idea sustained their corporations for decades, eliminating the need for more good ideas." The lack of good ideas and the inability to generate them left the region unprepared to deal with the accumulating blows of manufacturing moving to the Sun Belt, competition from imports and then globalism.

Dayton did innovate a lot, but that was two or three generations ago. Is Longworth not correct in his diagnosis why innovation has declined, and what innovation there was failed to translate into economic growth?

Closing on a slightly more optimistic note, the author does say Daytonians are “asking the right questions”:

“Dayton, at least, understands what is happening to it, and why. It grasps the industrial era is gone and globalization is here...

....Most of the rest of Ohio, which looks down it’s nose at Dayton, doesn’t think the city has a chance. Ned Hill, the state’s leading urban economist, calls Dayton a “hospice for Delphi”, scoffs that the air bases’ only mission is to “blow things up”, and argues that “it’s not research that drives economies,-it’s products.” Perhaps he’s right. Dayton isn’t there yet. It isn’t even close to there. But the tired old city, against the odds, is taking three venerable institutions, auto parts,-financial data, and the air force base, and seeing if they add up to a fingerhold on the global future."

A ray of hope. Yet, finally, the book reminded me of that gloomy Over The Rhine song lyric

I know Ohio
Like the back of my hand
Alone Ohio
Where the river bends
And it's strange to see your story end
How I hate to see your story end
It's so sad to see your story end

The Last of Bank Street Revisted

Back in January I did a quick post on the decline and fall of a street on the near west side, as symbolic of the fate of that part of town (but soon other parts, too): The Last of Bank Street

Now I can do a before and after:

Before:
After:
(Such a pretty blue sky)

Dayton Dirt Collective's New Space

Based on reading their Myspace Music page, the new space will be this vacant storefront between Bingers and Exotic Fantasies. They apper to be trying to open for shows starting in May.

(great potential lofts or arts studios upstairs, huh?)

They are also looking to get a website up (at this time it's just a splash page)

Here is some imagery from their myspace page. As one can see on the right, they have been running benefit shows for their new space since February, at least. I have to say I'm impressed with these folks: a lot of action to make something happen.
The idea or inspiration are various other all-ages spaces for music & art, sort of third places for the punk community. 924 Gilman Street is the most famous (though its conection w. Maximum Rock'n'Roll) but the DDC Myspace page lists others as an inpsiration, like the Charm City Art Space in Baltimore, or Art Damage Lodge in Cincy.

You've got to be impressed the way these folks are stepping out to make this happen.

Another Approach to an Arts Space

Another example would be ABC No Rio, though without the activist side. (ABC No Rio sounds right up my alley...check out this statement:

We seek to facilitate cross-pollination between artists and activists. ABC No Rio is a place where people share resources and ideas to impact society, culture, and community. We believe that art and activism should be for everyone, not just the professionals, experts, and cognoscenti. Our dream is a cadres of actively aware artists and artfully aware activists.

Their Lower East Side Biography Project sounds pretty cool.

The Five Creative Region Initatives: In Their Own Words

The DDN did an article on the Creative Region project a month ago, with a press report on the five intiatives that came out of the workshop facilitated by Richard Florida's consultancy.

Since then, nothing in the press, but occasionaly reports at Dayton Most Metro, which up to now was the main online source for info on this effort.

This has changed, as the project now has this website: DaytonCREATE





More importantly, the group now as fleshed out the scope and goals of the five intiatives they are working. In their own words:

1. Dayton Creative Incubator - a project to bring life back to one or several of our vacant downtown spaces by working with building owners to allow local artists to use the spaces for creating and displaying art- as well as providing community spaces where artists, musicians and other creatives can hang out, network and simply exchange creative ideas.

2. Dayton Pride- will highlight the region's many unique assets and diverse population through billboards, kiosks, bus signage, and window signage throughout the region. By rebuilding community pride, residents will become ambassadors promoting the area's strengths- thus making the region attractive to non-residents and employers considering relocating.

3. Film Dayton - establish an endowment that will fund grants to local filmmakers who are making films in the region, and to host an annual film festival- beginning in 2009- eventually featuring films funded by Film Dayton.

4. Innovation Collaborative- to integrate the area's rich concentration of artists, engineers and skilled workers into synergistic relationships to stimulate a stronger economy and promote job creation through innovative collaboration. Each year they will issue a challenge to teams of artists, engineers and skilled workers. This challenge will culminate in a celebration open to the community where these teams will unveil their innovative solutions.

5. Young Creatives Summit- bring together diverse young talent, business leaders, non-profits, universities and elected officials, to address the flight of young talent from the region. The Summit will air the concerns of young people, engage them in the region's decision making process, and help build a shared vision of how the Miami Valley can be improved.

Yer humble host has already commented on these, but the first one is sounding really promising, talking about gallery and performance space as well as third spaces.

There is something like that already happening with the Dayton Dirt Collective, who apparently have secured a downtown storefront for their space.