Sunday Op-Ed Column on the Creative Region Initiative

Ellen Belcher wrote a very favorable column in Sundays op-ed about the Creative Region Initiative:

Dayton's Young, Restless Get Creative


One would expect the DDN to be on-board as one of their columnists is part of the team as a “Creative Catalyst” (he has been blogging on occasion on some of the CRI initiatives). Apparently one can expect more coverage on the program as the CRI folks will shortly be having a sit-down with the DDN editorial staff.

Ellen Belcher did have this aside near the end of her column that I thought was interesting, and a bit out of left-field considering the general theme:

(If Wright-Patterson's labs were private companies, if their research weren't secret and conducted behind a fence, if the base's scientists were selling their "business" and achievements in trade magazines and The Wall Street Journal, Dayton wouldn't have such a difficult time promoting itself as a technology center. After all, a community is defined in important ways by how its companies brand themselves. Wright-Patterson has a great brand, but it's best known among defense contractors and those in the Air Force. Translating the respect that Wright-Patterson's researchers command, and the intellectual synergy that exists on base and nearby, to a wider audience is a challenge.)

A paradox. For security reasons it’s best that WPAFB and its cluster of defense contractors play it close-hold outside the “fortress”, the defense community. But without this visibility Dayton’s “brand” is just another rotting Midwest industrial city where, long ago, two guys invented the airplane.

East Dayton Ground Truth: Findlay area

Taking a closer look at one of the areas identified in the previous post to see what’s going on, as a ground truth beyond maps and diagrams:


This area doesn’t have a name so I’m calling it “Findlay”, as that’s what it was called when it was first subdivided, probably in the 1860s. East of Van Lear was later re-subdivided in 1882, so the housing here is, median, 1880s and 1890s, with probably some 20th century building, too.


The area has substantial concentrations of problem vacancies


Third Street probably had a lot of larger places like this one, at first, as it was on a car line. Most of that is gone as larger properties from the first plat were re-subdivided, and as the street commercialized. But now there are more vacant lots, too. This big house isn’t boarded, but its clear the place is abandoned.
(I did do a thread or two over at Urban Ohio exploring the "big houses" on Third and on Findlay Street, particularly Findlay Street, maybe I will repost that).


Three of the four houses visible are vacant and boarded (pix is on Springfield looking south to 3rd, I think the vacant lot used to be the "Alhambra Theatre"...we are close to the Tals Corner business district here)



Little sawed off shotgun near Springfield & Van Lear.

One story doubles scattered throughout the 19th century blue collar neighborhoods. Paired board-ups...

...And next door, evidence of the demolition program in action. One sees a lot of this in the neighborhood.
Down the street a bit more board-ups. One maybe more recent (note the dish antenna)

Here is a good string of vacancies. Four board-ups in a row (one is by the tree in the background, not very visible). Across the street, not shown, the houses are still occupied.
And a good illustration of the progression. From right to left,

• Occupied

• For rent or sale: but no takers (nice detail, here, though, on the window frames and roof).

• Vacant and boarded up: dropped out of the active real-estate market

And, finally, demolished (note the board up next door):
Though this might give the impression the entire neighborhood is becoming vacant, the reality is there is replacement housing being built, and most of the remaining older housing seems to be occupied. Here are some infill examples


A vacant lot waiting for a new house (new ones can be seen in the background, with garages facing the alleys).An alternative to demolition is restoration. This is a particularly good example:
…but probably not a realistic one as it might cost a lot to restore vacant and boarded up houses. Yet it was nice to see this one example.

The Last of 19th Century Dayton

Dayton is about to lose about a substantial amount of 19th century housing stock, and probably quite a few old commercial buildings. City government is embarking on an ambitious demolition program that will transform the face of the city.

Mapping Older Housing.

There are three primary sources for quickly mapping concentrations of older housing in Dayton.

1. 1934 Housing Study, a local project from the New Deal era, which identifies housing by precinct.

2. 1940 Housing Census, part of a national project by the US Census & WPA to provide city atlases of various characteristics of housing, by census block for US cities (the Chicago atlas is two large dictionary-size volumes).

3. 1954 Housing Plan, by Harlan Bartholomew & Associates, which appears to be based, in part, on the 1940 housing survey, but omits commercial strips and downtown.

The 1930s Housing Study uses “how old", average age over 40 years old, 39-20 years old, etc, as a way of mapping housing. As this was in 1934, the black colored areas are 1894 and older average age, some of the very oldest districts in the city. The bold hatching would be 1894-1903, cross hatching 1904-1913. Together they are districts with, on average, the oldest housing; antebellum, victorian and ragtime eras.


The 1940s survey uses median age, with the following classifications,

• 1899 and earlier

• 1900-1919

• 1920-1929

• 1930-1940 (and there’s not much there)

Big x’s on a block mean there are fewer than 5 units, and blanks mean no units.

As a close up, here is downtown (with quite a bit of housing as late as 1940) and the areas mostly along 3rd Street, showing the last remaining housing in Webster Station and blocks of older housing around the Front Street buildings, north of 3rd. Most of this housing is 1899 and earlier.


The Harlan Bartholomew study just shows blocks with a median age before 1900 and 1900-1919. Actually a an interesting east-west growth pattern to the WWI era, contrary to what we're used to in modern times.

As one can see by this close up the area with the most number of blocks, contiguous blocks of concentrated pre-1900 housing, was the east side of the city. As late as 1954 this was still a substantial collection of vintage housing.



Clearing the East Side

Mapping out the 1954 pre-1900 concentrations as black plan (recognizing there would still be a lot of pre-1900 housing in the 1900-1919 range, median age might be closer to 1900 for some of the closer-in blocks).


Then looking at removals to 2008:

…one can see extensive clearance due to urban renewal and freeway construction. In some cases entire neighborhoods have disappeared. If this was mapped to included median age to 1919 the clearances would have been even more dramatic.

Concentrations of pre-1900 housing as of 2008 (note this does not include older commercial districts like Oregon 5th Street or Tals Corner).


Certain areas are now under historic district protection and additional large scale removals are planned for certain block groups (MVH acquisition & demolition efforts at the fringes of South Park, plus the Wayne &Wyoming Kroger project).


Next, a map from a recent study of vacancy in Dayton, mapping out two kinds of vacant structures (not just housing) enlarged to show the study area. and some prominent streets are drawn in for reference (the numbers on the key are citywide, not just the area shown).

Note the clusters of “problem vacancies” (in yellow).


And once again, historic districts, as sort of an architectural Noah’s Ark for 19th century housing, and “missing historic districts” labeled, all with substantial concentrations of 19th urban fabric.
These are shown in gray as “free-fire zones” for the stepped-up demolition effort. Substantial quantity of the 19th century urban fabric could disappear in the near future in these districts (and a lot of it is boarded up deteriorated, too).

We are seeing the last days of quite a few of Dayton’s “century houses”.

Note that the new aggressive demolition policy will be piecemeal, not the wholesale neighborhood clearances of yore. The free-fire zone neighborhoods will be eroded house by house, leaving vacant lots pock marking a neighborhood.


The greening of these 19th century neighborhoods will be a long term and imperfect process, as most likely one won’t see entire blocks disappear, and there is the opportunity for infill.

But there will be a definite thinning-out in the next 10 -15 years or so of what's left of the 19th century city

Four Types of Commercial Blocks

At the intersection of Brown and Warren there is a good example of four types of neighborhood commercial building found on Dayton’s busy streets, as a study in the evolution of generic commercial typology from the 19th century to today.

Type 1 is the 19th century store. In this case we have a somewhat Italianate look, but the cornice and flat roof is not like neighborhood corner stores, but maybe more for a prominent location on busy street leading into the city, in this on one that had a streetcar line. High ceilings, and two stories give it a visual prominence, and the corner site permits the storefront to wrap around the corner a bit, with a lower blank sidewall for painted adverstising. Also, a second floor for either storage or apartments or a small workshop.


Type 2 is an early 20th century style. Decoration is a bit more subdued and flatter, but note the way this type fronts the street, with a clearly developed façade. To the rear one can see that the structure is only one story, but a 2nd story is developed to front the street (perhaps small apartments), with room for storefronts below (ground floor has been altered).
This type would be a good precedent for developing deep retail space, but still having a second floor for offices or apartments.


Type 3 is really interesting as an example of a transitional form The modern stripped look is postwar, but the concept of “parking” is still not there yet, (yet note how the building is pulled back a bit from the sidewalk, as if it wants to have some parking, but no room). Note the mixed use is still being thought of: retail on the ground floor, perhaps apartments or offices on the second. About as decorative as this type gets is the brick façade vs. exposed concrete block sidewalls rear

Type 3 is found elsewhere in the city, and some suburbs, demonstrating that the early postwar era was building in the functionalist modern-style, but had still not come to terms with monofunctionalism and privileging the auto over the pedestrian and sidewalk.

Putting it All Together: three very different styles, but the basic concept of mixed use, two stories, articulation of the street facade, and buildings held close to the sidewalk mean they all do fit together somewhat, creating a little business district.


Type 4 is the modern suburban concept of single use, one story, surrounded by parking, and held back from the sidewalk. The building is oriented to the parking, if it has an orientation at all.

Type 4 is typical new commerical construction for Dayton. The exception to this is the very special case of the UD-driven “boutique” development along Brown, a precedent that is not being followed elsewhere in the city.

As older commercial buildings like the first three are removed, Dayton’s busy streets are being rebuilt as suburbia, when they are being rebuilt at all.

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.