Ohio Modern Goes Dayton

Belated news. This was recently announced and didn't recieve much attention at all. But its worth noting since the postwar boom essentially built a new city in Kettering, but also impacted other areas. Suburban Dayton has an excellent stock of mid century modern housing, and even a few intact office buildings from the era, like Financial South and the offices around the old Hills & Dales shopping center. Not too much retail survives intact, though.

From the Dayton Daily News:

State Historians, Preservationsits will look at architecture in in Dayton and it's Suburbs

DAYTON — A world war had ended and industrial states like Ohio were booming. Returning soldiers found good-paying factory jobs, started families and bought their dream home in brand-new suburbs. Schools, parks and shopping centers followed.

It was a time of unprecedented growth and prosperity. Between 1950 and 1960, Ohio’s population increased 22 percent and more than 1.8 million homes were built, including 127,000 in Montgomery County alone.

Now, a half-century later, state historians and preservationists say it’s time to start studying that period in earnest and preserving its significant architecture before progress sweeps more of it away.

And they want to begin their study in Dayton and the surrounding communities of Fairborn, Kettering, Huber Heights, Oakwood, Trotwood and Vandalia, the Ohio Historical Society announced Monday, June 22.

.....From the article: For more information, contact the Ohio Historic Preservation Office at (614) 298-2000 or Barbara Powers directly at bpowers@ohiohistory.org

We take this postwar suburbia for granted. For most of us it is "everyday life", nothing special since we are surrounded by it and mostly likely grew up in it. But its been over half a century since WWII ended so there is enough building stock to see variations in style and built form. Suburbia isn't static, and does exhibit evolution in form and pattern of development.

What this study will look at will be the brave new world of Cold War America, a time of mass prosperity and optimism in the future. The forward looking exuberance of the era's achitecture reflects this.

Building Northridge: Ridge Avenue @ Neff Park/Harshman Plat

Continuing with the series on the development of Northridge and points north, Daytonology investigates the earliest plats, Neff Park and the Harshman Plat (named Fieldston in later mapping) on Ridge Avenue. This would be the first section of Fieldston; the additional property would be platted under this name further west on Ridge. For a discussion of Northridge platting history see Platting Northridge.

Ridge Avenue dates from sometime between 1875 and 1898, but this part of Ridge was the first part platted in town lots, perhaps in response to Stop 3 of the Dayton & Troy interurban.

The maps below show the two plats, Neff Park in light orange and Fieldston in yellow. The arrangement of the interurban running down a median is clear in these maps, providing a traffic-free right-of-way into the city.


The lot lines as of 1930 for the plats west of New Troy Pike (Dixie Drive) compared to a modern aeriel. The area of interest is outlined in red, and the interurban stop shown. Since this was within walking distance of the stop the assumption is that this street would see a lot of pre-war development driven in-part by transit access.


A close-up of the platting on Ridge as of the 1930s. Harshman's Fieldston plat on the south side of the street has noticeably larger lots, and there's evidence of lot splitting.


(click on the pix to enlarge for more detail)

Drawing the 1930s lot lines on the modern aerial one can see how the area densified, with two houses on one lot in some cases. The lots closes to Dixie Drive have been combined for auto-oriented commerical use. The configuration of Dixie Drive itself changed as the road was enlarged to four lanes, taking the interurban median and the frontage road. If there was any pre-war commercial development at "Stop 3" (intersection of Ridge and Dixie) it has been subsequently removed and replaced


Mapping out the prewar housing, determined by visual inspection of houseforms. The entire block was not built-out before WWII, and there is evidence of larger lots being split for additional housing in the postwar era, particularly on the south side of Ridge Avenue


And a few aerials of the neighborhood, giving a bit of the flavor of the place. This is interesting as it's such a transitional area between different ways of building-out suburbia.




A Stop 3 Gallery

If there is a Stop 8 place name this is Stop 3. One can see a transition from 19th century house types to bungalows and foursquares, to the 1940s cottage style, and then to some postwar types.

This house is a good example of the urban I house found on the backstreets of North and East Dayton. It's a later form (developed in the later 19th century) since it doesnt have the four windows on the gable end facing the street, and was either built when Ridge Avenue was opened up (predating the interurban plats) or it was one of the first houses built on the Neff Park plat (north side of Ridge). It's in excellent condition (on the exterior).



One of the ubiquitous four squares, this one is a bit different as it doesn't have a hip roof . A little bungalow next door. Note that there is no sidewalk here, yet the houses are still set somewhat close to the street. Perhaps the transference of siting practices for urban lots to a suburban locations when suburbia was new..."we've always done it this way".

The Northridge area has some of the best bungalow, Craftsman, and "California doll house" style houses in Dayton. This housing stock is an unrecognized treasure. Here, two bungalows. The one to the left is probably earlier, and has some fine detailing.
A 1940s cottage that is also a version of the "California Doll House" (the famous concentration is in Carmel), which uses exaggerated forms, distorted scale, and picturesque styling to create a storybook cottage feeling for small houses.

Three generations of urban vernacular. One the far left a version of the ubiquitous four square. In the middle a postwar houseform often found on prewar plats. The form might have evolved from pre-war bungalow cottages, but the styling and material are akin to the postwar brick ranch, except the siting on a lot is to put the gable, or short end, of the house facing the street, to take advantage of narrow lot frontage.

In this case the lot itself was a large lot belonging to the house on the far right, but was split to put this house on it, increasing the density of the neighborhood. And on the right, another I house, one of the first on the street.


Finally, another example of the excellent Northridge bungalows, exterior pretty close to original condition and with a nice privet hedge in the front yard. To the right is a postwar ranch, illustrating how build-out stopped during the Depression and resumed during the 1940s and postwar era, using quite different architecture.
The result is a visually rich neighborhood, avoiding the monotony of serial construction and housing from just one stylistic era.

Ohio Opinions on Gays & Lesbians (& guesses about Dayton)

The recent Quinnipiac Ohio Poll has some ten questions on gay issues, questions #30 through #40 at the link. The poll breaks down responses by various demographic categories. The big finding is that over 60% of those polled support a statewide anti-discrimination law and support for civil unions is 50%-50%. Gay marriage is still opposed by over 50%.

Theres's an interesting denominational split here, though. The poll asks three questions on degrees of recognition of same sex partnerships:

1. support marriage

2. support domestic partnership

3. no recognition at all

And then segements the responses by three denominational groupings

1. Catholic

2. Protestant

3. Born-Again/Evangelical

Of course full marriage recognition fails for all denominational groupings. Yet for Catholics the "no recognition" answer gets only 37%, vs 51% for born-again/evangelicals and 40% for Protestants in general. So a plurality of Catholics support some form of recognition, whether it be civil unions or civil marriage.

This pattern of Catholic support for gay issues tracks across the other questions, too.

Other results mirror findings in other national and state polls.

-Support for gay rights increases with education
-Support for gay rights increases with income
-Young adults (Quinnipiac uses an 18-34 age cohort) support gay issues at a higher percentage than the middle aged and seniors.

An interesting result is the born/choose issue, whether lesbians and gays are born that way or choose their sexual orientation. In this range young adults say lesbians and gays choose (51%), yet this does not affect their support for gay rights (66% support) and some form of recognition of same-sex partnerships (only 28% say "no recognition). The born/choose question also has the highest "don't know" answers, over 10% in all age cohorts and demographics.

For entertainment value, there is question that asks: "In general, do you think society is paying too much, too little, or about the right amount of attention to the needs of gays and lesbians? "

50% say too much, 15% say too little, and 24% say about right. I guess this is about media coverage of lesbian and gay issues; should gays sit down and shut up? Not likely.

Dayton Opinions on Gays and Lesbians

We don't know but we can make some guesses.

The Dayton Daily News has taken strong editorial stands supporting gay rights. Most recently on the don't ask/don't tell policy, which is a sore subject given the big defense community here. These editorials and news stories usually generate strings of homophobic commentary. Is the vitriol representive of ingrained local prejudice?

Considering how long it took gay rights to come to Dayton (requiring a key vote from the reviled Rhine McLin, and perhaps one of the many reasons she is reviled) one can surmise this is the case.

Daytonians (city and suburbs) are not highly educated, are not particularly affluent, and the supportive young adult cohort is leaving the metro area (Dayton has the highest rate of outmigration for this age group in the region based on a study from the 1990s). So Dayton is older, poorer, and less educated. Precisely the factors that lead to less support of lesbians and gays.

One can say this is the case for Cleveland and Toledo as well. The difference is that these lake cities are heavily Catholic (more the eastern & southern European variety) compared with the Dayton area, which seems to be more evangelical/fundamentalist. In other words they are more like Chicago, possibly the most gay-supportive metro area in the Midwest. And Cleveland and Toledo did pass antidiscrimination ordnances earlier than Dayton, and have moved (especially the Cleveland area) on recognition of same sex partnerships. So maybe the lack of a substantial evangelical community is a decisive factor for making for a more welcoming and accepting social and political climate.

Yet, this poll was a statewide poll. And evangelicals are 46%/46% split (!) on supporting anti-discrimination protection for gays and lesbians. So there is social progress, even with difficult customers like the born-again evangelicals.

The Big 80s in Dayton

The big recession and Michael Jackson’s recent passing brings to mind the 1980s, when there was another big recession and Jackson made it big, really big. And how did that decade play out in Dayton, economically speaking?

Taking an Economic Pulse via Building Permits.

One way to measure economic activity is by employment and unemployment. Another indirect way is to look at construction; the expansion of the built environment in response to demand, speculation, and financial incentives (such as tax laws governing depreciation and the availability of credit). The way Daytonology will do this is via building permits and construction employment, the assumption being that the volume of permits reflect the local and national economic climate (even if the permits didn't lead to actual construction).

The Texas A&M real estate center maintains an excellent web-page on historical stats, which is the source for the numbers here. The numbers are incomplete for non-residential permits as they start in 1980 and extend only to 1995 for non-residential permits. Residential permits extend to 2009. Yet this is enough to measure peaks and troughs of the 1980s and early 1990s .

And, since the numbers are for the entire metropolitan area one can take a regional pulse using the building economy as proxy.


Office Permits.

Graphing out the office permits, and laying in the two large recessions that bracket the decade. The steep “Double Dip Recession” of the early 1980s killed the stagflation of the 1970s but also helped kill a lot of manufacturing, and was a key event in moving to a non-union, low wage economy. The early 1990s end of the Cold War recession was a key part of the Clinton election campaign (leading to the campaign staff catchphrase “It’s the Economy, Stupid!”). The effects of that recession were a bit delayed, locally, really hitting after the “official” trough.



As for office permits, one can clearly see a spike in activity at the end of the decade, which, incidentally, was the period just after I-675 opened to traffic, The 1980s was a boom time in real estate, but the boom came late to the office construction market in Dayton. Some of the products of the late 1980s boom: Newmark, Lexis/Nexis, the Colonel Glenn developments and the build-out of the Route 725/I-675 corridor in Washington Township. Other suburban landmarks were built earlier in the decade, like the Prestige Plaza tower near the Dayton Mall and some of the high-rises on Poe Avenue (along I-75) north of Dayton. The last two skyscrapers downtown, One Dayton Center and the old Citizens Federal tower, were part of the late 1980s office permit spike.

Retail Permits.

This was a very good decade for retail growth nationally, and the Dayton metropolitan area was no exception. The Dayton Mall area saw major strip center and big box development, which extended east down Route 725 to Centerville. The first Wilmington Pike/I-675 strip centers opened in this decade, as did Cross Pointe in Centerville.


The 1990s would see retail construction activity in Greene County, at Fairfield Commons and Wilmington Pike, perhaps accounting for the recovery out of the early 1990s recession

Retail and office construction in the 1980s was responding to the financial climate of the decade, particularly two tax laws (1981 and 1986) that affected depreciation of commercial real estate and a generous lending climate near the end of the decade. The boom did bleed over a bit into the industrial and warehouse markets.

Industrial Permits

People were still building industrial and warehouse space during the 1980s, in fact the high spike for this time of construction permit came at the end of the decade, before dropping again to relatively low levels.




Everything Counts in Large Amounts

Borrowing from the Depeche Mode hit of that decade, we put the non-residential trends together for the big number and also separate them to compare.

Adding the trends together, and laying in the I-675 construction period. A big construction project in its own right, I-675 improved accessibility on the edge of the urbanized area. Property that was held in speculation at the interchanges went under development after it was certain the highway would be built



Separating the three non-residential permit types and comparing the numbers. The peaks of residential and retail construction were a bit off, with office peaking a bit later in the decade.



Robert Bartley, the editor of the Wall Street Journal, called the 1980s the Seven Fat Years and they certainly were in Dayton for non-residential construction (compared to the nadir of the double dip recession). The 1980s (and the 1990s) gave physical form to the suburbia we know today, as well as adding two skyscrapers to the downtown skyline.

Housing Permits

The Texas A&M site has a longer range of housing permits for the Dayton metropolitan area, taking those numbers to 2008.



Graphing residential and non-residential one can see that multi-family housing seemed to be tied more to the business cycle, with troughs corresponding to recessions. It’s interesting that the 1990’s boom didn’t see a peak as high as the 1980s, and activity pretty much collapsed in the 2000s, signaling a very anemic multifamily market in that decade.

Single family housing peaked around 1987 and again in the early 2000s before collapsing in the latter part of the decade as the local economy slid into recession. It appears that the big run-up in the 1980s resulted in a somewhat stable plateau until the collapse after 2005. Notably, the “It’s the economy, stupid” recession of the early 90s didn’t drop single-family activity to the depths of the double dip recession.

Construction Employment

The above were graphs of construction permits, not actual construction. One way to measure construction activity is by looking at construction employment. Using historical (pre 1997) and current (1998 and later) databases one can measure construction employment in the metro area from 1977 to 2006, a 29 year range. The only issue with this is that it would measure employment for public works construction, too (roads, utilities, schools, etc).



One can see the 1990s run-up here, and also a second peak around the time of the 9-11 recession, before a bumpy slide down during the 2000s. 2008 and 2009 are not shown but employment has dropped into the 10,000-12,000 range with the recession (around 1985-1986 levels), erasing the construction job gains of the past 20 years. Still not as low as the trough of the double dip recession.


Since this time series goes back into the 1970s and knowing there was a steep recession in 1974, perhaps one is seeing the 1970s peak in 1979-1980, which seems quite low compared to subsequent peaks. Perhaps an indication on how anemic and stagnant the local economy was during the 1970s, when the metro area lost around 17,400 people.

The 1980s and 1990s peaks actually improved on the 1970s when it came to construction employment, even as population growth was relatively minimal (15,300 in the 20 years between 1980 and 2000).

Of course, population is an imperfect gauge of housing permits or homebuilding, as the market might be more responsive to household creation (as well as the credit market and the speculative environment) not raw population numbers.

Selling a Commodity

There is a smell of desperation in the air. The desperation of how to "sell" a bland and generic place like Dayton as a place to do business.

Dayton is the average mid-sized Midwest industrial city. In other words it is a commodity, since there are plenty of average mid-sized Midwest industrial cities out there.

So how do the economic development people sell a commodity? By selling a commoditity. And not just any commodity but the most basic, bland commoditity of all.

Water.

Yes, thats right. They're trying to sell Dayton because it has a reliable water supply. Not really that special in the Midwest; the home of the Great Lakes, largest freshwater supply on the planet.

The Dayton Development Coalition has their H2Open website, which is actually sort of clever with its watery animation....



The site asks the question "...need water for your daily operations?" Which makes one ask what sort of industry need a lot of process water?

A USGS fact sheet on industrial water withdrawls suggests a few:

"Some industries that use large amounts of water produce such commodities as food, paper, chemicals, refined petroleum, or primary metals."

Well, the area already has some paper industry. In fact the big Appleton Papers off I-75 plant has expanded while other manufacturing operations have shut down. But, so far, nothing in the way of chemicals, refined petroleum or basic metals (in other words steel mills and and metal smelting). And since Dayton is surrounded by primo ag land one could see food processing. In fact there already is industrial soybean processing at that impressive Cargill plant on Needmore Road.

So, perhaps this is more plausible than it looks at first glance.

The Return of the Tea Party

The Tea Party folks produced one of the best-attended political events in recent memory back in the winter, and Daytonology was there.

The organizers have continued on, hosting a website, and organizing community groups to further the cause.

And they are trying for a reprise, a second Tea Party rally combined with a good old-fashioned Fourth of July fireworks. But this time it's in Brookville: at "Golden Gate Park", 3 July, starting a bit late, at 7 PM. Check out the excellent Tea Party site for details.

Unfortunatly this conflicts with the Cityfolk Festival for yer humble host, but if past is prologue there should be an even better turnout since the weather is going to be a darn site better than at the last event.

Tracking the Recession in Metro Dayton

An update of the Recession comes to Dayton post measuring how the Dayton metropolitan statistical area (or MSA) slipped into hard times. This time Daytonology investigates the past few months of job gains and losses and compares them with the last two "good" years, 2006 and 2007.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics employment numbers are used instead of unemployment due to the funky way the unemployment numbers are arrived at. People who fall of the unemployment rolls don't count as "unemployment". So the unemployment numbers can improve as people exhaust their benefits and are no longer counted, even if they still don't have a job.

A better measure is counting how much employment--jobs--a local economy is producing, or shedding. So that is the number used here.

The graph is monthly private sector employment, which rises and drops based on the month and season. If one graphs enough years a pattern emerges, which one can see in 2006 and 2006:

1. A low in January
2. Increases in jobs during the winter, spring and peaking in June
3. A dip in the summer.
4. Another seasonal high in December.
5. A big dip between December and January.



And one can see how 2008 deviated from the monthly employment "pulse" , losing job sover the year before crashing in the fall and winter.

Yet, it seems that the local economy is following the pattern of employment growth after January.

Comparing 2009 with 2006 and 2007

A closer comparison of 2009 with 2006 & 2007 demonstrates that job creation in 2009 has been quite anemic, with February being the trough, losing about 800 jobs over the January low, but then making them up again in March. There is small employment growth in April and May. Compare this with the fairly robust seasonal employment gains in 2006 and 2007.



Yet doing a side-by-side comparison of month-to-month numbers it's interesting to see the close match in the April-May numbers, which seems to indicate that the 2009 economy is performing close to 2007 and 2006 in generating jobs, for that one month.


It will be interesting to see if the economy starts to follow the 2006-2007 pattern for the rest of the year. If so one can expect one more month of job growth (from May to June ), then a dip in July and August.