Jeffery

I had a freind (who relocated to San Franscisco) who said living in Dayton you get the feeling that Beatlemania is just about to hit. I think this varies around the state. Despite this anti-streetcar thing I think Cincnnaitians are more supportive of their city and there are substantial middle class areas still within city limits and that are desirable places to live.

How is this a good recruiting tool? I would think parents would be very leery of sending their kids to such a school.

^ Thank You! I remember this as one of my favorite threads at Urban Ohio. I think it would be a lot of fun to do an urban typology of OTR, of the different types of vernacular architecture there. And to map out the "1850s Survivors"....locations of buildings that survived from that "first edition" of OTR.

I bumped the Urban Ohio thead for you....its in General Discussion. The theses is cited in the thread header, I think.

Bumped for OTR....!

Sorry for the belated reply..I was in Chicago and Milwaukee researching some old neighborhoods to were I have family connections...and enjoying Germanfest in Milwaukee, too. If anyone here wants to see a good model for urban revitalization they should head to Milwaukee. It is an old Great Lakes city that is in Great Shape...though it does have its ghetto/slum areas (saw that too). @@@ Anyway, yes... .....I figure there is probably tons down on OTR and Cincinnati in general, though it would be fun and maybe more worthwhile to research than Dayton. Dayton has better documentation than one would expect, too. But, specifically for OTR there is a masters or phd thesis at either UC or Miami that does a neighborhood analyses showing how buildings were subsituted...the author digitized two old insurance maps and somehow made them print in the same scale, so you could see the overlay between old and new, showing how the neighborhood got denser. Im pretty sure I posted on this somewhere on this board. I guess you could use OhioLink to try to find the theses if you want to read it for yourself (use a UC community borrowers card, or go the library).

Hello! (its a six lane and there are sidewalks, but yeah, spot on!)

...actually it is rather walkable for sundries (things like light bulbs, birthday cards, household items, band aids, etc), specialty stuff like art supplies, and quick groceries (milk, sour cream, some fresh vegtables...and a lot of frozen or canned....as well as cereal, rice, etc) and dry cleaning. Sure, everything is designed around the car, which means the actual experience of walking is boring and scale-less... but for some reason there are sidewalks on all the streets so you are not walking on the emergency lane to get to places. Yet the distances in some cases are a bit far. I would say this place is probably more bikable than walkable (say to the post office). I could see how this place could actually be made even more walkable and denser if they plug in more apt/condo buildings at the back end of underutilized parking lots and put in just a few more midblock sidewalks. "Repairing suburbia" I think they call this concept?

Looking at some of the places Ive lived.... Cragin neighborhood in Chicago...72 (today..maybe moreso in the 1960s) Sacramento Old City....82 Suburban Louisville...40 (ugh 725 corridor in suburban Dayton...62

The walkscore for my suburban area is about as good as downtown Dayton, and I live in a true sprawl suburb. But since I live in the middle of of shopping centers and stuff like that I actually can walk to as much (and to more of) as I could in downtown Dayton. I figure if one lived "out in the neighborhoods" in Dayton you'd have a weaker walkscore than in my suburban area.

^ Thats one of the leading indicators, too. ruh-roh!

I dont see what the big deal is. It says Cleveland has a high travel tax, in the top tier of cities. Is this such a big deal to get bent out of shape about? I think if you can say that the other travel costs, like food and lodging, are low, you are still getting a good urban travel bargain. Chicago, however, is outrageous when it comes to travel costs. Not just the taxes. In fact I, personally, am priced out of the Chicago travel market, unless maybe I book a hotel in South Bend or Eglin and take the train in. For Cleveland, I can still stay downtown and not get taken to the cleaners like you do in Chicago. That might be the better response than bitching about Forbes. Cleveland has a lot of negative issues but this is pretty minor.

[quoteJeffery, Your post and data that you provide are very helpful in this thread and are appreciated. Thanks! I dont post as much as I used to but this thread is one of the few places to talk about whats going on. I think it has become more of a general 'state of the economy' thread, and as I say we might be in a new type of economy, which goes along with your comments that traditional definitions of recession, "growth", etc might not paint as complete a picture as they might have in the past. Oh Well.

As I asked before, is there any polling out there on the Streetcar referendum? I think there was a previous referendum on the issue, and are the results from that one being used in the strategy on this one...say, focusing GOTV on certain precincts, etc.

I do that on gay rights issues. Our Congressman up here in Dayton is probably a good GOPer for urban affairs but he is pretty much anti-gay rights, so I vote against him. So yeah, Id vote for someone who's a streetcar supporter if thats a big deal to me.

Not sure if this was posted, but the Conference Board did a Leading Indicator release last week: US LEI Increases The Conference Board Leading Economic Index® (LEI) for the U.S. increased 0.3 percent in June to 115.3 (2004 = 100), following a 0.8 percent increase in May, and a 0.3 percent decline in April. ..but the blurb goes on to say, after identifying potential drags on the economy over the past year or so, and the debt crisis as a potential issue for the future... ".... If these headwinds subside, the underlying trend of slow growth, as suggested by the LEI, should become more apparent over the next few months." So, a growing, but fragile, economy.

..yes, but the GDP has not been contracting...yet. Here are the GDP stats, by quarter: 2009 1: (5.5) 2: ( .7) 3: 2.2 4: 1.8 2010 1: 2.7 2: 1.7 3: 2.6 4: 3.1 2011 1: 1.9 ...these are the final stats. So, it looks like we left recession in the 3rd quarter of 2009 (first quarter of positive GDP growth in this time series). Apparently prelimnary GPD numbers are due this week for 2nd quarter 2011.

Maybe this thread should be renamed "US Economy: News and Discussion" or "The Never-Ending Economical Talk Thread" or something?

Back to the employment situation....the jobs are not going to come back. Period. The Times of India reports what the US media somewhat downplays: US Companies Churn Out Profits but Cautious on Hiring Lots of ground truth quotes in this article: "Employers added fewer jobs in June than at any time in the past nine months, and the jobless rate rose to 9.2 percent, higher than when the recession ended in early 2009. "We've never seen the kind of shedding of jobs that we saw in this recession. America's corporations have never been running so efficiently," said Ellen Zentner, senior US economist atNomura Securities in New York. " Yay for efficiency! and... ""The only major beneficiaries of the recovery have been corporate profits and the stock market and its shareholders," the study concludes..... .....The high jobless rate is also keeping wage growth severely restrained in the US, which is also good for profit margins. And: "The message last week from the chief financial officer of one of the nation's industrial giants couldn't be clearer. "We've driven all this cost out. Sales have come back, but people have not," said Greg Haynes, chief financial officer atUnited Technologies Corp. "It's the structural cost reductions that we have done over the past few years that have allowed us to see strong bottom-line results." So we ARE in a recovery. Profits are back. This has not been just a recession, its been a massive structural adjustment to a new type of lean-employment economy. And to a true global economy, where profits come from other parts of the world: "Massive growth opportunities overseas, especially in China and other buoyant Asian economies, have some of the largest American companies on track for record profits, even if they're businesses are mostly treading water in the US." I'm starting to think we need to stop talking about "recession" since we really aren't in one anymore. We are transitioning to a new economy, yes, but we can't call it a recession if there is economic growth and profitability.

Here is something I found by doing a quick google....these folks have a nickname, The 99er's ....and a website for themelves...99ers Net @@@ I was wondering about this because a secretary and I were at the copier the yesterday and she asked me if I noticed more homeless people. Since I ride public transit and my lifeworld is pretty much inner city and cheap apartments these days I cant say I did. She says she seems to see more. She says she sees them on Route 40 with their packs, hitting the road I guess. She says shes more of this these days. (She lives in or near Springfield, I guess). Didn't make much sense at first... unless you think of these guys hitchiking cross country. It would be more uobstrusive to do this on something like US 40 since youd get busted by Ohio State Police for walking and thumbing down the interstate.

Looks like Detroits version of Dayton's Salem Avenue area, or maybe Hancock Park in LA?

I'm trying to figure out what these unemployed people are going to do to "pay the rent" if there are not enough jobs out there...

^ also, people wont be qualifying for mortgages or able to afford downpayments or carrying costs for single family "ownership", if we are seeing a signifigant amount of downward mobility due to the economic changes coming out of the recession. The chart is fascinating since its such a long time series. Interesting to see those big jumps in mutlifamily construction in the late 1960s/early 1970s.

^ For LA maybe Olvera Street? @@@ Letter and Number streets always seem sort of faceless. But they all take on a certain local signifigance, known only to the locals. 4th Street in Louisville means something quite a bit different than 4th Street in Dayton. @@@ For Chicago I also like the Loop street names....LaSalle, Wabash, Wells, etc. I think they were named for politicians of the era, except for Wabash and LaSalle. They were always a presence in my life as L stops, both the signboards and the conductor calling out the names. Wabash sounds like an odd name for a Chicago street since the city is a fer piece from the Wabash River. Turns out it has a relation to the early history of the city. There used to be cattle drives or wagon trains from the Wabash Valley to pioneer Chicago in the early days, so the platters named a street "Wabash" as sort of a tribute or recognition of this. This is also why there's a Vincennes Avenue or Vincennes Road out on the south side....part of that old trading trail south to the Wabash valley. Other fun Chicago street names are the "western" ones....Western, California, and Sacamento Avenues. They are all on the west side of the city, too! Probably the "urban frontier" in the 1840s and 50s (gold rush era). And the "Island" streets...Blue Island Avenue (in Pilsen, doesnt actually go to Blue Island) and Stoney Island Avenue out on the South Side. Chicago streets with certain ethnic characterizations are Noble Street, which is like Mott Street or Mulberry Street in NYC....inner city ethnic areas for the 2nd Immigration people...in NYC case Jews and Italians, in Chicago the Poles. I think Nelson Algren name-checks Noble Street in one of his short stories. Blackhawk Street was like that too..a Bucktown street meaning "rough neighborhood' back in my day. Chicago's Taylor Street used to be the "Little Italy"...T"aylor Street" meant little Itay. Maxwell Street would be the historic "urban shtetl" street for the Eastern European Jewish immigrants and famous (in Chicago) open air market (for clothes and stuff, not food)...which also had a connection the the cities African American blues scene since the beginnings of the West Side (black) ghetto was in the same area. So a street name that carries a lot of cultural baggage for native Chicagoans and those in the know about the city. @@@ Dayton Streets. To be charitable there are some neat names here. Dutoit. I used to pronounce it like Detroit. But I was corrected by the locals, who prononunce it the proper french way...Do TWAH Street. Keowee. Just sounds need. Xenia Avneue. Such an unusual name. Watervliet. Locals prononce this Water-a-vleet. ..the old Sanborns had some interesting old street names that are now lost. Convenient Alley Zig-Zag (a street named after rolling papers?) Elbow Lane Baal Lane. And the Macs...McDaniel, McReynolds, McClain.

One of the old-school "movement conservative" operatives, Richard Viguerie, was a big supporter...or at least a fan...of passenger rail and interubans. Some of his amateur photography is even online at one of those railpix sites.