Jeffery

Wow, this thread has become dated! Some updates: Beazer has pulled out of the area and Ryan Homes has taken over their developement Soraya Farms is under construction with some houses up. Miller-Valentine couldn't get the zoning they wanted for their Social Row property and are now trying to sell the parcel. Some comments on Rusty's posts (I love this guy!) The city is dead. It's not "little Detroit" just yet, but is about to hit the mass abandonment stage that Detroit has passed through. Definetly, also at the expense of that older 1970s-era edge city development along I-75 "north", which has as high an office vacancy rate as downtown. The Dayton Mall area is turing into Downtown Dayton in the 1960s, a declining, increasingly minority area. I can see it where I live, becoming more an immigrant port of entry place and a landing pad for the foreclosure crisis refugees plus minorities moving out to suburbia. This is the multifamily stuff around the mall & 725, not the single-family-housing yet. ...along SR 725. Strip centers are going downmarket (ie Big Lots and marginal stuff). The Austin Pike area, however, will be the prosperity island. It will be the upmarket retail destination along with fresh new office stuff (east of I-75) and Belvo Road/Byers Road type light-industrial stuff west of I-75, combined with the the usual gas station/hotel/fast food intechange fuzz. What pisses me off is I can't make a right turn on red. When Im there, very early Saturday after shopping at DLM, I just run the light. Screw 'em. Another ODOT brain-fart. The intention is to market Austin Landing to Cincinnati firms looking to consolidate ane expand to serve both the Dayton AND Cincinnati market. They really do see this as "infill", as the northern extension to the I-75 growth moving up from Cincy as much as Dayton sprawl moving south.

Wow...thanks a bunch for the responses, and especially for the links and maps! The place is getting even more interesting with this background! I guess that Spring Grove trolley line that appears on the topo was the main connection back into Cincinnati?

Dayton can’t keep up with the growing housing surplus/vacancy situation DAYTON — The number of vacant structures in the city continues growing despite a demolition effort that has razed more than 1,000 housing units since 2007. At the current pace, it will take more than a decade to right size the city’s building stock at an estimated cost of $50 million. Vacant buildings grow in number despite city demolition program It appears a “Devils Night” trend of arsonizing abandoned buildings is picking up… DAYTON — A summer spike in arsons, many likely set by youngsters, has arson investigators looking for juveniles in the Sunday morning fires that destroyed an eight-unit apartment building, three houses and a garage. Youths likely behind spike in arsons, officials say “It was literally raining fire,” said Lisa Marrow, whose house stood next to one of the homes torched on Bellevue. She and her five children escaped This sounds dramatic and scary at the same time. An intersection ablaze. I’ve been noticing the decline accelerating. I was driving around Newcom Plain on Sunday, an out-of-the-way neighborhood featured in this thread I posted a few years ago. I’m seeing things have been torn down and become more abandoned there, including some burned-out hulks. Part of the ongoing destruction of 19th Century Dayton. It would be interesting to revisit some of my old pix threads to see how much is gone. There are some threads I never posted because the neighborhoods, blocks, and buildings were torn down before I got around to posting the pix.

I spent quite a bit of time walking around Northside on Saturday. More on that later ... But I was wondering...I know two railroads came through here, the one thats active, and the one that is along were Vandalia Avenue is. Did any of these have railroad stations in Northside? I was curious because the place seems pretty old, pre streetcar, so I was wondering if there was sort of commuter thing going on in the 19th century. Also, seems like the neighborhood sort of fuzzes out as you reach Spring Grove avenue & Mill Creek (and the old Canal)? Was this area more developed in the past? And surely there must have been a different connection "up the hill". That Ludlow Avenue viaduct is pretty new. Did Ludlow enter the neighborhood differently in the past?

That they had such a bign turnout sounds mucho cool: This must be one of the big summer festivals for NE Ohio. For once a high-turnout ethnic festival that isn't Irish/Celtic (or German)! So, are there Polish festivals in the Cleveland/Youngstown/Pittsburgh area?

I seem to recall somewhere that downtown Ytown is coming back a bit?

As I mentioned before, based on BLS private sector employment numbers for Ohio, we have probably reached the year high in employement in June, and will plateau around this level for the rest of the year. Private sector employment numbers for Ohio for the year have shown a month-to-month growth, in a pattern equivilant to a non-recession economy of the 2000s. If employment numbers show a month to month decline after June, is when we have an indication that the economy is deteriorating again. We will probably already see signs of this in other indicators, which are showing a slowing, but not a move back to recession.

Fort Hayes is pretty amazing in that it survives. Reminds me just a bit of the Soldiers Home here in Dayton. The old factory buildings are yet another reminder that Columbus has that obscured or unaknowleged 'rust belt' side.

I think the hilly streeets help with the photogenicism, too.

Evans-Prichard was a figure from the Clinton era, part of the right-journo full-court press agains him. But this is a good closer: "...A Republican Fronde..."...great line. I guess this would be the Parliamentary Fronde? From the left comes Doug Henwood. Former Wall Streeter and publisher of the "Left Business Observer" newsletter (ironically abbreviated as LBO), discussing opinion leaders' seeming push for an austerity program: Jonesing for a Slump Having successfully avoided depression through a massive, largely coordinated, stimulus program, the world bourgeoisie now looks ready to reverse it—some because they think it a success, and others because they think it was a failure. This is a very dangerous business. >snip< The short-term issue is, of course, that the economy is struggling to get off the mat, and not doing a very impressive job of it. After a burst of strength in job growth and consumer spending in the first months of the year, things faded notably as spring turned into summer. There are no signs yet that the economy is slipping back into recession—though the ECRI leading index (see graph nearby), which anticipates broad economic trends three to six months out, is falling back to the zero line after a strong showing late last year and early this. This suggests that the slowdown will be sticking around. And while the index has issued false alarms in the past, should it penetrate seriously below the zero line, the likelihood of another leg of recession would rise to near-certainty.. Note that Henwood speaks favorabley about the ECRI index, referenced in the Evans-Pritchard excpert upthread. However, also note this caution before running around with hair afire shouting "Woe!" Woe!" ECRI Leading Indicators Widely Misunderstood Bottom line, neither the “experts” predicting that the sky is falling based on the WLI, nor the other “experts” indulging in misinformed WLI-bashing in an effort to discredit the super-bears, have a real clue to what the WLI is all about. We created the WLI not to be an infallible, stand-alone recession-forecasting machine, but as one small part of a much larger array of leading indexes (each made up of many economic indicators) — like the especially prescient U.S. Long Leading Index. This array amounts to a sophisticated sequential signaling system of the economy’s cyclical turning points. The WLI is designed to be interpreted in this broader context, and its message today is quite simple: A slowdown in U.S. economic growth is imminent, but a new recession is not. ...as has been indicated by some leading indicators I posted upthread from another source.

Yep, I plan on checking out a few places I've not been yet & the NS Tavern is one.

Is Cincinnati back? Did it ever 'go away'? Seems that the place always was pretty active, always had a downtown department store and better clothing stores and restaurants even before the recent wave. Things do come and go (the 4th Street arts district is an example, if anyone remembers that), but the place seems to endure. The local power structure, the leadership in the business community, never has give up on the center city, as proven by 3CDC and the money local private sector entities put up for the 3CDC equity funds. I'm looking foward to see the Riverfront Park and The Banks. This is going to be one of the better riverfront ensembles in the US when complete.

This is interesting in light of that steel mill in Newport, the two blast furnaces north of Hamilton and ARMCO. So there was the start of a small steel industry in the region. The tale of a "resource road" to the coal fields reminds me of a similar attempt by Dayton, back in the 1850s. The Dayton, Xenia, & Belpre was projected to exploit the untapped coal fields of Appalachian Ohio (and tap into the pig iron production of the Hanging Rock iron district) to provide materials for Dayton's developing industrial economy, which was starting to specialize in metal work and was at that time limited to water power. Belpre was the terminus because it provided a connection across the river to the Baltimore & Ohio @ Parkersburg. This would've given Dayton a connection to Baltimore and the eastern seaboard. A good 'what-if' for local economic history...would this direct source of materials helped accelerate Daytons manufacturing sector in the 19th century? Capital wasn't available to complete the line; the promoters laid track as far as Xenia and graded as far as Jamestown. The New York State Barge Canal is the modernization of the old Erie Canal, no? There was a modernization of the old Illinois & Michigan Canal out of Chicago, too. But this wasn't too impresssive compared to the final effort, the Sanitary and Ship Canal, which was more "sanitary" than "ship". The I&M improvement reminds me a bit of the attempts to revive the Miami & Erie, around the same time I think (the 'electric mule' concept). The Miami & Erie probably did as much to boost Cincinnati economic growth as the steamboat trade, since it provided a direct route into the city for passenger & freight from the very productive Miami Valley for about 20 years (say 1830 to 1850) before railroads came into play.

The Queen City apparently has so many Queens that it has not one but two Pride Festivals! And I'm going to the one this weekend (overnight at Garfield Suites, near one my favorite downtown places, Piatt Park). I've become a big fan of Northside, but not so much the gay side but the daytime side, places like Sidewinder and Shake-It and the Prairie Gallery. This event will give me a reason to explore the place a bit more (like the Northside Tavern, Melt, and this obscure bar called "Mayday", which I've driven my many times but never knew was there. I probably will do more evening things downtown, closer to the hotel. So looking forward to this quasi stay-cation in Cincy! A city I can't seem to get enough of.

Galena was frequently featured in Chicago media. This was as far back as the 1960s, when the Sunday papers would do features on the place, both as a tourist destination for a trip from a Chicago and about the start of the restoration movement there, and about the place as a destination for antiquing. If y'all don't know, Galena was sort of the trading capital of a "settlement island" somewhat beyond the frontier due to the lead mining in this area (Dubuque, on the Iowa side, also was a mining center). Galena's trading area reached into southern Wisconsin to serve the "badgers" (nickname for the lead miners). So the place grew due to this mining & trading economy, grew to be the largest town upriver from St Louis. When Chicago moved into railroading the first railroad projected out of Chicago was the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, showing how Chicago boosters wanted to connect to the Mississippi via this still (at that time) large river port. So the place is a time warp back to the antebellum era. Sort of like some of the Ohio River towns around here like, say, Madison (Madison would be a good Ohio River example of a Galena-type economic history).

Thanks for the link to the Northside Greenspace site. They are on to something cool about the area..proximity to woods/nature.

Brookings released a study on this this week or last, and it had Dayton near the top for exports too, but the data didnt get beyond 2008. Guess which industry cluster ranked near the top? "Transporation Products" (ie automotive). Guess which representative high-export firms Brookings IDed for Dayton? GM and Delphi. Oops! Might as well throw that study in the circular file.

Ohio, Misanthrope's Paradise (sort of like Louisiana's liscense plate) ...seriously. We have different Ohios, as peabodies post notes. My Ohio wouldn't be hers. For me some defining Ohio things are: Corn Mazes The Darke County Threshers meet. Clifton Mill Main Streets and Country Villages in the Fall. "Forest Islands" in a sea of corn and soybean (think Garbys Big Woods up in Miami County). The Piatt Castles and the surrounding "Top of Ohio" countryside (Zanesfield, etc). This is "deep Ohio" and a very special place for me...something about the genus loci there that speaks to me.

..it's your state. I just work here.

Miles of suburban sprawl, bad drivers, and asshole cops. ...who now don't need radar to prove you are speeding.

When will start to see more "floating bodies"?

^ compare this to the Conference Boards release on declining consumer confidence. Hmm.

The things that define Ohio for me: Ignorant right wing pig-f$&kers. Square Flat (in the various senses of the word) Urban Decay A leaden winter sky and dead fields

Backto the Great Recession.... As regular readers of this thread know I occasionally post on the Warren County housing market. Warren has recieved national attention as one of the fastest growing counties in the US, being part of the urban sprawl of Cincinnati and Dayton. In short its part of the developing Cin-Day megalopolis. So it's a good place to see the impact of the recession in one of the more economically healthy parts of the region. The census building permit database provides monthly, yearly, and year-to-date cumulative totals of housing permits, single & multi-family, and also dollar volumes. For single family permits, the cumulative totals for the year in May (May 2010 is the most recent data point)starting in 2005, followed by the cumulative as a precentage of the years total, followed by the year total 2005: 946 (42.2%) 2240 2006: 745 (51.6%) 1444 2007: 491 (48.4%) 1014 2008: 316 (49.1%) 643 2009: 290 (45.9%) 632 2010: 270 ...so one can see, so far, the cumulative total for 2010 is actually lower than 2009, so far. Given the %'s we should be pushing maybe 600-700 units for 2010 for Warren County, unless there is a spike in permits later in the year. Also one can take a look at Zillow and see other downward trends. Real estate is still in recession.

I was thinking the bus lines all terminate downtown? What you could do is something like they did with the CTA L. They used to run the Evanston Express straight into the Loop (maybe a stop at Belmont or thereabouts) for rush hour, but operated it as a local service while in Evanston, with the usual stops. South of Howard, nearly non-stop to the Loop (and in reverse for the evening rush). You could do a similar concept with busses & streetcar, but not limited to rush hour, for regular sevice. Run the busses right into downtown with minimal stops for transfers in the streetcar service area. They'd operate as quasi-expresses while in the streetcar zone, but then go to regular service beyond. I dont think you'd want to just terminate them at the streetcar end-of-the-line. Then it would be almost repeating the issues with the old interurbans and the Cincy original Cincy streetcars, where there where these transfers at the interfaces of the service areas. The idea is that residents living in the center city wanting to go outside of the streetcar service area could use the streetcar to get to a bus transfer point to transfer to an outbound bus, but not create to a hardship for bus riders inbound into the center city from outlying areas, where they wouldnt be forced to transfer to the streetcar.