Jeffery

^ Im suprised they arent having a conniption fit over that design that was linked. Looks like it belongs in Blue Ash or off I-7I somewhere.

I guess a lot of this is...top secret? Maybe the point is that the manpower and dollars are close-hold. That map with the gradiated circles shows the number of contractors, but not the volume or size of the operations. Still, some interesting info there. Dayton really does stand out in the Midwest. But Columbus has a small cluster too, for Ohio. This why I say you have your finger on the pulse of Right Wing America here in Dayton, becuase this defense culture is pretty conservative (and quite suburban or wannabe small town). But it does provide an economic 'floor' to the regional economy. Otherwise Dayton would be more like Toledo or Youngstown. As it is the city remains an socioeconomic bantustan vis a vis the defense culture/economy in suburbia. I know I blogged on aspects of this: The Defense welfare State The Defense welfare State II Technocratic Affluence in Greene County Defense Earmarking for the Dayton Region ..so that should be enough to chew on. But this is topic drift. Perhaps we should return to the recession. Particularly the housing recession since I think some new numbers out are more positive than last months (but a caution about becoming a 'variation victim')

^ wow! Total respect to people who trail run. I'd have a heart attack or break something if I did that. Yes I bet they were! I recall similar things from the hill country south of Louisville, which I used to bushwack across. I'd come across a particularly large tree and notice a particularly old date and initials carved in...earlier than the second or third growth around the tree. I'd bet that was the case with those Mnt Airy trees (maybe). I'ts tough to visualize farming this land. The slopes are so steep, even if one was using a horse or mule team drawing a plow. Some of those slopes off the Furnas Trail look like they were dying off into little cliffs or outcroppings, or maybe just earth bluffs. But cool to think there are some old farm ruins hidden in the forest. I wonder if there are any trails to these. I'll bet that was the one I drove by...I caught a site of some cakes in the window out of the corner of my eye.

^ It's sister ship is also a floatin hotel/resturant Delta King The Belle of Louisville is the last operating steamboat on the Ohio/Mississippi river systems, I think, and certainly the last authentic sternwheeler on western waters, a design originated by Ohio River boatbuilders.

^ Could you link to that WaPo series. I'd be interested to see what they say about the Dayton area. I do know defense spending is driving a lot office development east of the city. Its a key feature in Greene County growth and becoming one in the Research Park right on the Greene/Montgomery County line

This might end up being a political question. I was speculating if there might be some way to ensure there is an increased subsidy for the streetcar without cutting into bus operating budget. Perhaps there would be some way to do TIF-like tax capture from the population moving to the streetcar line neighborhoods. This way the population benefit could be an indirect source of the subsidy. In re broading the ridership base, the streetcar would actually help on with this since people would start to become accustomed to using transit. But increasing frequency and reliability would be the way to start marketing beyond the transit-dependent (based on my experience with transit elsewhere).

I wonder what the plan is for the big parking area between Hamilton Avenue and the buildings? I presume that lot was part of American Can at one time (employee parking?). The Hamilton Avenue frontage could be a great opportunity for infill, a good site for an urban set-piece landmark building.

They need to be on top of the maintenance in their public latrines off the food court. Like emptying the trash and keeping toilet paper in the stalls.

Well, I found out that the map is online. In two parts. What map? The map to the Mount Airy Forest trail network. They don’t have free maps at the trailheads or park entrance (except the ones mounted at the aboreteum and entrance lodge). And that is my one an only gripe about Mount Airy Forest. This place is fabulous. Amazing. At least what I saw of it. To have something like this so close to the heart of the city is unheard of. I am mostly outdoors nowadays doing a lot of swimming & hiking (and, today, my first bike ride in decades). But I had plans to go to Cincinnati to visit the Betts House and get some cheap booze in Newport (mixers for a summer punch I do). So, instead of hiking in the Dayton area it I decided that..hey..there’s this Mount Airy Forest right in town…lets check it out. I did have a guidebook that I glanced at to note the trailhead. Area 20 (I guess this picnic area 20). Looked like a simple loop around the forest. 4-5 miles. Should be nothing. Boy was I wrong. Mount Airy actually has fairly well marked trails, but you sort of have to know where they go. I didn’t and got lost a few times. Started following the Furnas Trail and then ended up on a yellow or white trail with occasional forks with sign posts pointing to the ‘oval’ . Followed these trails roughly north through some rugged country. But the trails were well designed, with enough switchbacks and easier grades and bridges and steps in parts. This was excellent, akin to the Five Rivers Metroparks and Washington Township Parks trail development standards in the Dayton area. The landscape or vibe here really reminded me of Germany for some reason. Or the Mirkwood in Tolkiens’ “Hobbit” book. I’ve hiked the Taunus mountains of Germany and there was a similar dark and ur-wald feeling here, also because I was doing this in mid morning so you got some great light conditions. It was wonderful walking this, then occasionally coming to the directional posts (including some old ‘tall’ marker post they left up). Noticed some of these trees have unsually wide trunk diameters, probably second growth or first growth survivors. The Tolkeinesque “Middle Earth” feeling was reinforced when I ended up, unplanned, at “Everbodies Treehouse. This was something out of Rivendell. Or maybe those old handmade houses from the late 1960s/1970s counterculture. They even had this carved and smooth polished wood bench inside. Very nice touch. So, I had no idea where I was at. I really wanted to hike the southern exposure of Mount Airy, where it faces the city more. So, backtracked down that yellow trail, then started following (I think) a red trail, but it looked like it was leading down to the valley floor (thought I could start to see a road through the trees…South Fork Road?). Backtracked to the yellow trail and started following the Furnas Trail again, heading south. On and on, sun getting higher. Getting hotter too. Finally, I notice that the Furnas Trail ends at a marker post, and another trail takes off. Enough of this. Follow a trail uphill to a picnic area, I think, and then across the lawn to a parking lot and road. Follow the road through this glorious morning meadows bounded by this tall forest. People cycling and walking dogs. Wow this is so nice. Finally got to the car and drove out, noticed a signpost to the aboreteum and figured they would have maps there. Yep. This woman who was a photographer was sitting outside the aboreteum center said they did indeed have maps, but the building was rarely open, and suggested I look online. So I wandered around this very nice little…well…not so little…aboreteum for a bit before heading to…. Northside ..yep, so close! Hike in the wilderness during the morning and be walking Hamilton Avenue by noon. I wanted to get a coffee at Sidewinder and pick up a Tillers CD at Shake-It. But also notice on my way into the neighborhood there is a little neighborhood bakery on I think Blue Rock (same street the St Pius X church is on). Didn’t stop, but mental note to revist. After the visit to NS it was off to the… Betts House I wanted to see the exhibition on multifamily housing they were hosting, and it was well worth the visit. This was a fascinating look at the different types of apartment housing in the city. I was particularly interested in the local vernacular styles, like the OTR tenements and local variants on the row houses. They probably could do an exhibit just on the OTR/West End tenements if they wanted to. I was trying to figure out some of those floor plans (they hand a report on an adaptive reuse project that had before-and after floor plans); iit looks like the stair landings were shared space..you passed through apartments as you ascended the stairs (or maybe I misunderstood the plans they had available). The Betts House Research Society is one group I am really interested in supporting. I appreciate that they are researching and interpreting the local built environment, something befitting a city like Cincy, a city with such a rich architectural patrimony. I hope to see more exhibits there as they arise. And spend more time on Mount Airy as part of my Cincy day trips (its nice, too, for once to go into the woods without a map). :-)

Well, this answers the question of where the operating subsidy is going to come from. From SORTA. While one can appreciate rationalizing the SORTA system to achieve efficiencies, would the savings be used to operate the streetcar or improve service (improve frequency and reduce fairs) for the bus riders? If not then the situation would be of cutting service to bus riders (say, eliminating bus lines or stops, or increasing fares) and using these savings or fare hikes to subsidize the streetcar. There is an equity issue here since bus riders (if Cincy is like other similar places) are usually transit dependent in some way or lower income and can’t afford a car. And the streetcar is intended not necessarily as transit but also as a urban development tool for the center city. The initial streetcar service would be used by a lower income and transit dependent population since the line traverses poorer areas (i.e. OTR). Serving this particular population is not the goal of this line. The increased use to justify the streetcar would come from the new residents who would move into the infill housing and adaptive re-use projects and tenement conversions. And these would be upper middle class professionals of various sorts, moving in as part of a gentrification of the neighborhoods around the streetcar. The operating cost subsidy coming out-of-hide from SORTA would be used to indirectly subsidize a gentrification effort. Not only would bus service to transit-dependant populations be cut but the streetcar would be part of a strategy to relocate a lower income population. This equity issue came up in Los Angeles, regarding the LA bus system being tapped in various ways to subsidize the rail transit system. This led to the formation of the Bus Riders Union, a lawsuit, and a consent degree favoring the bus riders. From wiki: The Bus Riders Union was able to achieve relatively quick success. Soon after formation and represented by Connie Rice and others from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, they were able to obtain an injunction on the elimination of the monthly pass. With the MTA, they came to an agreement to a consent decree in 1996, which called for the creation of a semi-monthly and weekly pass, reducing prices for the monthly pass, holding fare increases to the level of inflation, and providing new services designed to connect minorities and the poor to job and medical sites. However, the most important part of the consent decree is a restriction on the number of standees on a bus. MTA could not allow more than a "load factor", or passengers on the bus divided by number of seats, of a certain amount. I think Cincinnati could do better than this, and find a way to equitably fund operation expenses for the streetcar while not harming the bus system.

I think that active/outdoor aspect of the pitch is a real selling point since you really can cycle out of the downtown area and be in open country pretty quick (or kayak in that wild river type environment they show, which is probably the Mad River not too far east of downtown). The boxing segement was probably at Drakes Gym, which is in the old Gentile Produce buidling (before that it was the C&LE interurban freight house and then a bus barn for an early regional affliiate of Greyhound) . Drakes took over St Clair street the weekend before last and put up an outdoor ring, staging some amatuer bouts in support of a fight poster exhibit in a gallery @ the Oregon Districl. Fight Night a Big Hit Downtown “Fight Night” in downtown Dayton was a huge success. Police estimated a crowd of 1,600-plus — as diverse as it was party-minded — surrounded the boxing ring set up in the middle of Fourth Street outside Drake’s Downtown Gym on Saturday night, July 17, to see eight amateur bouts, hear a rousing rendition of the national anthem by Yolunda Byrd, and watch as three area artists painted and sketched at ringside, and several notable boxers from Dayton’s past were called into the ring for recognition ..stuff like this is cool since its sort of counter-intuitive. The video was sort of like that to, pushing right back at concepts like the city isn't OK for couples with kids, etc. Of course the execution of this plan depends on money and a market. They claim there's a market, but I am not convinced it's as big as they say it is. There might be, though. As for the money I've commented on that before, the "champagne taste on a beer budget" aspect of local planning and wishes, questioning if there is the kind of capacity out there to set up 3CDC-type equity funds to help out on infill & adapative re-use development.

^ The base defense budget equals the Cold War highs of around $500B (in current $$S). Adding the two warsputs the defense budget at around $700B, the highest since WWII. In terms of the overall budget defense spending is around 20% of the budget. Social Security is around 20%, "income security" is around 15%, Medicare is 13%, and health is 11%. Defense is supposedly around 50% of the "discretionary" budget .

Back to the recession. The Cleveland Fed has an interesting paper online that specualates that business debt might be causing the drag on economic growth. Is Debt Overhang Causing Firms to Underinvest Many economists have suggested that the weakness of corporate balance sheets is constraining business spending and investment, and that this in turn is impeding growth and the recovery. High levels of debt can depress spending and investment through several channels. This Commentary explains one of them—debt overhang can cause firms to underinvest—and points to ways in which this effect might be inhibiting the recovery. Many economists have suggested that the weakness of corporate balance sheets is constraining business spending and investment, and that this in turn is impeding growth and the recovery. High levels of debt can depress spending and investment through several channels. Firms with high debt, for example, must devote more cash to interest payments, so they have less available for spending. The desire to repair their balance sheets may further discourage spending. Firms with weak balance sheets might also find it harder to obtain external funds for new investment projects. And when they can raise external funds, they must pay higher rates, which increases their cost of investing. One particularly important investment-damping channel is one where the overhang of existing debt distorts firms’ incentives to invest, leading them to invest less than would be optimal if they had fewer liabilities. This Commentary explains this channel and the ways in which it could inhibit the budding recovery.

WWII is probably the great real-world experiment that proved the Keynsian concept correct. That deficit was probably paid off via economic growth during the later 1940s and 1950s. ...as one can see governmental deficits were huge vis a vis the overall GDP during the war, and even during the Depression, compared to the recent past. In real dollars the current deficit might be higher, but it's low as a percentage of the economy. A difference, though, is that deficit spending for the war effort was also accompanied by wage and price controls. And some porportion of the deficit spending went to infrastructure, both roads, airfields, and new industrial plants and machinery. The impact of the infrastructure spending after the war was pretty impressive as helped accomodate postwar growth.

The BLS has released the state employment numbers for June. Apparently, for Ohio private sector employment, there was growth on-par with mid 2000s trends, meaning an increase in employment. So, as far as the employment picture is concerned, the Ohio economy was generating since January, the same number of jobs, on a monthly basis, as it did before the recession. Based on the forecasts above I'd say we'd probably see a small drop in July, but within the range that we would see in a normally functioning economy. In fact, if the economy is in recovery, we should see the usual up/down variation around the May/June highs. The thing to look for would a consistent drop in employment July, August, and September. The problem of course is that this does not dig us out of the hole we dropped in during 2008/2009. We are locking in at a considerbaly low level of employment vis a vis before the recession.

There are a few sessions at the upcoming “Reclaiming Vacant Properties conference on urban agriculture, with the first session being a “mobile workshop” focusing on Cleveland efforts. Source C. From Cleveland Rocks to Cleveland Grows: Reusing Vacant Land through Urban Agriculture With close to 60 acres of land in the city that grow $3.5M worth of fresh produce for residents and local markets, Cleveland is combating adverse health outcomes while improving the quality and aesthetics of vacant lots. New agriculture legislation, specialized educational programming, and research projects have all been integral in supporting the transformation of vacant parcels into healthy and thriving urban farms. Participants will learn first-hand how people, policy, and partnerships have been instrumental in this process of transformation as they travel through Cleveland’s neighborhoods and meet with urban farmers, key advocates, and other stakeholders at diverse urban agricultural sites that were once vacant properties. G. Decision Making for Alternative Site Reuse There are many approaches to reusing previously developed land. But vacant sites are not all the same, and it’s critical for communities to consider site conditions when determining the alternative that best meets their needs. Join this session to hear about the benefits of two alternative uses—green water infrastructure and urban agriculture—and about the issues communities need to understand when making decisions about what use best matches the potential for each site. Speakers will share tools and methods for exploring how health impacts, resource management, and ecosystem service potential affect decisions. G. Decision Making for Alternative Site Reuse There are many approaches to reusing previously developed land. But vacant sites are not all the same, and it’s critical for communities to consider site conditions when determining the alternative that best meets their needs. Join this session to hear about the benefits of two alternative uses—green water infrastructure and urban agriculture—and about the issues communities need to understand when making decisions about what use best matches the potential for each site. Speakers will share tools and methods for exploring how health impacts, resource management, and ecosystem service potential affect decisions.

This area is going to be key for logistics and distribution due to its relatively central location. This that old '90 Minuet Market' concept again. Note that the Dayton area, too, has been seeing growth in logistics/distro things.

At the Dayton-Business Journal panel discussion & Q/A on Austin Blvd on Tuesday it was said that someone needs to take leadership to start marketing the Cincinnati-Dayton region as a whole, since this will be one of the largest MSAs in the country, exceeding Minneapolis/St Paul in population (which means one of the largest in the Midwest after Chicago and Detroit). That people are thinking small when it comes to regionalism. Also, Austin Road is in direct competition with Middletown, Union Center, Tylersville Road/Liberty, etc areas for firms wanting to expand into a central location, firms from both the Cincy and Dayton areas, but is late to this game. There where a few mentions of the "Liberty" development, presumably in Liberty Township? Anyone have any intel on proposals near I-75 in this area? I know they just opened that new exit integrated into the expressway interchange to Hamilton...could that be what's being mentioned?

The Northwest corner of the interchange will have Motoman on the land right next to the exit ramp (southbound exit), the balance will be developed as light industrial/office, probably a lot like what is already along Byers Road north to Lyons. The Southwest corner will get one of the proton treatment centers, and a proposed R&D facility, hotel, restaurant, and what looks like spec office or R&D facilities and a large water feature/retention basin. A very conceptual plan was on display for this parcel, which is owned by Miami Twp. The RG Properties rep (their COO) replied, point-blank, "yes" when asked if they are trying to attract retail like whats at The Green. He then said they are trying to complement the Dayton Mall, not kill it, and are looking at recruiting various uses, including theatres and full service hotels. "If the Dayton Mall fails, Austin Road fails". So at least there still is public committment to the orginal plan of not cannibalizing the Dayton Mall retail district. He also mentioned that RG is under no financial pressure to develop the site, so can wait for the appropriate uses, not try to make money quick by putting in gas stations and budge hotels (examples given). It was remarked that the infrastructure piece of Austin Road project was the first multijurisdictional TIF in Ohio, and the local government cooperation was a selling point when trying to attract tenants to the site. It was also remarked there are 150 acres adjacent to the airport owned by the city of Dayton, which has a development plan for it, but no execution strategy or movement to execute the plan. The CEO of TeraData mentioned that 80% of new growth will come from 'within the region', business expansions and relocations. Which seems to indicate (my words) this will be seeing more Motoman style relocations as firms expand and perhaps consolidate into a better geographical location (better vis a vis the "SW Ohio Urban System", aka Cin-Day). The Dayton B-J will have a longer story on this in their Friday print edition.

Im thinking if this project is ever completed it will be a definite boost to the neighborhood, which is already sort of happening in a funky way.

^ yeah I saw that on Sunday while walking around Northside. When I walked by they were in the rear (?)(or north-western?) end of the complex, off the side streets.

Thanks, Neville. The operating subsidy will be relatively minor if projections hold.

Probably not TIF. TIF will most likely be used to retire the revenue bonds used to finance the intitial capital investment (this is how it's done elsewhere).

So, again, what is the funding source for the operating subsidy? Or is the projection to fund 100% from the farebox?

The D B-J reports on Austin Road: Greg Sample, president and chief operating officer of Centerville-based RG Properties Inc., said the development along I-75 — including the RG Properties’ development Austin Landing — are not suburban sprawl, but rather in-fill development between two metropolitan areas growing toward each other. “If there was no development to the south, it (Austin Landing) would be sprawl,” Sample said. “But the reality is, we’re late to the game. All the others (developments) have a jump start on us.” Business leaders discuss Austin interchange development at for One of the tidbits of info is that the general aviatioon airport next to the site can't be used for fully loaded and fueled corporate jets due to runway/clear zone and avionics restrictions. And one of those cancer treatement centers is going to be putting in an R&D center and maybe even some med device manufacturing in the area. Lots of interesting intel.