Rusty Shackleford

Lewd Daubs needs to pick up this story.

I looked up that location. It must be the old Encore location at McCabe Crossing? Or in the same shopping center.

The Dayton area has been at the forefront of deindustrialization for 30+ years. The bitch of it is, there are few other options for the people and plants that are surplussed. There's nowhere to go, no escape. To think of the entire country going through what Dayton has experienced for several decades... yeesh.

^ Ugh! Sad! To think that what used to be the jobs that everyone "with an education" looked down on as lowest common denominator - plain ol' blue collar jobs that pay decently - have become a hot, desirable and rare situation for a lucky few. A couple of months ago I was perusing foreclosures in Kettering. I was able to find repos in some pockets - one of them off of Wilmington near "Beavertown", another a side street off of Bigger Road - with *appraised* values in the low $40s. When you look at CPIs and other statistics, that's almost third world low.

Taft Broadcasting was the original owner of Kings Island. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft_Broadcasting - you can see from this article that they were a significant media company in their time. Yes, the same Taft as President William H. Taft. Taft is sort of one of the "First Families" of this part of Ohio. Certain Dayton area manufacturers were in the suburban land business in this area, kind of how Walmart now has a major commercial real estate holding division. GM used to own a recreation center on Byers Road, south of 725, nearby - I went with my parents there several years when I was a kid, to company picnics and fish fries. It wasn't that long ago that 741 was a purely rural highway - a drive to the Southland 75 Drive-In to watch the latest chain saw murder film in the late 60s was basically a short trip out to the middle of nowhere. Now that's Cub Food's turf. The article says "extension of 741 to I-71." That indeed exists and did happen in the 70s. That is the segment of 741 that extends south from the light at Rt 42, goes south about a mile, and turns left to become Kings Mills Road. 741 used to dead end at Rt 42, with a stop sign if I recall. It really improves access to Kings Island from the north because the only other access from that direction was through the city of Mason.

^ Blue collar nirvana. Doesn't everyone think they're "special"? :-D

Ahh, just as I thought. Thanks!

Exactly where is the site for this mall? Is it that area in back of Wendy's/Gold Star?

^ I'll permit myself one last comment on the subject. The Boycott blog author is guilty of exactly what has trashed the region. "Let everyone back there go to hell, they're all to blame" is what three or four generations have already said about Dayton and we now see the result. He's as bad as the power base that has allowed the commercial life of the city to seep away. Trying to characterize Dayton's "spirit" today is an exercise in intense, applied nihilism. It just feels bad to try.

Anti-urban: or more precisely, anti-diversity. Xenophobia. Actually more that, IMO, than anti-urban. You can find some real rednecks in built up areas in Ohio cities, but they often tend to like the environment. They just like *THEIR* environment as THEY expect it. So do you think that this "Hate Dayton" guy basically considers city residents Morlocks? Sometimes when I've had a bad experience in an area, I think "this entire area and everyone here can go to hell". But in my mind I always come back to considering the *other* victims that never chose to live there in the first place, and the many others who mind their own business and who don't have the power to change things. I mean, you can trip over the meth heads and hookers on E. Fifth Street but there are a lot of kids of those worthless trash people living there, too, who are innocents and who have no way to get out. And lastly, venting about bad police, an indifferent city administration and dumbass citizens neglects the fact that the problems are part of an entire social matrix of issues. Even if you had one, 10, 100 or 1000 brave, "tell it like it is" activist types placed in that environment, they would be fighting an overall tide. And I think that extreme hardship, like the inaccessibility of decent blue collar jobs in the Dayton area, has caused the social structure to implode and decay. It's a tough area to live, even though it's "cheap", and people tend to become embittered and not get better with continual hardship. That blog guy expects the victims to just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. If you have no job, no prospects, etc that is just talk.

It is (and was) hilarious in an ironic way. Hating the people but not the cities makes it sound like if the "I am Legend" plague swept through Dayton, there would be a decent city left over. I object to the Boycott Dayton blog on the basis of lack of style and imagination. It's one big, poorly done, one-note, vent. There are ways to "hate" something in writing and to make it clever and readable. I think that guy needs some therapy, or church. Or maybe a stiff drink.

Great graphics - man, this is getting redundant. You do good work, period. Qualitatively, Dayton appears to be a city of many Indians and few Chiefs. Again, the numbers support my gut-feel for the area.

Allow me to vent about this company next. :evil: It has a very insular culture, like all Dayton institutions of any significance. They employ a disproportionate number of PhD's in various subject matter that is relevant to this information broker's activities. I have known some people, including spouses of friends, who have worked at the place. What I have been told is: The management is HIGHLY toxic and not conducive to brainstorming or innovation. (See notes below on the internet.) The internal management has pedigrees from places like NCR, and is inbred. Because the place is top-heavy with PhDs and advanced degrees, someone with a "mere" technology bachelor's is regarded as sort of a technician (grunt) there. I have taken two interviews at the place. Each time, I was treated poorly. Each time, it was made very clear that I was not good enough to be considered for full time placement, but I was being considered as a contractor for "maintenance programming". I recall one lady manager who basically said to me that if they thought that a piece of work should take 8 billed hours, they DEMANDED that it take 8 hours and no more. I picked up intense vibes of this manager wanting to feel superior to me due to her role. I decided that Lexis-Nexis can go to hell. The anti-innovative (very latter day Daytonian) management style can be attested by the fact that LN did very little in terms of "securing" the Internet. The big success stories of the 90s like Yahoo came out of college kids tinkering with handwritten web pages. With all of its supposed software expertise and its vast data warehouses, Lexis was ideally positioned to have OWNED the internet by 1997. But I am told they took until the late 90s to even deploy an internet gateway. And that deployment was born out of constant arguing by management geezers that it should not be done. In true Dayton fashion, Lexis-Nexis snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. So, none of this is authoritative and it's all anecdotal. But I have lots of stories like this one; Lexis is just one that anyone can verify instantly by observing that it's Google (started in 2000 or so) that is at the head of the internet industry, not Lexis.

Thanks. I enjoy the Jeremiah role. :evil: I don't know about the defense side, but Lexis Nexis seems to be about 40% from out-of-town. This might be a good thing or it might be a bad thing. My hunch was that an ongoing in-migration would be a good thing as it would be bringing in a population not tinged with the negativity and anti-urban bias of the natives. But this might not be the case if people are looking for places that will sell if they have to move, thus they play in the local real estate market which elimates Dayton, as they are subject to steering by local real-estate professionals. Then there is the issue I hunched on on the earlier thread, the difference between the kind of professional brought in here (IT/engineering) vs other types of white collar work...whether they see a positive to urban living or not, particularly early career/pre-family people in their 20s and early 30s. I recall reading the reason R&R built that big corporate campus out in Research Park was that they were having trouble recruiting due to their downtown location (as opposed to Humana in Louisville, which has expanded by adaptive re-use of old riverfront buildings in Louisville and new downtown high rises) I think the result is what we are seeing in Dayton, a modern sububurban edge city civilazation that is fairly healthy econmically (a small version of northern Virginia or Aerospace Alley) and a weak city/urban culture. Jeffrey, I don't think this is the case. You stated in past threads that the large amount of military people and ex-military who settle in the Dayton area contribute an anti-diverse, anti-urban mentality. I tend to mostly agree. The ones I've known expect comfortable lives without being challenged by a range of differing ideas. (An ex Air Force guy I know said to me that he didn't like Google News because he thought it was too liberal. :laugh: And Google News is automated.) Don't blame the techies. Most of the local "civilian culture" engineers I have worked around have been what the writer Paul Fussel called in his book Class the "Class X" - semi-Bohemian non-comformists who really wish to not be associated with social ladder type thinking. You mention that Dayton has a small version of the DC beltway defense scene going on. Yeah, except in prosperity levels. It's very weak compared to DC. I know of no engineers who are highly paid and find it "easy" to find work here. So I don't think you will see that affluent anti-diversity mentality with this segment of the population. Typical engineers and technology people basically aren't paid enough here to get callous. So they tend to be "Class X" - they stand outside the social class system, like I do, and disparage it. :whip: These threads are helping me to form a better understanding of the local scene. "Why does Dayton suck?" In order: Appalachian population fused with northeastern union worker way of thinking; plus "jarhead" right leaning mentality of military people, current and ex; and a very, very sluggish local job growth prospect, exacerbated by a poor local technology culture that doesn't produce job growth. (I hope this isn't too much thread drift.)

Agreed with all of your points. You may have stumbled onto a social/cultural factor here that influences the area: the quantity of corporate relocatees who move into Dayton for one specific job and who aren't really rooted here. I'm thinking of specialists in stuff that is done by base contractors, and subject matter specialists that work at Lexis-Nexis. If their job goes "poof", they are likely too specialized to find a local replacement job. So the area has a huge number of transient professionals. Now, what affect does that have on local culture, urbanism, activism? The town is basically a career stopover for those people.

Great analysis and graphics, Jeffrey. Now, consider where those scientific and technical jobs are based. The vast majority in the Dayton area, I will bet, are based either at WPAFB as civilian employees, or employed by AFB contractors in the Fairborn and Beavercreek areas. I'm a geek (EE - software type) and I have butted my head against the local hiring scene ever since I moved back to the region. Here's my take. Basically, defense-related technology positions in the area are inaccessible to those who don't currently possess either 1) current experience in a competing or related project or 2) a current security clearance. This is true even when you have related technology experience. (My understanding is that most current clearances can be migrated from one defense contractor to another at minimal expense, but the employer has to underwrite the entire expense of the background screening conducted by the DoD if you don't already have a clearance, and that costs tens of thousands.) Lacking either of these things, you can go in for the interview, but you will not be called back and they will act like "why are you even here?" So as we discussed a while back, the local civilian defense hiring scene is a closed system of sorts. There are some employers at the research park like Kodak, and GM, Honeywell and others that employ techies. But my experience is that when you subtract out the defense related technology jobs, there is always a huge imbalance in favor of the employer. It's extremely difficult to be mid-career and be considered for hiring around here. In other words, there are always too damned many desperate, underemployed engineers floating around here. What I am saying was true even when IT was hot in the late 90s. Programmers and computer people were feasting in other cities and were seriously underemployed locally. It's NEVER been a good hiring scene here. In summary, Dayton is anything BUT the land of opportunity for technology professionals. I've known talented people who stayed in just horrible work situations because they couldn't find anything else. And tech entrepreneurship is very limited here. I've known of a whole raft of smaller local technology companies that were run into the ground by their managements. The pattern I've observed at several places is: early success ... get incredibly cocky... key executive dies or leaves... or, the management just decides to get stupid en masse... business implodes. The area's technology opportunities are definitely hampered by that negative locally conservative culture. A friend and I call Dayton "Silicon Valley NOT".

That's almost inspiring, y'know. :lol:

I dunno. I lived in Silicon Valley for awhile and it seemed to be culturally a very diverse area. Also a monoculture of programming dweebs. Dayton has a ton of engineers (enough to glut any job ad that is placed) but they don't really dominate the region like they do in Silicon Valley. If you stand in a teller line at the bank in Sunnyvale, you can probably hear discussions about software or hardware design. You won't get that too much around Dayton. So I don't think that this is what really influences Dayton's xenophobic local culture. I think it's more of a manifestation of the local stock of people and the local work culture and I think it has happened over a span of decades. I think most of it is the local Appalachian culture - defensive about being from the wrong side of the tracks - fused into the northern "entitled" union worker mentality. Kind of the worst characteristics of the north and the old south fused together - selfishness and materialism (the northern stuff) combined with cussedness and quick to being angered (the hillbilly attitude). So there you get traits like hatred of diversity and pride in ignorance, plus the smartassed attitude of the well fed factory worker who's "kept".

Well, you have to stay away from those dusky, funny smelling, diverse Morlocks. :evil: And I'm sure that guy will find LOTS of like-minded neighbors who feels as he does wherever he moves, whether it's Springboro, or... Springboro... Anyway... someone above implied that leaving a crappy area without trying to fix the problems is tantamount to being part of the problem. I moved out of Dayton because: If I had stayed here, my idiot high school and college friends would have dragged me down, kept me frozen at high school maturity levels, and prevented me from making new friendships. I needed a "void" to create a new life, or at least try to. (Key, Daytonians are too provincial to leave you alone without criticizing you.) I now see the difference. They're still idiots, but I have grown. Dysfunctional family (too much Daytonianism to deal with.) But mostly: the engineering jobs I found in the immediate area were low-value-added crap. Shuffling papers at a desk job at WPAFB. Or doing some nebbish stuff at NCR that wasn't even engineering. I wound up taking a job at a Bay Area computer manufacturer, and they actually had me designing stuff. I couldn't *buy* a real design job here in Dayton or Ohio at the time. So, it was kind of the area and its limited scope of opportunities that drove me out. And I didn't want to hang around and be 30 one day and realize that I was still hanging out with high school friends a la "Clerks". :cry:

This is pretty good, though. I would qualify "area" as extending beyond the city limits. I'd also ad "passive aggressive" to your list of generailzed negative traits found among the locals. Agreed. Dayton is ringed by suburbs where there is a culture of needing to feel superior to someone else. I'd sum it up as a generalized and consistent meanness and selfishness. I think it may perhaps be partially the result of entitlement mentality on the part of the many unionized workers in the region, soured by 35+ years of locally bad economic news due to plant closings, downsizings, poor domestic auto industry performance, etc. I know that when I grew up in Dayton, I wasn't particularly spoiled materially, but I just picked up a huge sense of entitlement, that I should "have things" and that life should be easier. It was baked into me growing up there. I had to move away to get an appreciation of how life really is. I also had many, many weird defense mechanisms and "tics", shared by classmates from Dayton, that I haven't seen in anyone from any other region. To be even pithier, Dayton has incredibly bad "karma".

I already noted the murder in the author's life. One could see this as a Dayton ghetto lifestyle that ensnared the kid. In other words, Dayton offered the opportunity and enticement to engage in risky behaviors, be set up, and murdered. So I can see the author deciding that it probably wouldn't happen elsewhere, therefore, the town is evil.

I don't presume to meet the author on his terms, but in my opinion - I grew up in Dayton in the 60s and 70s, and I deliberately "escaped" out of the area after I graduated from college and moved away from the area. Coming back and seeing Dayton through an outsider's eyes, but with the familiarity I have with the region, I see Dayton as "bad seed", an area that has turned rotten and negative. Dayton needs to die and implode and something and someone else needs to take its place. I don't mean that everyone who now tries to make Dayton better in incremental ways should not do so or that I wish they would drop dead. What I mean is that Dayton is a truly lost cause. In certain ways, the Dayton metro area is the biggest ghetto in the US - has the most prevailing "we suck and we like sucking" mentality among entrenched locals. Let's put it this way. I have lived all over the country. It's only in Dayton that someone ahead of me walking out of a store would let a glass door go behind them without holding it for the next person walking out - I was amazed to get out of Dayton and see actual common courtesy practiced toward strangers. I also remember growing up and not being able to simply converse with someone in Dayton without it being prepended with a lengthy introduction - the people here are xenophobic - if they don't know you they suspect you. And Dayton is the place (actually on Rt 201 outside of Huber Heights) where someone threw a rock the size of an egg from a truck driving in the opposite direction at my car (it landed in the back seat - I didn't know what happened until I got home.) Dayton is now where I have been merging at a quiet time of the day onto Rt 35 in Beavercreek from 675 and had a briar a$$shole in a truck exactly hold his position and not let me move out of the merge lane. I used to attend a church in Dayton. My wife and I stopped attending because the church would rather help local crackheads and methheads in their publicized high profile good works programs than a family member of ours, also a long time church member, in need. The key there was yet another bad, rotten aspect of Dayton - the clique mentality. You HAVE to be an accepted member of a ruling clique here in order to be respected or listened to. Otherwise, you're an expendable nuisance. The attitude in Dayton is just plain nasty. There are bright spots. I am not against anyone helping that community, I am not against good things that have been initiated in Dayton either. I just think Dayton is a completely lost cause. The author of that blog blames Daytonians and their laziness and apathy, and by extension blames all Daytonians. That is not fair, but on the other hand, Dayton is the least civil and friendly place I have ever lived in the US (and I have lived on both coasts and several places in the middle.)

Did anyone see this in his "About the author" statement: Behind every cynic is a broken hearted idealist. I don't condone this guy's proposals, but if I were him I could see myself wanting to see the place as the next Al-Qaeda ground zero.

Without WPAFB, western Greene could probably have resembled what northern Warren county looks like. Areas like along Dayton-Yellow Springs Rd would still be rural highways. But that would also mean that the Dayton MSA itself would have been a far smaller place now, so development would have been spotty and low intensity. I-675, "The Browne" (excuse me, "The Greene" :evil:), and a lot of the madness of southern suburban development never would have happened. What really bugs me about this in-between area of Warren County is the almost total lack of local identity. Growth in Warren county has been due to proximity and commuting patterns, not because of any strong local identity. (Huh - in the Western Star they have been documenting the possible pullout of the railroad, and in the city council they called it one of the "three pillars" of the city. A minor tourist attraction is a reason for being?) I tend to respect rooted old-timers in an area who remember "back when" because they made a decision to make a life in the local area. You just don't see independent thinkers or self reliant country types around here, just unwashed hoards who followed the real estate developers. The Lebanon area is "New Kettering", IMO. The region around West Chester and Landen are basically "Montgomery North". Middletown seems like it should have a strong local identity, and it kind of does and has a very few local boosters, but damned if I can see it when driving through or shopping there. It just seems like more "Kettering South" and it's dying rapidly (re: Towne Mall).

IMO, Greene County grew mainly because of Wright-Patterson's presence. No Wright Pat, and Greene would look like Preble County. Most of the urbanized parts of Warren County (I live there) are socially, "culturally" and economically a lot more like a southern version of Kettering or a northern version of Sharonville. IE: I saw an article in the Western Star a few years ago that seemed to indicate, for instance, that Lebanon was a place that people from the Belmont neighborhood in Dayton preferred to move to ... WTF? Warren is a sprawling suburban area that simply resembles "real" country. There are precious few value-added jobs here. The local economy mostly revolves around fossil fuel based activities like trucking. There is really no native professional class here. The idea that Warren can raid Dayton and Cincinnati for high-value growth is absurd. If I want to find a job as a software engineer I'd better plan on driving to downtown Cincinnati, up to Washington Twp or Wright-Pat, or even Columbus, and as far as I can see, it is absolutely never going to change. All the local planners here can think of are $10/hr service and logistics jobs.