Just for fun:

That's a reduced size.  Click here for a bigger size.  (I have a much larger size than that one, too... 8 feet per pixel I think.)

 

It's a bit dated- from 2000 I think.  But it's still interesting to see some stuff.  Like how only about half the county is urbanized.  (A little land visible near the edges is in adjoining counties, but most of the open land here is Montgomery County.)  So much more room for sprawl! :jo:

hey i think i see the inlaws house in centerville!

 

great job getting yourself up in that spaceship pigboy! you friends with that dick rutan guy or do you have some kind of top secret wright-pat connection? ha!

 

 

 

 

 

Its' interesting that the metro is shifted to that Clark/Greene/Montgomery/Miami county line-area.

Alot of available land to develope.

Intresting to see the 1x1 sq mile roads.  That is probably how the land was sold off years ago.

 

Interesting photo.  Western Montgomery County is still pretty sparsely populated and very rural just like Preble County, but I gather that most of the people who live there want to keep it that way.  I remember years ago some of the westernmost townships were talking about trying to detach themselves from Montgomery County and attach themselves to Preble County in an effort to avoid the fate of Trotwood and reduce taxes.  There was also a great deal of opposition to the idea of building a western loop expressway that would mirror I-675 but link I-75 with I-70 to the west of Dayton.  They feared that the expressway would bring sprawl, as it inevitably would.  It's bound to happen sooner or later, but I guess they hope it will be later.

Very interesting!  I, too, was surprised at how undeveloped a lot of the western Montgomery Co. "cities" like Clayton and Trotwood are.  Then west of Diamond Mill Rd. it seems like there's absolutely nothing save for a couple of smaller towns.

Very cool!  You can see my high school (Stebbins), neighborhood (Forest Ridge), and my parents' house  :-)

By the way, the image here is 25 long on each side, in case anyone's interested in distances and land area.

 

I wish I had one of Greene County, too, so they could be put together to cover most of the metro except Springfield... plus I could see my house!  Back when Mapquest had aerial photos, I started piecing together a Beavercreek picture and got mostly finished, so I do have that.  At least this photo contains enough of the edge of Greene County to include the future location of "Greene Town Center" or "The Greene" or whatever they're calling it now! :|

what part of the 'creek do you live in?

I live near Shakertown & N. Fairfield Rd. (when not away at school, that is)

Sweet Jesus - look at all the cul-de-sacs. They look like some sort of festering bacterial infection!

Is that just a paper map???

 

If you go to www.loraincountyauditor.com and make an account you can view an interactive map of the LORAIN county... (you can zoom in on individual homes and buildings).  Its actually really cool.

 

I believe the website has been down for the last couple weeks.. but its worth checking out

There is a large section of Beavercreek missing.  The second Wright Patt runway and Fairfield Commons is chopped off.  The is a large secton of sprawl missing.

Is that just a paper map???

 

If you go to www.loraincountyauditor.com and make an account you can view an interactive map of the LORAIN county... (you can zoom in on individual homes and buildings). Its actually really cool.

 

I believe the website has been down for the last couple weeks.. but its worth checking out

It's not a paper map; it's saved from a GIS orthophoto layer.

I didn't look at the Lorain County site, but there are a number of counties that have GIS property information maps online, where you can see aerial photos as well as property lines, etc.  Is that what the Lorain County site is?

 

There is a large section of Beavercreek missing. The second Wright Patt runway and Fairfield Commons is chopped off. The is a large secton of sprawl missing.

Yeah, there's a bunch of sprawl missing because it's not in Montgomery County.  Perhaps I'll try to assemble a picture of the Greene County suburbs.

All right, I have nothing better to do, and the other day I shelled out money for Keyhole, so:

Here is most of the rest of the Dayton metro, i.e. the Greene County suburbs (Fairborn, Beavercreek, Bellbrook/Sugarcreek Township, as well as WPAFB).  No Xenia though, which is immediately off the right edge of this photo in the middle, if Xenia even counts as a suburb.  This is at a different scale than the Montgomery County pictures (that's probably obvious).

Hey!  I can see my cousin's cul-de-sac!

I can see my office building in between Colonel Glenn and I-675 :)

no

The Beavercreek/Bellbrook one is neat.  Nice overview of the patterns of new developement there.

 

I didnt realize there are so many golf courses in BC, esp that one on the southwest corner of the interchange between US 35 & I-675

 

And you can see the transition from the township & range survey system to the metes and bounds system at the Little Miami River.

 

 

So whats the consensus?  Xenia a suburb of Dayton?  I vote "yes".

 

The place was tied into Dayton viat two interurban lines...one, the Dayton-Xenia, lasted till the 1930s.  There is an antique add for it over in the Spaghetti Warehouse in downtown Dayton. 

 

Beavercreek actually has some suburban developement that predates WWII, possibly related to this interurban line?

 

 

And you can see the transition from the township & range survey system to the metes and bounds system at the Little Miami River.

 

Yeah, that's pretty cool!

 

P.S> I vote that Xenia is indeed a suburb of Dayton.  All we need is a little bit to fill in along US-35 in the Trebein area near the airport, and then it will be sealed.

Aerial shots are so cool.  I could stare at them for hours.

I guess I'll agree that Xenia is effectively a suburb of Dayton.  This calls for yet another picture (again, I'm sure this is a different scale).

Xenia is definately a suburb of Dayton.

Xenia has a cool layout.

your second aerial photo proves that the Air Force museum is in Riverside,

not Fairborn so take that Skyhawks!!!  :-D

 

just kidding, I know the Air Force Museum isn't in any city, but Riverside

is the "Gateway" to the museum (and Spring St. is one hell of an ugly

gateway).

 

Has the US-35 by-pass around Xenia sped up the sprawl between Xenia and

Dayton?

Not really.  The sprawl was inevitable along Fairfield and that Alpha/Car Dealership Lane of Doom regardless.

Go Page Manor!

Go Page Manor!

 

Not anymore.  Its been privatized & renamed The Prairies. And its being torn down and rebuilt.

 

Xenia has that spokes of a wheel layout..with the roads coming in from the country.  I  think other towns in the old VMD have similar layouts....Washington CH and Marysville.

 

I think you can see the Central State/Wilborforce campus northeast of Xenia on that aerial.  I didn't realize they where so close to town.

just kidding, I know the Air Force Museum isn't in any city, but Riverside

is the "Gateway" to the museum (and Spring St. is one hell of an ugly

gateway).

 

Springfield Street and the old part of Riverside is an interesting example of changing road alignments and early suburbia.  Alot of the development along Springfield Street was 1920s era, perhaps related to the location of the Wright Field in the late 20s.  And there was an interurban line running through the area more or less parallelling Springfield St, so perhaps this was an early driver of developement, too. 

 

The place started out, though, in the 19th century as a rural villiage called Harshmanville (some of which still exists).

 

 

Go Page Manor!

 

Not anymore. Its been privatized & renamed The Prairies. And its being torn down and rebuilt.

 

I think you can see the Central State/Wilborforce campus northeast of Xenia on that aerial. I didn't realize they where so close to town.

 

Oh, well.  I didn't have any real connection to Page Manor...I just rode by it a few times.

 

P.S> Yes, that's Central State and Wilberforce on US-42 in that pic.  It's pretty close--maybe a mile and a half out of the Xenia city limits.

 

 

It's not a paper map; it's saved from a GIS orthophoto layer.

I didn't look at the Lorain County site, but there are a number of counties that have GIS property information maps online, where you can see aerial photos as well as property lines, etc.  Is that what the Lorain County site is?

 

Yes it it, you can also click on individual properites and get a photo of the building, the property value, transfer history, ect...

 

Its really convienent, especially when house hunting  :-)

 

But I think the site is still not working.. I'm not sure why. Should be working soon.

The main reason western Montgomery County looks so undeveloped is because Dayton was founded on the banks of the Great Miami River which is on the eastern half of the county. Add to that, the lack of an expressways on the western end of Dayton up until the Trotwood Connector was completed a few years ago.

 

I lived in Madison Twp before it became Trotwood for 20 years and there was hardly little if any development going on. Since the connector has been finished, I have seen a lot of development starting around it. Give it a good ten years and I'm sure it will start sprawling out like everything else. My hopes is that Trotwood will eventually raze the Drexel area and build new housing there. I think that would be a good jump start for west-end development.

That 3rd Street corridor was one of Daytons early streetcar suburbs. 

 

"Drexel Park" was actually the first developement out there, platted prior to WWI...then later plats followed, like Residence Park, Ridgewood Heights, etc, through the "teens & 'twentys. The place probably looked like a promising new suburbia back then...

 

Yet for some reason the real estate market out there just collapsed...it looks like it was frozen in some sort of time warp from the 1930s..as if the real estate market died in the Great Depression and never recovered.  Almost no postwar suburban subdivisions at all (execept a few off of Germantown Rd) and minimal postwar commerical developement too (except for "West Town" in Residence Park).  You drive in on US 35 through open country and boom you are in town.

 

I really wonder what the history is of that area?  One would have expected the real estate market to have revived there after WWII, as it did eslewhere in suburban Dayton.

 

 

I'm giving this a bump (and restoring the image link that I broke recently) because of a recent discovery.

 

I'll cut to the chase first.  This is a map of the outlines of all the buildings in the county, which I think is another interesting way of viewing the development patterns in Montgomery County.  It's based on the same orthophoto I originally posted, which unfortunately means that anything built more recently than 2000 is not included.  Basically you can see the same things as with the orthophoto, but with all the non-building clutter removed some patterns become clearer.  I think it's easier to compare built densities, for example.

 

PLEASE CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO SEE THE FULL SIZE!  It's a lot easier to see things in the full size image, but it's too large to comfortably include in this post.

 

The "discovery" I mentioned is that I just found out that the Montgomery County Auditor's web site has the usual set of GIS layers available to download, which is unusual enough in my experience, but even moreso because the site doesn't seem to have one of those handy viewers like many other counties have.  The building outlines is one of the layers, and obviously you can zoom in much more than I have shown on this map.  Perhaps the biggest prize is an orthophoto of the entire county at 6-inch resolution (but grayscale and 6 years old). 

 

If anyone besides me is into this kind of thing, the files are here: http://www.mcauditor.org/downloads/gis_filedownload.cfm.  Be warned, though, a couple of them are HUGE.  (The orthophoto was 630 MB.)

 

There are also files with real estate data, if anyone's interested in that: http://www.mctreas.org/filedownloads.cfm

Interesting stuff Andy, nice find.