Dayton Affordability (Columbus, Cleveland, Louisville: apartments, houses, buy)

[Dayton Sux]

...and for me the question is how to adjust & live within this slow/low/no growth economy and demographic trend (which includes declining wages & salaries). This is sort of a social, cultural and quality-of-life question as much as a “numbers” question.

[SWOH]

^And that trend, although possibly magnified around here, is largely national.

We are becoming a nation filled with minimum wage workers. It's a fact, whether we like to admit it or not. It's a "service economy" (read - restaurants, retail, and related support services). Call centers, warehouses, remote sales.... that's where jobs are going.

So that's why we need minimum wage reform. It needs to be a living wage, and it needs to be adjusted with inflation. Because this is our future. Teen jobs are becoming career jobs. We need to acknowledge the reality of it before it's too late.

[ohio_peasant]

Without morphing this into a political discussion about minimum-wage, stacked deck, immigration, 1% and so forth, it does seem to me that the past 1-2 pages of this thread have supported a claim that I've being trying to assert for some time: the problem isn't specific to Dayton. The problem is with ALL cities and metro areas that are either (1) not "world class" centers like NYC, DC, SF and the like, or (2) university towns (Ann Arbor, Berkeley, even Morgantown WV).

To reiterate, pick any place in America, Midwestern or otherwise. Is it a world-class metro area? No? Is it a university town? No? Then I'd wager that it would be struggling economically.... even if the weather's great, the taxes are low, the mountains are gorgeous and the beaches are warm. We are seeing a great sorting into glamorous places, and everything else. Dayton's only sin is that it's part of the everything else.

A similar thing happened in Russia. Moscow is doing fabulously well. St. Petersburg is doing semi-OK. Every other place is in trouble. If you're in Novosibirsk, Yaroslavl, Volgograd, Vladivostok, Nizhnii Novgorod - doesn't matter... you're part of "the rest". There was a national sorting-out, with winners and losers essentially foreordained.

[Tarheel8406]

There seem to be plenty of places in America that are doing well though, despite not being a college town or part of a world-class metro. This article provides a chart for the top ten metros with highest growth in GDP. 7 of the 10 aren't large metros or college towns. (The article also talks about how population growth doesn't necessarily lead to GDP growth, which might be of relevance to the Dayton area.) Another way to measure how well a city or region is doing is to look at its unemployment rate. The BLS released the unemployment rates for MSAs in May, and you can access them here. (At 5.3%, the Dayton MSA was actually doing better than the national average, which was 6.3% then.) There are plenty of places with unemployment rates lower than the national average that aren't college towns or part of a larger world-class metro.

Perhaps there's another way to measure a city or a region's economic strength that I'm missing? Or should we distinguish between the economic health of a city and that of the region?

[hensleya1]

Originally Posted by Tarheel8406

Perhaps there's another way to measure a city or a region's economic strength that I'm missing? Or should we distinguish between the economic health of a city and that of the region?

Outside of possibly this forum and a couple other Ohio-based urban discussion forums (ahem)... it's pretty much undisputed that the city of Dayton is holding the region back. Take a look at the development patterns... even with the new developments downtown (Water Street, CareSource) any development downtown is being far outstripped by things happening in the suburbs. I just read that there's another 600,000 square feet of retail space going up in Centerville, and Costco is going to be a big part of that. And I guarantee it'll fill up pretty quickly.

Same thing with Austin Landing, where RG Properties almost can't get the buildings built fast enough. There's more buildings going up in Pentagon Park as well, Wright Patt just bought a whole building to themselves.

When a developer makes headlines in the suburbs, it's because tens or hundreds of housing units are proposed (such as this one in Centerville). But in Dayton it's a big deal when Charlie Simms manages to sell seven in the city limits.

Don't get me wrong, 7 townhomes is better than zero, and it's a step in the right direction. But you need to have at least ten times as much development to even keep pace with the suburbs, much less stop losing ground to them.

***

Meanwhile, in Dayton...

I'm not convinced Water Street will bring any new residents to down, it'll just rearrange the deck chairs. The primary tenant in Water Street is going to be PNC Bank. In doing so, they're going to vacate the building they currently occupy at 2nd and Main, with no replacement tenant lined up.

Go over to Brown Street, and Miller-Valentine can't even fill up the spaces along Brown Street and they've had what, four or five years to do? That corner lot at Brown and Stewart lay empty the entire three years I went to UD.

It's also why I have doubts about Miller-Valentine's plan to develop the fairgrounds. It on paper is a good plan... but will the tenants come?

[SWOH]

MV's Brown St development is a conundrum. Should have filled fast, I'm guessing the rent they wanted was too high.

I will say though it's amazing the type and quality of restaurants the Brown St corridor has. I'm always in awe when I visit up there after being in Oxford for a while. We can't even get a Panera! And yet Miami is over 2x the size of UD. Go figure...

As for downtown, housing occupancy is right at 100%. More housing units were built within Dayton city limits than anywhere else in the Miami Valley. And Dayton's population increased last year for the first time in recent memory. The Landing, for instance, had maintained a couple month long waiting list for years. People want to be downtown. The key is providing the right places to live. Water St won't be shuffling deck chairs. And for the town houses, I just hope Simms never tries to build them at the Patterson Co-OP HS site. Then I will throw a fit. That spot should be used for a far higher density building.

[jfre81]

Originally Posted by ohio_peasant

Without morphing this into a political discussion about minimum-wage, stacked deck, immigration, 1% and so forth, it does seem to me that the past 1-2 pages of this thread have supported a claim that I've being trying to assert for some time: the problem isn't specific to Dayton. The problem is with ALL cities and metro areas that are either (1) not "world class" centers like NYC, DC, SF and the like, or (2) university towns (Ann Arbor, Berkeley, even Morgantown WV).

I would add a third section, locations with a local/regional energy boom going. I offer Pittsburgh as an example. Same with North Dakota. Houston, too, but its economy is mostly based on the energy sector. Whether Houston is "world class" is a popular debate elsewhere on c-d. I'm told this is also running up RE prices in places like Wheeling, W. Va, by contacts who live around there.

Dayton, still, is none of this.

[SWOH]

^True. Even Youngstown is starting to boom now because of that shale.

[ohio_peasant]

Agreed, resource-extraction and energy are an excellent route towards regional growth. This has been happening for centuries. The question is whether a city or region buoyed by resource-extraction manages to diversify and to reinvent itself after the resource runs out. California, from what I gather, was put on the map by the gold-rush of the 1840s. The gold didn't last forever, but other factors did. And while California as a state groans from budget crises and a risibly high tax burden, it boasts three world-class cities (SF, LA and SD) and remains a thriving place to live.

Shale-oil is a promising potential rejuvenation for Ohio and Pennsylvania. But what comes after? Will formerly moribund cities rise again and prosper for several decades, only to revert to inexorable decline once the oil is pumped out or alternative energy finally becomes a serious competitor to fossil-fuels?

Some places have a knack for reinventing themselves. Exhibit A is Chicago... a dirty, sprawling city with high taxes, poor schools, brutal climate, surrounded by miles of nothingness. The mills have fallen silent and the hogs are now butchered in compounds hundreds of miles away, yet the city not merely endures - it thrives. If Youngstown (or Dayton!) gets a second act, how will it acquit itself?

[RustBeltOptimist]

Grand Rapids, Michigan is the counterexample you'd be looking for to a small Midwestern city that isn't struggling and doesn't have a world class university or oil shale. I suppose Rochester MN, also technically would fit the qualifications as UM-Rochester isn't that great overall, but obviously due to the Mayo Clinic it shares common traits with university centered development in cities like Ann Arbor. Of the anomalies, there are a few reasons that cities like Grand Rapids and Omaha, NE are successful, but most have to do with the types of amenities found rather than tax rates, as both are relatively high in that department. I think one reason that sticks out is because they've invested more in their contemporary arts over the long term, providing a sort of stickiness for the young and talented and in my opinion ultimately helped keep key companies like Meijer and Bissell, whereas cities like Dayton fell into the 1980's era idea that community driven and amateur arts would be as effective and more cost efficient.

If you look at the history of Dayton's Alternative Spaces residency program compared to Grand Rapids' history with public arts and art festivals, you see a stark contrast. One city pipe-bombed a work, had others dismantled or moved out of sight and first watered down and eventually scrapped the investment, whereas the other embraced it. I don't mean to imply that soft amenities like the arts are more important than STEM building or VC develoment, but they certainly tend to show up in differences between cities when it comes to long term retention of employers and property values.

Cities need to know how to strike a balance between the hard and soft draws, and they need to better know what each type of art retains: symphonies, operas and museums hold old money in a city well; zoos and parks hold families; but the young need a variety of new art and music, an actual living arts economy, a crowd which can extend the hours a city's nighttime venues remain profitable, creating more buzz and vibe about a city.

Just my two cents as somebody who looks to these cities trying to understand what makes each tick or not.