Dayton: The Rise, Decline, and Transition of an Industrial City

by Adam A. Millsap

Overview

The Rust Belt was once the crown of American manufacturing, a symbol of the country's economic prowess. But now it is named for what it has become: a deteriorating stretch of industrial cities left behind by a post-industrial world. In Dayton: The Rise, Decline, and Transition of an Industrial City, Adam A. Millsap turns his focus to his hometown, an archetypal Rust Belt city, to examine its history and discuss its future.
Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, Millsap's book explores the economic background of the region made famous by J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. From early twentieth-century optimism, through the Great Depression and post-WWII manufacturing decline, to Dayton now, with its labor-force problems and opioid crisis, Millsap tracks the underlying forces driving the city's trajectory. Race relations, interstates, suburbanization, climate, crime, geography, and government policies all come into play as Millsap develops a picture of the city, past and present. By examining the past, Millsap proposes a plan for the future, claiming that there is hope for Dayton to thrive again. And if Dayton can rise from its industrial ashes, then perhaps the Rust Belt can shed its stigma and once again become the backbone of American innovation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814255551
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	11/06/2019
Edition description:	1
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

A Dayton native, Adam A. Millsap is Senior Fellow at the Charles Koch Institute in Arlington, Virginia. His op-eds and commentary have appeared nationally in USA Today, U.S. News & World Report, Forbes, and the BBC, as well as local publications such as the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Orange County Register. He is a Senior Affiliated Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

Read an Excerpt

On the surface Dayton appears to be a typical midwestern Rust-Belt city, but an analysis of its past reveals its exceptionalism. Though today it’s not as prominent as some of its larger Rust-Belt brethren such as Cleveland or Detroit, in the early twentieth century it was a well-known hub of innovation. In 1900 its residents generated more patents per capita than any other large US city, and a few years later Dayton natives Orville and Wilbur Wright—inventors of the first practical flying machine—became two of the most popular people in the world, making their hometown famous.

Yet despite Dayton’s early success, its history provides the quintessential example of a Rust-Belt city’s life cycle: rapid population growth as the country transitioned from an agricultural economy to an industrial one; relative decline as people left cities for the suburbs; and finally absolute decline as people and jobs left the region altogether for the warmer climates, cheaper housing, and freer economies of the Sunbelt. Today a period of stagnation has set in that has left city officials and residents searching for ways to reclaim previous prosperity.

Before going any further, it’s important to define some terms that show up in this book. Metropolitan statistical areas (MSA), or metro areas, are defined by the Office of Management and Budget and consist of a group of counties that together form a common labor market. Economists often study MSAs rather than political cities since the economic forces that govern the formation and growth of dense clusters of people—that is, cities—typically work across political boundaries. This book, however, focuses on the city of Dayton, or what economists typically denote the “political city” or “central city,” and when the word city is used in this book it means the political or central city.

There are several reasons why I focus on the city of Dayton rather than the broader metro area. First, city decline is more shocking and interesting. The population declines of big cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo are well known and economists and other researchers have spent decades trying to explain them. In this book I apply their findings to the city of Dayton.

The second reason is that the city or municipal government is the most local level of government in the United States. In addition to helping people understand why cities like Dayton declined, I also offer some recommendations for how cities like Dayton can bounce back. There are no metropolitan area governments in Ohio, but the state does have a robust home-rule law that gives a lot of authority to city officials. Thus, many of the policies that can help Dayton are going to be implemented at the city level, and that is where I focus.

Finally, the most successful metro areas also have successful central cities. Because of their larger populations and economies, central cities have a significant influence on the smaller surrounding cities that make up the metro area. It’s hard to picture the broader Dayton metro area thriving without a healthy city of Dayton.

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Chapter 1            Why do big cities exist?

Chapter 2            Dayton from the turn of the 20th century to 1930: A period of optimism

Chapter 3            The Dayton Area 1930-1960: Relative Decline

Chapter 4            Dayton from 1960 to 2010: A period of decline

Chapter 5            Dayton’s finances and Public-Sector Unions

Chapter 6            Dayton’s Economy Today and What It Can Do to Thrive Again

Chapter 7            Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Index

About the Author

Editorial Reviews

"Adam Millsap's Dayton: The Rise, Decline, and Transition of an Industrial City has delivered a tour de force in timely, relevant, and insightful urban economic history. Dayton, Ohio, was an innovation hub at the turn of the twentieth century, and its rise and decline is a sobering story that both reinforces and challenges contemporary ideas about how innovation shapes and sustains urban development and policy. The book is much more than a case study; it's a layered and sophisticated window into the past, and it has implications for understanding cities today and tomorrow." --Samuel R. Staley, PhD, Director of the DeVoe L. Moore Center at Florida State University

"Millsap tackles the question: What happens many years after a city triumphs? Like many Rust Belt cities, Dayton, once a hub for innovation during America's golden age of manufacturing, now faces an unclear future. As he shows, a city is not created from above nor conjured from government programs--it emerges and changes shape based on the countless interactions of people who are drawn to its potential and opportunities. The future of Dayton lies in allowing a new generation of innovators, entrepreneurs, and migrants, to unlock new possibilities in the life of the city." --Eileen Norcross, VP for Policy Research at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University

From the Publisher