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Report: Dayton Could See Spike In Downtown Housing Units

Many Dayton businesses are struggling amid the coronavirus emergency.
Juliet Fromholt
/
WYSO

A new analysis of downtown Dayton’s real estate market finds significant pent-up demand for downtown housing. If current trends continue, economic development advocates say, downtown Dayton is on track to see a doubling in the number of new apartments and condos over the next few years.

According to the group's analysis, downtown Dayton’s housing market is currently under-built.

Using data from the National Association of Realtors, the Downtown Dayton Partnership reviewed national trends in housing preference, demographics of homebuyers and renters, and patterns in similarly sized cities where urban development is outpacing Dayton’s. 

“We’ve definitely experienced a boom in the downtown housing market, but there was uncertainty in the growth potential for residential in downtown Dayton,” Scott Murphy, Downtown Dayton Partnership vice president of economic development, says. “We conducted this study to address that uncertainty by estimating the depth of the residential market, and we’re very pleased to see that we have significant potential to grow the downtown neighborhood.”

Occupancy rates are already high despite an increase in housing stock, which the partnership says has increased 20 percent since the launch of the Greater Downtown Dayton Plan in 2010. Murphy says downtown has seen $500 million in housing development over the last five years. There’s another $500 million in the pipeline.

The growth, he says, is being driven in part by nationwide demographic trends that favor city living.

“There’s a desire for walkable lifestyles: being able to walk to work and walk to entertainment. This sort of desire to live in dense urban environments has been something that has been seen nationally for quite a long time, and we are really starting to gain traction in that here in downtown Dayton.”

As a result, Murphy says, new housing units have been renting or selling quickly in recent years. There are currently just under 2,000 housing units downtown. More than half the units are market rate.

See the full report at downtowndayton.org.

Jess Mador comes to WYSO from Knoxville NPR-station WUOT, where she created an interactive multimedia health storytelling project called TruckBeat, one of 15 projects around the country participating in AIR's Localore: #Finding America initiative. Before TruckBeat, Jess was an independent public radio journalist based in Minneapolis. She’s also worked as a staff reporter and producer at Minnesota Public Radio in the Twin Cities, and produced audio, video and web stories for a variety of other news outlets, including NPR News, APM, and PBS television stations. She has a Master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York. She loves making documentaries and telling stories at the intersection of journalism, digital and social media.
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