Economic Development

The Dayton Development Coalition (DDC) has announced its list of priority projects for government funding requests for the year, with some pretty futuristic Air Force research at the top of the list.

Every year the coalition brings together a committee to decide on projects to advocate for in efforts to get state and federal money into the region. The goal is to unite the region around priority projects in areas including defense, health care and transportation.

The downtown Dayton Arcade has been unoccupied for more than twenty years now.

But 52-year-old Daytonian Aquetta Knight remembers a time when it was hopping.

“Everybody I knew was down there,” she says. “They were the good old days.”

Her dad was a shoe repairman in the Arcade, which also housed a fresh meat market, fresh fish, a popcorn store and a grocery. She’s like a lot of residents who want nothing more than to see it open back up.

The ground was officially broken at Dayton’s Water Street apartment development Thursday morning. The 215-unit luxury apartment complex is part of an investment partnership between Columbus-based Crawford Hoying and Dayton based Woodard Real Estate. The original plan called for fewer units and less money invested, but the project has expanded since it was first announced.

The village of Yellow Springs, on the surface, is hopping economically. Property values are headed up, and downtown vacancies are low. Antioch College is growing and just opened a renovated fitness and wellness center. But just below the surface, the village has a lot of the same issues as other parts of the region. A lack of well-paying jobs means it’s becoming more of a bedroom community.

Janet Bednarek, a professor of history at the University of Dayton, specializes in airports—and in the idea of the airport as a hub for economic growth. She thinks airports bring a lot of potential, but there are also limitations; ultimately, she says, corporations decide where they want to go, and an “if you build it, they will come” approach can backfire.

“Dayton has always tried to capitalize on the fact that we’re at the intersection of two major interstates,” says Bednarek. “It just seems like the ability to capitalize on that hasn’t seemed to happen yet.”

Dayton’s Mad River wellfield is on a grassy island in the middle of one of the city’s three major rivers. Phil Van Atta, head of Dayton’s water treatment operation, says the wellfield, where Dayton pumps up groundwater from the Great Miami Buried Valley Aquifer, is one of his favorite places. The shallow sand and gravel aquifer in some places lies just feet below the ground, and its 1.5 trillion gallons of freshwater is constantly recharging from the rivers and rainfall.