Madden Hills Neighborhood Association President Donna Davis described the neighborhood as a “quiet oasis.” She moved to her Madden Hills home nearly 15 years ago.
“Many of the people that live in Madden Hills are aging, if you will, but we want to leave a legacy for this neighborhood, for all the potential new homeowners that are to come with their families,” Davis said.
The southwest Dayton neighborhood was developed in the 1900s, first housing residents who settled in Dayton during the Great Migration. The neighborhood now has 331 residences. Of these, more than half are owner-occupied and less than 10% are vacant, according to a five-year strategy that was approved by the Dayton city commission last week.
CityWide Development Corporation Senior Project Manager Caitlin Jacob worked with Davis and other neighborhood voices, as well as Dayton city officials, over the past few years to identify priorities for the growing neighborhood.
“We know that neighborhoods are not just housing,” Jacob said. “You have to do other things to make that housing successful. So they wanted to think, how do we wrap our arms around the housing and think about the neighborhood holistically?”
Forty new homes will be built in the Madden Hills, Fairview, Wolf Creek and Dayton View Triangle neighborhoods through next summer. Another 24 houses in these neighborhoods will see rehabilitation work as a part of a $17 million Montgomery County Land Bank program.
This housing project was fueled in part by $6.9 million in state funds through the Welcome Home Ohio program, which aims to make housing more accessible to income-restricted Ohioans.
“It’s what we’ve been working for,” Davis said. “And we see going forward as new houses are being constructed, we will build a rapport with new homeowners.”
Some key work included in the Madden Hills plan includes blight removal and clean-up efforts on the northern, southern and western borders of the neighborhood, as well as patching sidewalk gaps.
Other work will include the addition of signs at entrances to the neighborhood, and continued promotion of the neighborhood’s park as a site for community gathering.
Davis said the neighborhood association also wants to work with the city to prepare for any future development with the Madden Hills Golf Course site. The city closed the course in 2020 for budgetary reasons.
“We’re all on the same page in terms of the goals and building unity within our neighborhood. We’re just trying to do things for the greater good. So it’s good for Madden Hills, and then it’s good for Dayton,” Davis said.
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