“One outhouse serves as many as 20 families,” a 1954 Dayton Daily News article reported.
The Madden Hills urban renewal project replaced Hog Bottom, but the problems of poverty and social blight never left. Today, it’s like no other place in the Miami Valley — for undesirable reasons.
Amid the 7,000 residents here in the Pineview, Highview Hills and Madden Hills neighborhoods sits a landfill, a men’s homeless shelter, a halfway house and a state prison — all within a mile radius along South Gettysburg Avenue. The nearest supermarkets are about 15 minutes away.
As part of Gov. John Kasich’s plan to plug a $7.7 billion budget deficit, he wants to turn the all-men’s Dayton Correctional Institution into an all-women’s prison, and increase the number of inmates there to 960.
To some in the neighborhood, who were told back in the 1980s that a 99-year lease capped the inmate population at 500, it is all too much. They also believe it is no accident that the neighborhood is nearly 93 percent black, with half its residents living in poverty.
“Could you imagine Beavercreek with a landfill you can smell when the wind blows, a homeless shelter and a prison?” said Archie Lewis, a Pineview resident and former Dayton Public Schools board member.
Neighborhoods like this one line America’s aging cities. From Greensboro, N.C., to Philadelphia and Detroit, low-income, largely black communities are prime sites for the “Not in my Backyard” necessities of modern living.
“It’s easy to locate stuff in these neighborhoods if residents don’t have political power and are not organized,” said Kathryn Hexter, community planning director for Cleveland State University’s College of Urban Affairs. “You see these types of things wherever you have disenfranchised residents with little capacity to fight it.”
Ellis Jacobs, an attorney and board member for the watchdog nonprofit Ohio Citizen Action, agreed the social blight shouldered by southwest Dayton residents has “racial undertones.” In 2003, he helped the nearby residents of Jefferson Twp. beat back a U.S. Army plan to dispose of a nerve gas agent there.
“I know people in western Montgomery County feel they get dumped on routinely,” he said. “An example is if you look at the best site for a landfill, geologically that site would be in southeast Dayton.”
Jacobs said Dayton’s low-income neighborhoods have had less political clout throughout history.
“Then you have a particular community seen as a place where you can do this kind of stuff,” he said. “People say, well the land is cheaper over there, and then you ask well why is the land cheaper over there?
“It becomes a compounding problem that generates itself.”
Jobs but a stigma
Dayton Correctional Institution has long brought something much needed to these southwest Dayton neighborhoods — employment. About half of the 300 people who work at the prison live in the city, and some live mere blocks from the 75-acre facility.
But not everyone in the neighborhood is happy with the prison, and that sense of frustration emerged Thursday night at a community forum at Wogaman Elementary School attended by neighborhood residents, prison employees and Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction officials. Some residents complained that the prison contributes to depressed property values and drives away potential home buyers.
“We can’t convince those that can leave to stay,” Lewis said. “And young families don’t want to move here, and who can blame them.”
Census data suggest the problems of population decline and income loss may be getting worse. The three neighborhoods surrounding the prison lost about 1,600 mostly black residents since 2000 and the median income dipped slightly to about $20,000.
Corrections officials have amended their original plan to put 1,600 women inmates at DCI. The plan now calls for moving the prison’s 800 low-security male prisoners to other facilities and replacing them with 960 women. About 200 of the women will be what prison officials call “level-three” violent offenders.
The plan is necessary, state corrections officials argue, because of the high cost of fulfilling the lease that was signed as a condition for locating the prison in an inner-city neighborhood. Prison officials maintain that housing an inmate in Dayton costs $88 per day compared to the state average of $65. The high costs come because the inmate-to-corrections officer at DCI is nearly 5-to-1, compared to 8-to-1 and even 10-to-1 at some facilities, according to Carlo LoParo, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.
LoParo said the state will get Dayton’s costs more in line by closing the Montgomery County Pre-Release Center on the prison grounds and transferring adult parole workers leasing space in downtown Dayton to that building.
The original 500-inmate cap, which was adjusted to 800 in 1994, would have to be revised again to accommodate the state’s plan.
Corrections officials hinted again Thursday that if the city doesn’t approve the plan, Dayton’s facility could close and the 300 jobs eliminated.
LoParo said Friday the state plans to eliminate positions at DCI over time through attrition, meaning there could be fewer jobs there in years to come.
A magnet for sex offenders
At the community forum Thursday, Jacqueline Drew held back tears as she held up 20 white pieces of paper.
Each paper was a notification that a sex offender is living in her neighborhood.
Drew, a former attorney, recognizes sex offenders have nothing to do with the prison. But she sees the addition of inmates there — male or female — as another neighborhood injustice.
“We have been betrayed in every way,” she said. “What you are trying to do breaks faith with the community.”
There are 88 sex offenders registered at 50 locations within a two-mile radius of the shelter and abutting prison, according to the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office.
A majority of them are registered at a halfway house at 1931 S. Gettysburg Ave. that helps offenders integrate back into society.
Drew and other residents like Mary Whitehill that have lived in the area for decades say the homeless shelter has become the area’s biggest problem.
The shelter opened in 2009 and houses about 240 men. Run by St. Vincent DePaul, the shelter does not allow sex offenders.
Since its opening the Dayton Police Department has been called there more than any other address in the city, responding to numerous complaints of panhandling, public intoxication, theft, trespassing and harassment, according to police records.
Rob Andrews, director of operations for St. Vincent DePaul, said his staff has been meeting with the community and police to work through the issues.
“I think there will always be some hard feelings about things that have been placed in that neighborhood,” he said. “We are not denying the incidents have occurred.”
Andrews said shelter officials will try harder to ease the community’s concerns.
“We have worked diligently to try and mitigate the problems,” he said. “We have organized neighborhood cleanups and gone through the park and we cleaned up along Gettysburg, so we’re doing some good things.”
Dayton City Commissioner Dean Lovelace, who lives in the neighborhood, is concerned about what he considers a form of economic bigotry: using black neighborhoods like this one for landfills, halfway houses and homeless shelters.
He said he understands the residents’ frustrations.
But he also knows the community needs an economic boost.
“In regards to the prison, we are talking about jobs,” Lovelace said. “And these are good jobs and good people.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2494 or lsullivan@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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