We talk a lot about income inequality and the urban-rural divide. I’ve kept coming back to this area because I think Dayton is representative of a whole swath of our country today. The county it’s part of backed Donald Trump – the first time a Republican had won there in 28 years. The city itself would go for Hillary Clinton. I came back several times in early 2016, for an article I was doing on what was happening in the country’s politics that year. Donald Trump has won the state of Ohio.It’s just going to cause some economic, just destruction to this area.ALEC MACGILLIS, Senior Reporter, ProPublica: I first came to Dayton as a reporter in 2012.Now more than a third of the people in this city are living in poverty.Dayton is a place that believed in: You work hard, you play by the rule, and good things will come to your family. And remember, this was the place that just a few decades ago was an epitome of, of American wealth and prosperity and ingenuity. So how did all this happen in a country that is supposedly at the crest of an economic recovery? The poverty rate in Dayton is 34.5 percent, which is nearly three times the poverty rate nationwide. They’re ground zero of a drug epidemic that’s on pace to claim another six lives before this film is over. They’re heavily concentrated in our political battleground states and are at the heart of the national debate about trade and employment. They don’t seem to matter as much now, but they do.
![]() You know my parents, my dad worked at General Motors. I, I’m a product of the American dream. Right? They believe your child could do better. This assessment of Dayton is hard to reconcile with the city’s extraordinary past. And no, I don’t think that she’ll get there. And so the cost of college will be out of reach for her. Right?What a day for picking daisies and lots of red balloons.I don’t know if a girl that’s 20 years younger than me, her dad’s not going to get paid the kind of wage and have the kind of pension my dad had. My brother is an attorney. We all know about the Wright Brothers, of course, who got their start making bicycles in Dayton. It was the center of aviation, it was the center of automotive inventions, and it was the center of a great many lesser inventions, which collectively brought form to the American 20th century.Orville Wright piloted the crude flying machine in the now-classic 140-foot, 12-second first flight. It was the center of the most important inventions. When World War II broke out, Dayton’s heavy industries retooled for the war effort – rubber, auto parts, airplane gears, propellers, all indispensable, and all manufactured in Dayton.General Motors has pioneered in applying mass production methods to the manufacture of bombers – bombers to blast the way for our fighting forces. There were 70 or 80,000 good-paying union jobs in Dayton, Ohio. That NCR family spirit is no bunk.What happened in Dayton was innovation became industry, became General Motors, became Delco, became National Cash Register. You feel it anywhere you go in the plant. One of the most important was the cash register, which revolutionized the retail business and made National Cash Register a dominant presence in Dayton.Look at the spirit around here. Sensing opportunity, people were pouring in to Dayton. Tens, hundreds of millions of Americans over time became owners of housing for the first time. The middle class and those at the bottom saw their incomes rise more quickly than those at the top. HACKER, Yale University:If you look at the period from roughly the 1930s to the 1970s, you had a period of broad-based prosperity. YAHKAH, Cardozo School of Law:And then, sadly, things get ugly fast. By 1960, the city’s population reached 262,000.PROFESSOR EKOW N. The department stores are open. The retail stores are open. This is Dayton on a Monday night or a Wednesday night. Outlook show notification for subfolders macSo you’re consumed quite rationally with making sure that all your tax dollars help your suburban school district. Right? One, you’re no longer invested in what goes on in the city. And that means a bunch of things happen. And people were were not comfortable with their new neighbors.And so we get the first round of white flight. A lot of the new workers that came to Dayton were black, coming up as part of the Great Migration from the South. So then an African-American who could afford to buy the home where the great school was or that was close to a park or et cetera, et cetera, couldn’t. That’s what we call redlining. And many black families who wanted to move to the suburbs and other parts of town found the door blocked.Banks literally drew lines around neighborhoods to decide which African-Americans were going to get loans for which homes. The pathologies of urban life consumed communities. It’s a public housing complex in a crime-ridden neighborhood.Before you all eat, I need you all to say your prayers. Mike and Willa Strickland and her six boys live in West Dayton’s Hilltop Homes. And that has become the new normal in West Dayton. We have lost our business. We are losing our hospital. You know, the typical house with the two kids, a dog and a white picket fence.Now we have dilapidated housing. Iphone 7 emulator for macWilla had just started working in customer service for an insurance company. And it was just like really overwhelming.Well, at the time, we just had one income coming into the house so it was, it was… We could be able to afford it but it was like we couldn’t afford to pay anything else, you know what I’m saying, and take care of the kids. It was very different because they dealt with the outbreak of like bedbugs and something called scabies that I never knew nothing about. Then I came back when I graduated high school. I moved when I was about eight, so I didn’t really kind of grow up my older days here. My dad, he was a, he was a chemist and my mom, she was a registered nurse.If you already had food, you should have said you had food already before I gave you that.I grew up right here on the west end of town. They both had good, decent jobs. Now it’s just like a ghost town.
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