SITE OVERVIEW ♦ DAYTON | OHIO
Target Area: East End • Population: 16,500
Fiscal Agent: East End Community Services
Research Partner: University of Dayton Business Research Group
Crime Concerns: Robbery, aggravated assaults, homicides, and other violent crimes
BCJI Funding Year: 2012 Planning & Enhancement
Neighborhood Profile
The East End neighborhood is in a period of transition with changing demographics and increased poverty impacting a once stable community. The target area also suffers from various systemic challenges including a rapidly declining population and economic base, high levels of blight and housing vacancies, and high crime. For example, total crime in the city of Dayton has decreased by 17 percent since 2009 whereas crime in the target area has decreased by only seven percent. Recently, heroin use has been a particularly challenging driver of local crime, especially prostitution and theft. Both businesses and residents comment regularly about the chronic problem with prostitution and its impact on the entire community.
Planning Process
Led by the community development organization East End Community Services, the Dayton BCJI planning effort ran from April to September 2013. Since its inception, the Dayton effort emphasized addressing crime as a crucial component of the overall effort to redevelop East End. With that in mind at the start of the process, East End leaders contacted more than 33 community and neighborhood organizations to establish a cross-sector partnership committed to pursuing research-informed strategies to stabilize the community. Researchers helped these partners examine data including court records, arrest information, and dispatch calls for service to help identify patterns and hot spots. The team also conducted a NeighborWorks USA Resident Experience survey with a random sample of 200 households in the community.
Planning findings underscored the interconnectedness of problems – such as the extent to which women involved with prostitution are addicted to drugs, and the extent to which theft incidents are directly related to heroin use. In fact, the team discovered that 92 percent of all property crime in the area was connected to heroin use in one way or another. These findings reinforced the commitment of the partners to a collaborative approach guided by research for implementation as well as ongoing problem analysis.
Goals of the project involved identifying targeted and evidence-based responses to specific crime problems to include:
- Offering broad youth engagement programs, particularly early childhood and kindergarten readiness;
- Providing family events that nurture children and parents and aid them in achieving their full potential through educational topics;
- Arranging cultural celebrations that unite parents and families of different backgrounds; and
- Developing safe and attractive housing with improved business corridors through targeted demolition and blight removal.
Implementation Strategies
Although the Dayton BCJI team is wrapping up its BCJI work, crime prevention and community building efforts will continue. In spring 2015, their focus was on developing a commercial revitalization strategy for a main commercial thoroughfare in the community. With support from LISC’s technical assistance resources, East End worked with expert Larisa Ortiz to assess market conditions and commercial development potential to augment residential development - 84 new homes built by East End CS in the community between 2010 and 2013. These and other neighborhood transformation efforts have increasingly involved local residents, as exemplified by local Youth Advisory Council students taking part in a recent Spring Break Cleanup.
In agreement with the BCJI project goals, East End Community Services operates an innovative parent education program called Taking Off to Success (TOTS), which provides 12 weeks of education to parents, from pregnancy to kindergarten. Parents are provided education regarding stages of child development, ways to stimulate learning, positive parenting and conscious discipline. In addition, its youth programming improves academic success and reduce risky behaviors using best practices for youth development. Through participation at the Youth Center, pre-teens, adolescents, and young adults build crucial skills, assets, and resiliency factors that to help them make positive decisions.
Furthermore, the Anti-Graffiti Task Force was created to tackle areas with a great deal of graffiti tags. Officers, along with volunteers from the East End Community Center, have already cleaned off graffiti and created murals on vacant buildings near Harbine Avenue and East Third Street and will paint five more murals this summer. The Dayton Police Department also hosts regular Dayton Coffee with a Cop events so that residents may ask questions, voice concerns, and become familiar with the officers in the neighborhood.
Featuring This Site
- Watch this webinar featuring Dayton’s strategies to address crime problems linked to vacant and abandoned properties
- View this presentation outlining Dayton’s approach to addressing opioid abuse in their target area, part of the Federal Innovation Exchange webinar.
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