ONLY IN THE DAYTON DAILY NEWS Daytonians report they're happy with city - mostly
Agrowing number of Dayton residents say they are satisfied with the city as a place to live and their neighborhoods, but a shrinking share of the population thinks the city is headed in the right direction, according to a survey released this week.
While these trends may seem somewhat contradictory, growing uncertainty and pessimism about the general state of the world may explain why fewer people say Dayton is on the right track, city staff said.
Many Dayton residents interviewed for this article said they believe things are getting better in the city and the areas where they live.
“I love South Park — it’s a really great neighborhood,” said Kate South, 44, who moved to the Dayton neighborhood about a year ago from the southern suburbs. “It’s really beautiful.”
A good place
Slightly more than 60% of Dayton residents said they are satisfied or very satisfied with the city as a place to live, says a survey administered for the city by the ETC Institute, which specializes in market research for government organizations.
This was the highest satisfaction level in the six years that the city has paid for a revamped survey, which most recently was completed by nearly 1,400 residents late last year.
Satisfaction with Dayton as a place to live has i ncreased a bout 13 percentage points from 2018.
Dissatisfaction in this area declined for the second consecutive year. Now, about 16% of residents say they are not happy with Dayton as a place to live.
“This is really what you want to see — this kind of divergent lines happening where dissatisfaction is getting lower and our satisfaction is getting higher, so that’s a really good story,” said Jeanette Ghand, a senior management analyst with the city.
Where people live seems to matter.
More than three-fourths of downtown residents said they are happy with Dayton as a place to live, while the lowest satisfaction level was in West Dayton, where about 57% of residents indicated they were content.
Neighborhoods
Last year, Dayton residents’ satisfaction with their neighborhoods climbed to a six-year high.
About 58% of residents said they were satisfied or very satisfied, up from about 45% in 2016, the survey results show.
About 20% of survey respondents in 2022 said they were unhappy with their neighborhoods, down from about 32% in 2016.
The largest increase in neighborhood satisfaction occurred in West Dayton. The largest decrease was in the southeast part of the city.
Donna Davis, vice president of the Madden Hills Neighborhood Association, said the West Dayton neighborhood has a lot of good things going on.
She said the neighborhood sees high engagement from residents and it now has some important relationships with community partners, like CityWide and the University of Dayton.
Madden Hills residents hopefully feel optimistic about the neighborhood because they see that people inside and outside the area feel invested and want to pitch in, she said.
The Madden Hills Park is going to get some major upgrades, Davis said, and some of the city’s surplus vacant lots in the area are being targeted for new housing development.
Neighborhood residents and association members communicate frequently with public works staff and other city departments to ensure environmental and public safety concerns are addressed and that maintenance needs are met, Davis said.
“It’s not a perfect neighborhood, but it’s very good, and we think when we get the potential new housing it’ll be more attractive to new potential homeowners,” she said.
Future outlook
About 45% of Dayton residents said they believe the city is headed in the right direction, while about 23% said the Gem City is not on a good trajectory.
The share of the residents who believe Dayton is on the right path declined about 8 percentage points from 2021.
However, there was a slight decline in the share of survey-takers who indicated Dayton is not on the right track.
This means there was a large increase in the number of people who answered that they don’t know or they are not sure if Dayton is headed toward good and
better things.
Ghand said people’s opinions on this may be impacted by how they feel about the current state of the world, including what’s going on politically and economically.
“People aren’t really saying ‘no,’ they just don’t know — there’s general uncertainty,” she said.
South, the South Park resident, said Dayton is “absolutely” a good place to live and she thinks things continue to get better.
South said she’d like to see the city and South Park cleaned up some, but she plans to help make that happen this summer by participating in block clean-up events.
“It just needs a little love,” she said.
Positive views
Community engagement helps make neighborhoods cleaner and safer, and Lakeview is seeing a lot more of that, said TK Smith, a board member with the recently reestablished Lakeview Neighborhood Association.
The Lakeview neighborhood association is focused on helping people in the area get to know one another, which will strengthen and unify the neighborhood, she said.
Lakeview could use some new investments, like improvements to McCabe Park, but the big thing is neighborhood involvement, Smith said.
The city has some good resources available, but residents and stakeholders need to tap into those to make a difference, she said.
“There needs to be a bigger push to say, ‘Hey, this is what we’d like to see,’ ” Smith said.