Trotwood, Ohio

[kwabbit]

This area always stands out to me on DRA as fairly unique. It's a predominately Black suburb west of Dayton. Looking at google maps it spans suburban to rural, with even some of the more rural areas sporting a majority Black population. In the North it's uncommon for exurbs to have a significant Black population. Smaller cities and inner suburbs are more common, but not low density areas.

Does anyone have some insight into this area?

[Sol]

Dayton is a highly segregated and fairly Black metro area, similar in terms of patterns of segregation to a lot of larger midwestern cities like Cleveland, Cincinnati, or Detroit. In all of those cities, you have suburbs which saw tremendous and rapid white flight in the late 20th century, often tightly following municipal boundaries. I suspect it's something similar here, with the ruralish land use being a side effect of Dayton's small size and low density, plus newer development concentrating in the east and south.

[ProgressiveModerate]

I would challenge OP that Trotwood is an example of exurban or rural blacks. Some of the precincts on the Western part of the town may seem like exurban black precincts but in reality, most of their population is concentrated on the eastern half of the precinct, with the western half being much less dense but also much more white. If one looks at the racial dot map on DRA, you can see the blocks where density falls off are the same blocks that are like 80% white.



In this split of Tottenville, blue has 21389 people (2020 census) and is 77.1% black. green only has 1681 people and is 82.0% black. What you really have is just a really sharp drop off from urban/subruban blacks to rural whites; however the way the precincts are drawn could give the impression there are exurban or rural blacks.

My theory is simillar to the poster above; Dayton just isn't big enough for suburban development being built past Trotwood to be desirable enough in terms of time savings when the outer ring of suburbs still isn't that far from downtown and Dayton isn't particularly fast growing/"in demand". I bet if the Dayton area did start to see an uptick in growth, eventually whiter suburbs would be built West of Trotwood.