[Music] tonight A Frontline propublica special with midterm elections just around the corner C on the eve of the midterms our economy is soaring our jobs are booming correspondent Alec McGillis examines the growing disparities between our cities people who are making a good middle class income are now making 10 or 122 an hour once thriving places like Dayton Ohio you think about where wealth lives it lives on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley and you've had no real growth in the underlying economy there's no one left to buy stuff and these economies collapse cities that have been left behind struggling to come back what makes a society move forward the idea that one's hard work is rewarded that one has the ability to rise economically and socially and to look to the future with optimism rather than fear a PBS Chasing the Dream report tonight on front [Music] line it sounds like tough times in Dayton Ohio when you hear about the thousands of layoffs double digits on the unemployment rate now uh and this is the highest since the early 19898 employees will lose their jobs when thean pulls out has become Ground Zero for America's overdose crisis killing more people across the country what's the address of your emergency Federal and local officers are involved in cracking down on the heroin problem that's growing in D Ohio where officials say they are on track for 10,000 the economy is so bad right now and the job loss in the Dayton area state for Donald Trump Donald Trump has won the state of is just going to cause an economic just destruction to this area but I think it's starting to come back [Music] [Music] [Music] I first came to Dayton as a reporter in 2012 I came back several times in early 20 2016 for an article I was doing on what was happening in the country's politics that year the city itself would go for Hillary Clinton the county it's part of back Donald Trump the first time a republican had won there in 28 years I've kept coming back to this area because I think Dayton is representative of a whole swath of our country today we talk a lot about income inequality and the urban rural divide but the gaps we're dealing with are also between cities between cities that are absorbing an Ever greater share of prosperity and places like this that are being left behind small and midsize cities that used to matter a whole lot to what our country invented made and aspired to they don't seem to matter as much now but they do they're heavily concentrated in our political Battleground States and are at the heart of the national debate about trade and employment they're Ground Zero of a drug epidemic that's on Pace to claim another six lives before this film is over so how did all this happen in a country that is supposedly at the crest of an economic recovery [Music] the poverty rate in Dayton is 34.5% which is nearly three times the poverty rate Nationwide and remember this was a place that just a few decades ago was an epitome of of American Wealth and prosperity and Ingenuity now more than a third of the people in the city are living in [Music] poverty Dayton is a place that believed in you work hard you play by the rules and good things will come to your family and for the past 100 years you know until about the Great Recession that was continuing to happen right they believe your child could do better I I'm a product of the American dream you know my parents my dad worked at General Motors um he got a good wage uh that wage he saved to help send me and my brother to school my brother is an attorney I'm the mayor of Dayton [Music] right 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 and so the cost of college will be Out Of Reach for her and no I don't think that she'll get there this assessment of Dayton is hard to reconcile with the city's extraordinary past it's no exaggeration to say that Dayton was once the epitome of industry and Ingenuity in the American Heartland Dayton Ohio was the Silicon Valley of his age it was the center of the most important inventions 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 wght piloted the crude flying machine in the now classic 140t 12C First Flight we all know about the wri brothers of course who got their start making bicycles in Dayton but they weren't alone in the early 1900s Dayton was filing more patents per capita than anywhere else in the country 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 you feel it anywhere you go in the plant that NCR family spirit is no bunk what happened in Dayton was Innovation became industry became General Motors became Delco became National Cat register there were 70 or 80,000 good paying union jobs in Dayton Ohio 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 manufacturer of bombers bombers to blast the way for our fighting forces Dayton has a story to tell the story of a city at War the war effort raised workers fortunes across the country country and Dayton was no exception if you look at the period from roughly the 1930s to the 1970s you had a period of broad-based prosperity the middle class and those at the bottom saw their incomes rise more quickly than those at the top tens hundreds of millions of Americans over time became owners of housing for the first time sensing opportunity people were pouring into Dayton whites from Appalachia and blacks from the Deep South Dayton is crammed jammed every living facility taxed this is Dayton on a Monday night or a Wednesday night the retail stores are open the markets are open the department stores are open the banks are open by 1960 the City's population reached 262,000 and then sadly things get ugly fast in part it's because a lot of people were terrified of what this racial integration would mean a lot of the new workers that came to Dayton were black coming up as part of the Great Migration from the south and people were not comfortable with their new neighbors and so we get the first round of white flight and that means a bunch of things happen right one you're no longer invested in what goes on in the city so you're consumed quite rationally with making sure that all your tax dollars help your suburban school district when you Hollow a community out of its lawyers its doctors its nurses its teachers those who hold communities best together what you're going to see is terribly predictable the pathologies of urban life consumed communities 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 that's what we call redlining so that an African-American who could afford to buy the home where the great school was or that was close to a park or etc etc couldn't in Dayton the result was African-Americans being largely clustered in West Dayton where money and resources steadily declined West Dayton you had middle class African-American white families living side by side kids who went to school two parent homes uh a car you know the typical house with the two kids a dog and a white picket fence now we have dilapidated housing we are losing our hospital we have lost our business and that has become the new normal in West Dayton dropped it in there whoever dropped it in there did it Mike and will Strickland and their six boys live in West Dayton's Hilltop homes you know where the top is uh-uh it's a public housing complex in a crime ridden neighborhood before y'all eat I need y'all to say y' prayers for the in Jesus name we all pray moving here was their best option despite working two jobs but it was a step up from the homeless shelter they were in before the shelter was an experience it was very different because they dealt with the outbreak of like bad bugs and something called scabies that I never knew nothing about and it's just like really overwhelming well at the time we just had one income coming into the house so it was uh 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 take care of the kids could you turn it up please no Willa had just started working in customer service for an insurance company Mike is a line worker at a meat packaging plant uh yeah my life is different than my parents' life uh they was middle class they both had good decent jobs so U my dad he was a um he was a chemist and my mom she was a register nurse if you already had food you should have said you had food already before he gave you that I grew up right here on the West end of town I moved when I was about eight so so I didn't really kind of grow up my older days here I moved to Atlanta then I came back when I graduated high school when I came back it just like nothing was here they just tore everything down you know then replac now it's just like a ghost town so the community is considered to be heavy with poverty it is no longer attractive for Corporate America to invest in and so people or corporations pull out without any apology uh very intentional and lead the community desperate the business community's exit from West Dayton can be seen most starkly in a remarkable statistic while an estimated 40% of the City's population lives here there are no grocery stores to serve [Music] them it's not a problem confined to to Dayton millions of Americans live in one of these so-called food deserts so essentially what we have here in West Dayton is no sustainable way to access Fresh Foods this is an abandoned Koger parking lot the store has been closed now for about 20 years there is no place to buy a baked potato there's no place to get a cup of coffee to have a sip of tea you can't even buy buy a salad here if you want to buy a salad in West Dayton the only placeat you can get is a Burger King or a McDonald's as West Dayton has been falling behind the rest of Dayton on a larger scale cities L Dayton have been falling behind the more prosperous parts of the country going back decades if you look at the decline of manufacturing and the decline of areas where it once was vibrant the real turning point is the late 1970s starting in the late 1970s corporations started to much more aggressively push back against labor unions and they did so in part because the economy was becoming a bit more Global so they were able to threaten that they would move production overseas and so we saw a plummeting of the role of labor unions precisely at the time the inequality was rising and then the Reagan Era ushered in tax cuts for the wealthy and a wave of deregulation at the same time shareholders started exerting more influence on the way companies did business you had Bankers sitting in New York corporate Executives boards far away from these communities that thought you know labor was dis uh Expendable and unfortunately we have this idea that what's good for Wall Street is good for everybody else Wall Street was pushing a lot of companies to offload labor costs from their balance sheet outsourc jobs abroad in 1993 Bill Clinton signed NAFTA which sped the flight of many Auto Parts makers from the Dayton area to Mexico a deal president Trump has since been harshly critical of the worst trade deal ever made by any country I think in the world but many economists say that the biggest hit on manufacturing areas came in 2000 when China was admitted into the World Trade Organization which still Echoes today in the trade war between the US and China when globalization happened when the loss of the dominance of organized labor happened um that wealth was not in just one place the wealth here was across a whole community and when a community sits on that and that's what they were created from and that goes away that's why you see such a struggle today as we move forward to redefine our eon now from 2001 through 2007 the Dayton metro area lost almost 23,000 jobs Deli is really scaling back their production here in the United States a lot of that work is going to Mexico and China so to put it another way nearly one in three local jobs in manufacturing vanished during that time and things only got worse from there today we're announcing our plan to overtime seize production at four GM truck assembly plants these gas prices they're not going down in 2008 GM closed its massive Dayton operation citing Rising gas prices and plunging sales it sounds like tough times in Dayton Ohio GM will close the plan for good later this year two days before Christmas it was one of the last big Auto plants in a town that once had more Auto industry jobs than anywhere but Detroit we uh produced quite a few uh GM Brands GMC Envoy the suu Ascender Saab Buick timobile mexo basically is a shi in strategy Rodney bricky was one of more than 2,000 GM workers laid off that day he' put in 14 years starting back when his father worked there the insurance was pretty much unbeatable and the wages were uh pretty high I'd say it probably averaged out around 35 an hour when the plant closed here economically it was devastating for this area because when you're making that kind of money and something like this closes it's next to impossible to find something that's compatible with that kind of wages unemployment stands but the problems for Dayton and the rest of the country were about to get worse could lose their jobs major financial institutions have teetered on the edge of collapse and some have failed the numbers of job lost 190,000 job the global economy was melting down on its way to the Great Recession and it was taking Dayton down with it unemployment rate is worrying John it's kind of like a onew punch I mean we had Vivid memories of what happened in the 1970s it wasn't that long ago and it was like oh no not again now to Ohio where the economic signs are not good in fact they're going from bad to worse in 2009 came the hardest hit of all from the company that was more identified with the city than any other National Cash Register it's packing up and moving south the NCR Corporation was Dayton it had been here forever to all of us who lived in Dayton we thought it was going to be here forever Dayton's only Fortune 500 company NCR is headed out and down south 598 employees will lose their jobs when the company pulls out out of here in late September the company moved to the Atlanta suburbs where it already had a large operation the CEO said it had become increasingly hard to recruit people to live and work in Dayton and daytonians are mad we're still mad that took a piece of our soul and this community has not recovered yet from the loss of NCR you still hear people talk about NCR leaving the community it's scar it's a story that's been repeated in many small industrial cities all across the country there's a really fundamental change happening in the economy you think about where wealth lives it basically lives in a couple of places it lives in financial assets so on Wall Street or in intellectual property so in Silicon Valley it's in a handful of people handful of companies and you've had no real growth in the underlying economy you've had wage stagnation for 20 years and so the bottom falls out there's there's nobody earning any money there's no one left to buy stuff and these economies collapse we have hit double digits on the unemployment rate now by 2010 Dayton's unemployment rate topped 12% it is worse than economists have been expecting and this is the highest since the early 1980s and while all this was happening in the early years of this decade City officials began seeing the first signs of an even bigger disaster Federal and local officers are involved in cracking down on the heroin problem that's growing in Dayton Dayton was hardly the only city being hit with a heroin problem but its grip was especially strong here it has us asking how big the heroin problem now is in the Miami Valley and what can be done to stop it the roots of the problem could be traced back years to the kind of work that had once made Dayton thrive hard physical jobs repetitive motions day after day the opioid addiction issue happens places where people use their bodies to make a living you have um a guy that's you know not feeling really well or a woman and my back really hurts goes to see their doctor their doctor gives them what they perceive to be um a non-addictive substance and I think that's where a lot of this came from into one of the most serious crisis facing people in the issue of opiate addiction in the Dayton area is unique but this particular part of the country was targeted very heavily by far pharmaceutical companies when drugs like oxycoton first came on the market by 2011 the state was reporting that opioid prescriptions had risen 1,000% in Ohio and many users were getting hooked Ashley Sturgill was one of them she first took opiates for chronic back pain when she was working as a waitress I can remember exactly when I realized that I was an addict I uh was prescribed to oxyc Cott me and my daughter's father both and um I my insurance was cut so uh I didn't have any and I didn't know I got really really really sick and I think it was my mom or my aunt I called and was telling them how sick I was and uh they told me to lay down and they pretty much knew that I was addicted to them at that point she was eating what 30 a day probably at least yeah I have a very high tolerance that would kill a lot of people and people think because I'm small that you know that's not the case but I was probably doing triple what other people were doing and then I everything just kind of went downhill from there a doctor who FBI officials say ran a pill Mill in Dayton proclaims his innocence Ashley says she was getting her pills from a doctor willing to write illegal prescriptions a practice that law enforcement eventually cracked down on wrote as many as fake prescriptions per day but there was an unintended consequence you know we took the pills away from the atcts not knowing we had so many addicts when we do that you have people with addiction problems and now they go seek another illegal substance and that was heroin police were executing several search warrants in the Dayton neighborhood all relating to heroin trafficking as drug cartels began moving heroin to Dayton they were helped by a feature that had once been a boon to its manufact uring economy the city's location at the so-called Crossroads of America you have Interstate 75 coming straight from the southern borders then it hits Interstate 70 which crosses from New York to Chicago so it's very easy to distribute products across the United States from Dayton Ohio so with the drugs flowing freely into a city that was already reeling from an economic collapse and suffering the despair that came with it Dayton had a full-blown epidemic on its hands by then it had taken over Ashley's life I knew she was on the pills and and I thought she got clean I actually uh she would use the bathroom a lot and lock the door and turn the water on one day I picked the lock on the bathroom door and opened it and she had a needle stuck in her arm that's when I knew for sure sorry I get him some I hate get I thought I could just throw her out and move on but I couldn't do that and I love her I knew we could do it and we're getting through now I'm sorry it's a lot of work but I mean we did it she did it sorry I just hate that's a rough one for me so Ashley was one of the lucky ones she sought treatment for her addiction after discovering she was pregnant but across Dayton as synthetic opioids like fentanyl had begun entering the market addicts Were Dying by the hundreds state of Ohio has become Ground Zero for America's overdose crisis killing more people across the country than ever before 911 want the address of your emergency my is and is it's bad please hurry epicenter is in Ohio where officials say they are on track for 10,000 overdose deaths this year that is higher than the total for the entire nation in 1990 most of the victims end up here in front of the County coroner Dr Kent harburger she was 45 years old and she was found um sort of in an abandoned house that's used for drugs regularly and need to get photographs what I see is just the same tragedy the same story repeating itself over and over again in that addicted population but it doesn't exclude anyone every racial group every socioeconomic group um we see in this current crisis all the internal organs on the right spot there's a little bit of fluid in the chest the lungs are a little hyperinflated the cost is staggering to any one community and the smaller the community the harder it is to absorb that economic crisis that this is created there's not enough resources to fix the bridges and the roads and then you throw in an opioid crisis and the the problem becomes insurmountable I think we're done the system is being overwhelmed we have had to bring some of our equipment that we have already for Mass fatality events here to the building so it's a refrigerated trailer we have two of them each one of them will hold 18 sets of remains and we've had to bring them here um from time to time because our coolers are full in just the first 6 months in 2017 he had seen more fatal overdoses in Montgomery County which includes Dayton than in the entire year before overdoses they're now the number one killer of people under the age of 50 more people die from that than from the number of fatalities has since declined due in part to their being less fenel on the street but the addiction problem is still raging you can see the devastation at any of the support groups that meet virtually every day in the city this one was called families of addicts um foa is a um nonprofit that I started back in November 2013 I have 11 years of my own recovery from Alcohol and Other Drugs currently but at the time that I started this when I found out that my my daughter was using heroin it was an animal of a different color for me but what she did is she educated me more than anyone about what was going on with her the night we were there addicts and their families took turns celebrating triumphs that may sound small but were Monumental victories on the road to recovery here we go we go here I I'm taking one of these because today marked my 90 days of being sober woo I'm going to take one of these because I just got out of prison uh it's a month on the 20th um I have a job I've got a car I've got a phone I just made it through my first paycheck last night so I'm super proud of myself so this is for my son Justin he's going to be 10 months clean um on the 17th and we couldn't be proud of you [Applause] I guess I'm going to take one and because I going to start Tak care of myself it's big [Applause] step if you spend enough time in Dayton you see that the opioid epidemic spares nobody not even newborns at the city's largest hospital one out of every 10 babies in the neonatal ICU is here because they may be in withdrawal from opiates there's even a special program designed to take care of the overwhelming number of addicted mothers to be run by Dr Christopher kro prior to the beginning of this program there was really nothing available in this community for that particular patient population you have women of childbearing age in a stressed Community where opiates are available and consequently you've got opiate addicted pregnant women these women are judged horribly because they're using drugs number one and they're exposing their child so seeking out help during pregnancy is a hard thing to do Ashley's daughter Reagan arrived on New Year's Day and spent the first week of her life being monitored for withdrawal I was a little scared of what was going to happen when she was born how she was going to be yes being such a good girl the fact that she could go through withdrawals it breaks my heart you know you're always I'm I'm going to get emotional you're going to have that guilt you know because you know you're the one you're the addict so you feel like you push this your baby like but you know you're like I said you're you feel horrible yes Ashley is exceptional for a couple of reasons number one she is in recovery she's had a long history of addiction and several attempts at trying to get in recovery and this is the first time she's been successful at it you know that that's a huge accomplishment in the end Reagan had just mild symptoms of withdrawal but all this medical attention can cost as much as 20 times what a regular birth does it's just one of the ways the opioid problem will be a burden on Dayton for years if not generations to come you know what's struggling for us is we're the ones paying for it the taxpayers are paying for the burden they're paying for the police services the fire Services police and fire they did 3,700 runs in the city of Dayton we've exchanged 125,000 needles across the county last year a 60% increase Judicial System that's been clogged by folks that come through it and multiply that by 282 people that died last year that doesn't count the number of people that are addicted this is an issue that far succeeds just an economic issue as Dayton tries to pick itself up and Revitalize its economy it finds itself in a situation that's become common in cities like this after all the overdose deaths the job losses and people just leaving for opportunities elsewhere the population in Dayton is barely more than half of what it was at its peak 50 years ago and even though the number of jobs has returned to what it was before the recession employers are finding there aren't enough qualified workers to fill them I mean Dayton you come there and you know that it was once this city that was this big Center of innovation and you come there now and what what hits you is just the emptiness of it you have this downtown with these big beautiful buildings and these gorgeous 15 20 Story Bank buildings and old hotels and these streets that are so wide like boulevards kind of and they're just almost completely empty if you're trying to build yourself your numbers back up quite simply from a point where you've lost 50% of your population in 50 years one obvious possible source for that is going to be immigrants and refugees last year the city of D declared itself as immigrant friendly so while the Trump Administration has taken a hard line on immigration in Dayton some newcomers have been part of the efforts to revitalize the hesa Turks are ethnic Turks from the former Soviet Union who came to the us as refugees over a decade ago roughly 2,000 of them settled in Dayton including Islam Shak Pender off back in 2007 when I moved to Dayton people was running away from this community Street was dirty basically part of dayon was dying but I discovered the life in us could be different if we move here due to the cost of living here and affordability of real estate so when you came here you saw the city in a completely different way yeah I've SE the opportunity because it was almost empty and there was a room to fill it after 6 months I was already a dayon he and some other Aisa Turks went into business together starting with a single used truck they built a transportation company called American power which now has over 30 employees this place was basically nonfunctioning for five or 6 years before we get there was a minor Warehouse small uh uh but that was pretty much it you got it for a good price yes we did we always do City it's now been a year since the Immigrant friendly plan was adopted here the Turks have served like as school board members Community leaders they have taken an old um Recreation site that actually was closed and created it as their own community site they have started businesses in the community and have taken over entire neighborhoods of the city of Dayton and made them vibr BR communities once again this houses is this houses was abandoned majority of people who live like these two houses their Bo was abandoned it was abandoned neighborhood we bought houses for5 $6,000 there's houses that I bought for $2,000 no it's nobody wants it's the bden in the city and my community see that as an opportunity and like so many successful daytonians before him Islam has already moved out of the city center and into the suburbs it's the first time I ever built a house from the ground and I I I believe the other house is going to be much better next we're going to build many many many many many more the aesa Turks are not the only foreigners who have found opportunity here the language of economic development in the American Heartland saang a self-made Chinese billionaire runs one of the largest AutoGlass companies in the world his newest and biggest Factory is in Dayton making glass for the American Market he and his translator agreed to a rare interview at his office here why was it necessary for a Chinese company to come in to build up our supply chain for autog glass the factory floor is bustling again at this manufacturing plant in morine Ohio a billionaire the location of his new Factory couldn't have been more symbolic the empty GM plant now fuyo Glass America it's the largest Chinese investment in Ohio's history and in the top 10 Chinese investment in the United States a company that invests over $600 million into your community into a project and employs over 2,300 people within three three and a half years that's a pretty big deal among the new employees were a lot of former GM workers I was actually a little bit excited that at least somebody was trying to bring some jobs back into the area you know that's why I went ahead and applied early I was actually in the third group hired into the plant both GM and Fu ya I actually started in the same part of the plant in the same corner but the starting wages were different than what he was used to at GM you started out at $12 an hour after 90 days you got um a raise up to 12284 the starting pay has since gone up to $15 an hour but that's still barely enough to keep a family above the poverty level will American workers need to get used to lower manufacturing pay than they had back 10 20 30 years ago [Music] manufacturing is not what it used to be we used to think of manufacturing as these good stable middle class jobs but because of the decimation of the industrial heart land essentially now those who are building manufacturing companies in former industrial areas are doing so on a totally new model a model that's built on a much much lower pay and much weaker benefits and job security in December Fu Ya's employees gathered on the factory floor for the company's holiday dinner it was a more festive occasion than 2008 when GM shuttered this Factory 2 days before Christmas down by the river that runs through the heart of the city the scene is much more somber St Vincent dep PA's is one of the dozens of charitable food pantries serving the Dayton area I got 49 a lot lower than I thought it was going to be usually just far down I'm about 70 or 80 last year they gave out free groceries more than 31,000 times J for the whole crowd running up yeah you never know what's going here 49 number 39 your food is ready please Meet Your Shopper at the door number 39 the majority of people who come to our pantry work we actually have a significant number that come here they'll give me a ticket and they'll say I have to be at work at 10:00 or I have to be at work at 9:30 please make sure I get my food people who are coming are people who will probably never recover from the Great Recession we have families watering down soup and mom's trying to figure out how to make a box of mac and cheese lasts for two days are you tired you're being really good we visit homes with no food in the cupboard at all there is nothing number 46 your food is ready please Meet Your Shopper at the door I cannot overstate the change that happened in 2808 and from there on it was a game changer for us um people who have never needed help came to us and they continue to and we still see the the impact from that event jobs have come back but it's not the kind of jobs we lost people who are making a good middle class income are now making $10 or 12 an hour people lost half of their pension people did everything they were supposed to do and it didn't work you're bagging up here today yes ma'am okay you can head this way okay yeah all I've seen is the need increase increase and increase I mean we used to serve 150 families we're now serving 350 and up all I see is the need going up and up and up50 your food is ready please there thank you okay wow okay hold on a lot of the jobs here in Dayton are minimum wage no benefits so by the time they provide all of that to their family grow groceries are the last on the list and so they need to come here cupcake yeah look they have cupcakes right here look at that I don't like to see kids coming here with their parents it just it really bothers me it bothers me to see children here because I know they'll be here 20 years from now with their kids 336 your food is ready please meet your shoer at the door Taylor Hardy visits food pantries like this a couple of times a month she works full-time but says that even with $230 in food stamps every month she needs Charities like St Vincent to help feed her family will you get me the um red sauce out yeah Taylor was working as a nursing assistant her boyfriend Andrew was weather Rising houses both earned a bit more than $13 an hour but neither had any savings we make $2,300 a month and we pay 300 for each car so that's 600 we got rent which is about 675 so there's 1,300 sit right there mommy's almost done here here I'm going to make you a taco our gas and electric that's 300 easy and then we pay for diapers we can't forget that for daycare and um home that's usually about $70 every two weeks go sit go take it and sit go sit for both of us roughly $40 a week for gas for the cars the cost of living is outrageous I think I have $5 in my bank account right now it's sad it's really sad that I work all this hours and I miss the time with my kids and my family to make nothing bar just me come on let's go the poverty level is set by the federal government and the poverty level for a family of four is $24,300 and when we stop and think about a family of four for $224,300 to that be the poverty level that's nowhere near what somebody would need to actually survive in today's dollars workingclass wages have essentially been flat or declined for three decades and we know that upward Mobility the chance that someone will move up the income ladder has stagnated you know what makes a society move forward confidently into the future is this sense of personal optimism the idea that one's hard work is rewarded that one has the ability um if they seize the opportunities before them to rise economically and socially and to look to the future with optimism rather than fear but there is very little sense of optimism among the lunchtime crowd at the House of Bread soup kitchen across Dayton wages have dropped an estimated 19% from what they were before the recession and the work is very different too right now I work at El greos up on Salem Avenue Restaurant work and that's really out of my league there I'm usually a diesel mechanic by trade $88.50 an hour job is not very much money you know so I got rent I got to pay $100 a week I work in a plastic factory we process recycle plastic and put it into a form like little black pellets they can be molded into useful objects by others so we sell the pellets to other companies who in turn use these pellets to mold objects we come here to eat so the kids could eat at home you know because you know we're we're struggling it is what it is you know you got to make you got to make do with what you got really got to have faith in yourself I think our unemployment rate is better than it has been in a long time the issue in Dayton is not how many people are employed or how many people are unemployed it's what kind of jobs do they have one of the other things you realize when you talk to people at these soup kitchens and food banks people with the jobs is just how humble the work has become and dayon now you have all these jobs that are no longer about inventing new things but instead about logistics of handling and packaging and moving things that are made elsewhere take day and corrugated who've been making boxes here for 40 years last year they spent nearly a million dollars on new equipment just to keep up with demand but most of that new demand is from companies making products outside Dayton we are making more boxes now than we ever have when the recession came along everybody just kind of SL slowed down we just kind of hunkered down and try to make profit to stay in business ourselves as the economies coming back now we can expand the starting pay here is $13 an hour and like other employers he struggled to fill jobs people are the big problem now you know we've got a lot of really good people here and it's hard to get more the drug problem is a real issue for companies like us because it's really hard to find good qualified [Music] workers as you go around Dayton today you see this tension between the economic and social damage and the determination to rebuild there are small businesses cropping up in Old industrial buildings A New Black Chamber of Commerce is meeting in a downtown coffee shop and young inventors are designing their prototypes like the R Brothers did here over a century ago dating is not unique in the problems that we are facing that is common among urban communities all across the United States but what is unique is that dating is still small enough to write some of these wrongs we're not a New York City we're not a Chicago We're Dayton Ohio so this is the community campaign that's where we are today this is how you change communities in a nearly empty corner of the city earlier this summer a group of residents were trying to fix one of their most urgent problems the lack of grocery stores in West Dayton by raising money for a community-owned co-op greetings how everybody doing good I know we're hot there's some water over here if anybody needs some water uh before we take out there was about five or six of us that had the wild idea well if we living in a food desert what if we opened up a grocery store nobody ever done it before uh and everybody kind looked at us like we're crazy we had so many people join in the last two months or last month that uh we're at 1500 members right now you know and so it's like it's we got a lot of momentum everywhere I go people are asking and talking about the market the market will be called Gem City an old nickname from Dayton's better days to me it's about like how to get resources that are leaving the community to be reinvested inside of our community and the notion that we're not waiting for others to do it but we're doing it ourselves this question of what you do about places like Dayton places whose Glory days have passed is a really tricky one for this country country because we've really never been good about figuring out what to do with the places that are no longer on The Cutting Edge the places that are no longer the the hubs of innovation we've never done that we've never felt the need to do that we just we move on to the next thing move on to the next place but the gaps between places have gotten so big these days that the disparities at either end of the spectrum are increasingly affecting us all so we can't just move on from these cities and expect that they'll fix themselves their Fates are wrapped up in big decisions being made about the nation's economy and politics these cities are a landscape of opportunity or at least they should be in a country that likes to Pride itself on picking up and starting over [Music] [Music] Qui for more on this and other Frontline programs visit our website at pbs.org [Music] Frontline to order front lines Left Behind America on DVD visit shop PBS or call 1800 play PBS this program is also available on Amazon Prime video [Music]
