(EDITOR'S NOTE: The Dayton Plan, as this housing plan is commonly known, is the first case of a regional planning agency successfully coming to grips with the problem of balanced distribution of low and moderate income housing throughout the metropolitan region. The adoption of the plan and its implementation have and will continue to involve a high level of communication and cooperation among the local elected officials, the planning and housing agencies and others. The plan was adopted and is now into implementation inspite of strong early reservations and reactions against the idea by some suburban citizens. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, especially the office of Assistant Secretary Samuel C. Jackson, has widely endorsed The Dayton Plan as a national example.)

Last fall, the Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission adopted a regional Housing Dispersal Plan. The Dayton Plan, as it is now commonly known, calls for the balanced distribution of about 14,000 additional units of low and moderate income housing, including a considerable amount of public housing, over the next four years throughout the five-county Dayton, Ohio, metropolitan region.

The MVRPC was created in 1964 and has 30 member municipalities, as well as the five member counties. There are forty commissioners, 37 of whom are elected officials, with each municipality having one representative and each county having two representatives. Many of the

jurisdictions in the region also have officially endorsed the housing plan concept.

The Miami Valley Region, in southwest Ohio, has a total population of just under 900,000. Three counties are predominantly rural in character, while the Dayton metropolitan area is contained within the other two largely urbanized counties. Dayton City has a population of 243,000, or a little more than one quarter of the region's people. About 11% of the area's total population is Black, and most of these people live in a concentrated area of Dayton's west side. Blacks make up more than 30% of the Dayton City population.

The housing plan described here essentially is based on computing low and moderate income housing needs by county and allocating shares of this housing to planning units throughout the region, each of which is based on groupings of municipalities and/or townships within a county. (See map.) Location of such housing is coordinated through voluntary agreements and working relationships with the MVRPC and through the A-95 review process. The plan is meant for immediate implementation, and it is already affecting the location of proposed housing in the region.

Although the details of the plan itself are of interest, the process of achieving public and political support for the adoption and implementation of the Dayton Plan is the most important emphasis in this case study. This is the most difficult part. The housing plan, dropped into an unprepared environment, would have stood no chance of survival.

The Need

About two years ago, MVRPC began a housing program with four major first-year goals: (1) to compile all pertinent information on housing in the region; (2) to employ the information to single out the region's housing problems; (3) to provide technical assistance on housing to all those requesting it; and (4) to create a level of community awareness about housing as the problem it is to some of the area's citizens. When the first program year closed with a regionwide Housing Conference, the conference drew more than 300 participants and a sizable amount of positive publicity.

In the second program year, two aspects of the housing problem had been crystallized. First, there existed in the region a shortage of sound housing units in the low-moderate income bracket. Second, the housing that was available to low and moderate income households was located in very restricted geographic areas. These, of course, are common conclusions in nearly every American metropolitan area.

The origins of the plan concept probably cannot be traced precisely. During the early days of the housing program, the staff often sought direction through knock sessions among themselves and with consultants. During one of these, the seed was planted when consultant Richard G. Coleman of Cincinnati crystallized the discussion: "What is needed in terms of a housing plan," he said, "is a way of taking the housing need and spreading it throughout the region. There should be housing opportunity for everyone everywhere." Weeks later, the director of the Dayton Metropolitan Housing Authority was with an MVRPC staff member at a suburban community council meeting. They were trying to convince the council to accept public housing into their community, and the members were hesitant. After the meeting, he said to the MVRPC staffer, "We need a plan that will tell these communities how much low and moderate income housing they should have. Can regional planning give us something like that?"

Thus the wheels were set turning. The staff knew that much greater production of low and moderate income housing was needed and had promoted it throughout the program. Now it became clear that this alone would not suffice; MVRPC would have to take the responsibility of setting forth a Dispersal Plan for scattering the needed housing.

There were no guidelines as to how to go about it, no examples to follow. Even on the problem of quantifying housing need, which was the first step, no one single source offered the end-all, be-all answer. And on the question of how to numerically distribute the units to sub areas of the region, no one had touched that with a ten-foot pole.

Plan Formulation Methodology

First, housing need was quantified using a straightforward need vs. supply technique. Need was defined

as a social concept, separate and apart from the economic concept of demand. The results of this analysis showed that in 1970, the five-county region was suffering a deficit of and therefore needed-about 16,000 additional housing units. Of these, more than 14,000 were estimated to be needed for the low-moderate income market. The need figures did not take into account all of the dwelling units in need of rehabilitation; it deal only with new units required to eliminate dilapidation and overcrowding and provide a comfortable vacancy

rate.

Also, the need figures were broken down by county so that each of the five member counties could see its own need as a part of the total regional need. Care was taken to do the best possible job on the need figures, as these were to be the quantities distributed throughou each county. The numbers of units arrived at indicated the seriousness of the situation on the one hand, but they were conservative enough to seem reasonable and not overwhelming on the other.

This is perhaps the first application of a lesson that pervades the entire housing plan story-enough to illus trate the point, but tempered to discourage reaction from going off the deep end.

Once the county by county need figures were com puted, the larger task of distributing them had to be faced.

The entire region was broken down geographically into 53 "planning units". These consisted of grouping of census tracts within the City of Dayton (which wa treated as a whole anyway), municipalities in three cases, townships and their included municipalities in the re mainder of the metropolitan area, and groupings of townships in the rural, sparsely populated sections Then the needed low and moderate income dwelling units were assigned to the planning units using a compos ite of numbers resulting from six calculation methods (1) equal share; (2) proportionate share of the county's households; (3) proportionate share of the county's households making less than $10,000 annually (or less than $7,000 in the three more rural counties); (4) the inverse of #3; (5) a share based on the assessed valua tion per pupil of the school districts covering the planning units; and (6) a share based on the relative over crowding of the school districts involved.

The final result was an allocation of each county's low and moderate income housing need to every planning unit of the county. Obviously, any number of methods could be devised to accomplish the distribution, employ ing any combination of factors. In making its analys of pertinent factors and ways of combining them, the staff considered three groups of elements. One was population, and included such things as number of people, number of households, household income dis tribution, number of persons over age 65 and number of welfare cases in each planning unit. Another category was housing itself and within this were number of dwell ing units by type, age of dwelling units, the condition of housing in each planning unit, percentage of home ownership, average house value, and number of building permits issued during the last several years. The third category was facilities, and this included the availability of sewer and water, transportation, shopping facilities. recreational areas, schools, and proximity to employment and job centers.

All of these things were compiled into a huge matrix