Welcoming immigrants is key to this western Ohio city's housing success
Corrections & Clarifications: An earlier version of this story misstated where Dayton is located in Ohio. It is in the southwestern part of the state.
Anita Nzigiye grew up in Rwanda, and came to the United States in 2007 “looking for a better opportunity,” in her words. Nzigiye followed a sister who had emigrated to Dayton, a small city in southwestern Ohio. She sought asylum and later became a citizen.
Now she owns the store Ikaze East and Central African Market, in the southeastern part of the city, offering familiar goods from back home to the city’s many African transplants.
Dayton residents “are super welcoming, to be honest,” Nzigiye said. “I have never had an issue with anybody.” It’s not just the people that are nice: jobs are plentiful, even for workers with less than perfect English, she said.
The open door that newcomers like Nzigiye discover in Dayton is deeply intentional, city officials and residents say. It stems from their understanding that immigrants are uniquely suited to revive local economies where population has been in decline, and to upgrade housing stock, particularly in areas where homes sit vacant.
And it stands in stark contrast to the political rhetoric attacking immigration that has ensnared the neighboring town of Springfield, Ohio, just half an hour away.
From neighborhood associations to a city department dedicated to integrating new arrivals, Dayton’s approach to immigrants may be uniquely welcoming. But its positive experience with them has been seen all across the country, from Hamtramck, Michigan, to Brockton, Massachusetts, said Sharon Cornelissen, director of housing at the left-leaning nonprofit Consumer Federation of America.
Cornelissen has studied distressed communities extensively, including in a three-year research stint in Detroit. Inflows of immigrants to such areas are a “virtuous circle,” she said, and local housing markets are often revitalized.
“There's often love and sweat equity that people put into their homes,” she said. “We see home prices stabilize and go up.”
A deep foreclosure crisis
Amid the tightest housing market in recent times, it may be hard to remember the deep distress that gripped much of the Rust Belt through much of the 2000s. For several years, banks and other lenders offered easy credit to borrowers across the country, inflating home prices and creating a bubble in the market. When the bubble burst, it sparked the financial crisis of 2008 – but home prices had peaked and started falling as early as 2006.
Many Americans, especially those with no equity invested in the properties, and in communities that were already in decline, walked away from their homes. Dayton had over 12,000 foreclosure filings in 2007 alone, according to data provided to Paste BN by Attom Data.
The foreclosure crisis only exacerbated the loss of population that had been going on for decades, thanks to the loss of large employers and migration to the suburbs, said Aaron Sorrell, who was Dayton’s planning director at the time. The city’s population peaked in the 1960s, and roughly one-third of its population vanished over the next few decades.
And then, shortly after the millennium, newcomers started arriving.
The Ahiska Turks, an ethnic group from disputed land in the former Soviet Union, were granted asylum starting in 2004, with thousands resettled to the U.S. over the next few years.
“I don't remember the number of homes that they bought and renovated, but it was substantial, and you could tell block by block the positive impact they were making,” said Sorrell, who’s now the assistant city manager in Huber Heights, a neighboring suburb. Many of the Ahiska became known for ornate trimmings on their homes, and fences that evoked the Mediterranean, not the Midwest.
Islom Shakhbandarov was one of the newcomers.
“You have to understand, my community, my family, 90% of them didn't know English at the time,” said Shakhbandarov, one of the first Ahiska to reach Dayton.
“They came with nothing and had been working at, you know, basically low-wage works. Whatever labor position in manufacturing or any other service-related field for minimum wage or close to that. For people like me to own a house at that point was almost impossible.”
When he first visited, in 2007, he found a diamond in the rough, Shakhbandarov said. “It was a decent neighborhood but abandoned. And I see the potential that our community could contribute.” With several relatives, Shakhbandarov bought a large house for $50,000. Other Ahiska Turks who were more willing to put in sweat equity bought houses in greater disrepair for $20,000 or $30,000, he said.
There were some early growing pains. But instances of “discrimination against immigrants” were met with community members coming together and starting initiatives to make the city more immigrant-friendly, said Jeanette Horwitz. Those ad hoc efforts eventually turned into a formal city department called Welcome Dayton, which Horwitz now manages.
Welcoming efforts are often grassroots
Still, many of the efforts that help make Dayton so welcoming are grassroots, not top-down. The Old North Dayton neighborhood, where many of the Ahiska left their mark, was originally settled by Eastern European immigrants, and now welcomes groups from all over, said Matt Tepper, another Dayton local.
Tepper and his wife, Jennifer Evans, moved to Dayton to take over the bakery her parents had founded years earlier. The couple now help run the Old North Dayton neighborhood association.
“I think part of our role is to just accentuate the positive and try to tamp down any negative stuff,” Evans said. “We welcome all people here and we want the relationship to be beneficial. We learn from them, we share our experiences and traditions.”
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The experience in Dayton has been so beneficial for many of the Ahiska that many, including Shakhbandarov, have achieved the American Dream of moving up and out to a home in the suburbs. Now, the properties they rehabbed a decade and a half ago are being bought up by African newcomers who appreciate the unique style, Tepper said.
For his part, Shakhbandarov has become a successful businessman and part of the middle class, he said. He owns multiple transportation-related businesses, including a training facility that helps recent immigrants get their commercial driver’s licenses so they can get jobs in an industry hungry for workers.
Housing crisis
In recent months, many of his trainees have been the Haitian immigrants that Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance has mentioned several times on the campaign trail.
“I was noticing he's attacking people of color and other minorities. But he doesn't mention anything about people who are moving from Russia,” Shakhbandarov said, referring to Vance's comments about the Haitian community in Springfield. “I think they found what we found 18-20 years ago. They found the same thing in Springfield. They found opportunity.”
Springfield city leaders declined Paste BN's request for comment, citing “an overwhelming amount of requests for interviews on a number of topics related to immigration.”
“It is now our aim to dim the spotlight on our community and return our main focus and priorities to serving our community,” a city spokesperson said in an email.
Mike DeWine, the Republican governor of Ohio, is among those who have praised the Haitian immigrants who've moved to Springfield in recent years, filling jobs and helping revive the community's struggling manufacturing sector. But he and some local officials say the influx has also put pressure on the city.
In July, Springfield's city manager sent a letter to Senator Sherrod Brown and Senator Tim Scott, the two most senior members of the committee that oversees banking and housing issues in Washington, asking for help with the city's housing crisis.
"Most recently, Springfield has seen a surge in population through immigration that hassignificantly impacted our ability as a community to produce enough housing opportunities for all," the letter said. "Springfield’s Haitian population has increased to 15,000 – 20,000 over the last four years in a community of just under 60,000 previous residents, putting a significant strain on our resources and ability to provide ample housing for all of our residents."
Such challenges are not unexpected, Cornelissen said
“It’s fair to say it can be a big transition for a city,” Cornelissen said. “In the short term, at least, some institutions become kind of overburdened. It is sort of taxing on the existing system, and that can bring tension.” As an example, there may suddenly be far more children in the school system than before, and many may need assistance with translation or teaching of English as a Second Language, she noted.
Dayton has had many more years of experience receiving newcomers, Horwitz said, and developing ways to be strategic about integrating them and helping smooth over any misunderstandings. In Springfield, there may be some culture shock with so many immigrants arriving relatively quickly, she said.
Shakhbandarov thinks that with time, there's a lot Springfield can learn from Dayton. In the short term, though, he's dismayed at how immigration is so often a hot-button issue in election years.
"By taking attention from real problems and the economy and education and health care, and blaming everything on immigrants, it's not helping to find the solution," he said. This story has been updated because an earlier version included an inaccuracy