Lately I haven’t been as active on my blog here as I used to be, and looking back on my most recent posts I was a bit surprised to see how they make it seem like all I care about these days is AI!
There was definitely a reason for my AI focus: for a year I served on a college-wide team tasked with studying Generative AI and its effects on higher education and making recommendations to college leadership.
And moving forward, AI will certainly continue to be a big part of my role in the library due to its profound effects on the information landscape and major investment that Sinclair is making in AI.
But I’m certainly focusing on a lot of other things at work too! And one of those projects has been quite different: trying to come up with ideas for helping the college improve its connections to downtown.
Our campus is only a couple of blocks away from the center of Downtown Dayton where tons of exciting projects have brought new housing, hotels, restaurants, retail, and much more. And we even hold our entrepreneurship classes in the historic Dayton Arcade alongside the University of Dayton and The Entrepreneurs Center.
And while there are plenty of individual faculty, staff, and students who regularly get out and experience what downtown has to offer, there is not a ton of awareness overall across campus and many people’s experience of Sinclair is limited to the walk from the parking garage to their classroom or office.
So my project has involved a couple of related pieces: 1) helping increase awareness of amenities like restaurants, shops and art galleries, and our Arcade space and 2) thinking about the physical connections in terms of the blocks in between the edge of campus and the Arcade.
For the first part, over the last couple of semesters I’ve done several talks on campus and hosted walking tours over to the Arcade with faculty and staff. I’m also working on creating customized downtown maps for both staff and students.
For the second part, I’ve been thinking about placemaking, or “creating places that strengthen connections between people and those places” and the walkability of the blocks around Sinclair.
(And walkability has so many benefits, from health and happiness to sustainability and helping foster a safer and more vibrant city.)
The walk to the Arcade takes less than 10 minutes, but I believe many people don’t do it because the space in between are mostly “dead” blocks of surface parking lots separating campus off from the rest of downtown.
Some of the easy wins or low-hanging fruit, then, for placemaking could include signage pointing out amenities and how close they are (ex. The Dayton Arcade is a 10-minute walk this way!); tree planting to help make the walk more pleasant and comfortable; and possibly even some public art in the large empty blocks.
And for larger, more long-term thinking, I hope these ideas have the potential not only to help people find a new place to grab lunch or take a walk during their break time, but also help students overcome barriers and succeed academically.
We all know housing and transportation are huge barriers for our students. I’ve personally been contacted many times by friends and acquaintances about someone they know starting at Sinclair and looking for an affordable place to live close to campus, often without a car.
Many of our students already live downtown and walk to school, or down by the University of Dayton and take the free Flyer bus downtown, and with hundreds of new units being added in those areas, our students will increasingly be living closer to campus, but at the moment they still face the aforementioned walk through the “dead zone” to actually get to Sinclair. (Same for the many students and community members who take the bus from other parts of town to the downtown hub across the street from the Arcade.)
The “low-hanging fruit” placemaking ideas can help make that last couple of blocks a lot more welcoming for these students, but I think helping create more housing in those same blocks would be a game-changer for not just the college but the city as a whole.
Sinclair is not a residential college and I don’t think we should start building dorms on our own anytime soon. But I’m really interested in the possibility of us partnering or at least consulting on mixed-use and/or affordable housing developments.
This would be a major win-win situation by greatly helping our students who face housing insecurity, rising rents, and transportation challenges, as well as breathing new life into empty and desolate downtown blocks that are already a priority of the City of Dayton, Downtown Dayton Partnership, and the developers working on the blocks just east of campus.
Other community colleges have already done similar projects. Columbus State recently partnered with a developer on a 160-unit affordable apartment project (20 units will be reserved for students) which was lauded for “simultaneously address(ing) a critical student need, support(ing) the broader regional demand for affordable housing, and revitaliz(ing) a largely dormant downtown block.”
And an apartment complex in between Tri-C and Cleveland State was created to provide housing to students with minor children, while also offering them various support services.
Focusing on these blocks in Downtown Dayton has the potential to give new meaning to our role as a “community partner,” one focused not just on our services and programs but our actual physical footprint, and building bridges, not barriers, to the downtown neighborhood ecosystem around us.
I have a whole slide presentation with a lot more detail that I can send to anyone who is interested!
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