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Growth churns between cities on I-75 corridor

Development bustles south of Dayton, north of Cincinnati.

Kimm Coyner, director of the Warren County Office of Economic Development, is seen at the entrance to the Corridor 75 Premier Logistics Park in Monroe where development continues despite a slumped economy.

Chris Stewart/Staff Kimm Coyner, director of the Warren County Office of Economic Development, is seen at the entrance to the Corridor 75 Premier Logistics Park in Monroe where development continues despite a slumped economy.

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By Jim DeBrosse, Staff Writer Updated 11:18 PM Saturday, March 20, 2010

LIBERTY TWP., Butler County — When Christine Matacic moved here with her husband in 1981, they settled into a mostly rural bedroom community of corn fields and about 5,000 other residents.

Today, it’s a bustling suburb of 35,000 people with a top-rated school district (Lakota), two major hospital satellites (a third on the way) and its own brand-new interchange off Interstate 75, aptly dubbed Liberty Way.

Last year alone, 28 new businesses settled into the area just 22 miles north of Cincinnati and 35 miles south of Dayton.

If you’re looking for the center of growth in the Dayton-Cincinnati region over the last two decades, it’s closer to Matacic’s backyard than it is to either city. Butler and Warren counties combined now have a population (568,118) greater than Montgomery County (534,626), which lost nearly 40,000 residents between 1990 and 2008. Hamilton County recorded its first growth in 2008 after decades of stagnation, adding 6,200 residents since 2000.

“It’s all about location,” said Matacic, a Liberty Twp. trustee. “People come here, quite honestly, because of its excellent schools and because we’re just about halfway between Cincinnati and Dayton. We have households here where couples commute to both cities.”

Many of the same logistics that have made Liberty Twp. a boom town have worked their magic on all the major interchanges between I-675 and I-275. More than $1.2 billion in investment has been drawn to the Dayton-Cincinnati I-75 corridor in the last two years. Traffic counts have doubled along some parts of the corridor in the last two decades.

Regional planners expect the two metropolitan areas — Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky and Dayton-Springfield — to grow together into a single giant “megaplex” for census and marketing purposes as early as 2020.

And where populations grow, jobs follow, especially where there is easy access to even larger markets, said Mark Policinski, executive director of the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments.

A 2005 study of the Dayton-Cincinnati corridor found that nearly 7 of every 10 jobs (67 percent) between the Warren County line and the Ohio River lie within 5 miles of I-75.

Health care and education satellites, corporate headquarters, new high-tech firms and retailers account for the bulk of the new development as business and commerce follow residential growth, development experts say.

“We’ve seen some significant job loss (in the Dayton area) in what I’ll call commodity manufacturing” such as automotive parts, said Joe Tuss, Montgomery County’s economic development chief. “But there has been growth in other sectors — information technology, health care and the defense industry — and those have tended to be along that corridor.”

Some companies and health care organizations in the region also have chosen to relocate existing operations to the corridor. Examples include Middletown Regional Hospital, which moved several miles east from the center of Middletown to the new and expanded $260 million Atrium Medical Center at the Ohio 122 exit on I-75. AK Steel and Dayton Superior are more recent examples of local companies moving their headquarters to the corridor.

That begs the question whether the corridor and its $250 million in recent road improvements are simply pulling jobs and people out of more urban areas of the region into the Dayton-Cincinnati sprawl.

Tuss said such reshuffling of jobs “is nothing new when you look at the businesses in research parks and how many of those businesses were originally in the core city.”

The dilemma faced by the region is that it must either accommodate companies wanting to move from the urban core to high-growth areas or lose them altogether to some other region, Tuss said. “It’s not a black or white thing.”

Regional and local economic experts are hoping the $1.5 billion in ongoing improvements along I-75 from I-70 south to the Ohio River will continue to attract businesses that want easy access to an expanded labor market, four major airports, three interstates and dozens of universities, research centers and colleges.

“Activity always breeds more activity,” said Warren County economic development director Kimm Coyner.

So does visibility. The opening in late June of the new Austin Pike interchange “will spark things, too,” said Springboro development chief Christine Thompson. “People (outside the region) are not always going to be aware of what’s happening until it actually opens.”

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2437 or jdebrosse@DaytonDaily News.com.

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