“Dayton’s population grew by only 7.5% from the 1950 census to the 1960 census, but by 1970 it was back to the 1950 level.”
Much of that was do to the population moving to the suburbs. The metro are population doubled in size over the next couple of decades. Some of that was due to busing in the 70’s (Dayton is down by nearly 40% since the 1960 census) but most was people moving into the suburbs for manufacturing jobs that were coming into the area such as Delco, GM, as well as the WPAF base. Dayton took a big hit in the early 2000’s. As most of the Delco plants and the GM plant shut down, followed by NCR the only fortune 500 company at the time headquartered in Dayton left for a suburb of Atlanta. We lost around 12000 jobs in just a few years. We are recovering now but it always take longer for jobs to come back than to lose them.