Suburban Flight

It’s become an all-too-familiar scenario all across America: A city’s downtown, once a thriving place to live and work, has slowly withered and become decrepit. Middle-income families flee to the suburbs to settle in planned communities, city buildings fall into disrepair, and empty weed-filled lots proliferate. So when retired couple Peter and Joan Bracher decided to sell their brick-sided traditional colonial outside of Dayton, Ohio, and build a new home on an infill lot in the Fairgrounds neighborhood just south of the city center, it was a radical departure from the standard palm tree–seeking relocation of most retirees and a pioneering move in terms of the area’s recent urban-regeneration effort.

Peter, a self-professed amateur architecture critic who writes a column for the Dayton City Paper, had stumbled across projects by local architecture firm Rogero + Buckman Architects in his research forays downtown. Principals Mary Rogero and Barry Buckman were involved with the city’s Genesis Project, a partnership between local government and major institutions such as a university and a hospital to spiff up the neighborhood, and they had built a number of condos, live/work spaces, and cafés in the area. "I was impressed with their work using urban space and with their use of space and light," Peter explains of the couple’s choice of architects.