>> narrator: tonight, a frontline propublica special... >> with mid-term elections just around the corner. >> narrator: on the eve of the midterms... >> our economy is soaring our jobs are booming. >> narrator: correspondent alec macgillis examines the growing disparities between our cities. >> people who were making a good middle-class income are now making ten or twelve dollars an hour. >> narrator: once thriving l placese dayton, ohio. >> if you think about where wealth lives, it lives on wall street or in silicon valley. and, you've had no real growth l the underlying economy, there's no ot to buy stuff and these economies collapse. >> narrator: cities that have been left behind, struggling to come back. >> what makes a society move

forward. the idea that one's hard work is rewarded. that one has the ability to rise economically, ansocially, and to look to the future with optimism rather than fear. >> narrator: a pbs "chasg the dream" report, tonight on frontline. >> frontline is made possible by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. and by the corporation for public broadcasting.is major supporrovided by the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundaon, committed to building a more just, verdant s d peaceful world. more informationailable at macfound.org. the ford foundation, working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide. at ford foundation.org. additial support is provided by the abrams foundation, committed to excellence in journalism. the park foundation, dedicated to heightening public awareness ofritical issues. the john and helen glessner family trust. supporting trustworthy journalism that informs and

inspires. and by t frontline journalism fund, with major support from jon and jo ann hagler.or sufor "left behind america" is provided by wnet through the chasing the dream initiative. with major funding from the jpb foundation and additional funding from the ford foundation. (radio squawking) >> it sounds like tough times in dayton, ohio, when you hear about the thousands of layoffs at... >> we have hit double digits one the unempl rate now. and this is the highest since the early 1980s. >> ...stating that 598mployees will lose their jobs when the company pulls out... ...has become ground zero for america's ovdose crisis, killing more people across the country... >> 911, what's the address of your emergency? >> federal and local officers are involved in cracking down on the heroin problem that's growing in dayton. >> ...ohio, where officials say they are on track for 10,000 overdose deaths... >> how big the heroin prob m now is... >> the economy's so bad ri now, and the job loss in the >> this is a big day for donald

trump, donald trump has won the state of ohio. >> ...is just going to cause an ectoomic, just, destruction this area. >> but i think it's starting to come back. ♪ >> macgillis: i first came to dayton as a reporter in 2012. i came back several times in early 2016, for an article i was doing on what was happening in the country's politics that year. the city itsf would go for hillary clinton. the county it's part of backed t donaldmp. the first time a republican had

won there in 28 years. i've kt coming back to this area because i thk dayton is representative of a whole swath of our country today. we talk a lot about income inequality and the urban- rural divide, but the gaps we're dealing with are also bween cities. between cities that are absorbing an ever greater she of prosperity, and places like this that are being left bind. small and midsize cities that used to matter a whoot to what our country invented, made and aspired to. they don't seem to matter as as much now. but they do. they are heavily concentrated in our political battleground states. and are at the hrt the national debate about trade and employment. they are ground zero of a drug epidemic that's o to claim another six lives before this filis over. so, how did all this happen in a country that is supposedly atth

crest of an economic recovery? ♪ (cars driving by, horn honking) the poverty rate in dayton is 34.5%, which is nearly three times the poverty rate nationwide. re anmber, this was the place that just a few decades ago was an epitome of, of american wealth and prosperity and ingenuity. now more than a third of the people in this city are living in poverty. ♪ >> dayton is a place that believed in, you work hard, you play by the rules, and good things will come to your family. and for the past hundred years, you know, until about the grea recession, that was continuing

to happen, right? they belved your child could do better. i'm, i'm a product of the american dream.my you knowarents, my dad worked at general motors, um, he got a good wage. that wage he saved to help send me and my brother to school. my brother is an attorney, i'me yor of dayton, right? >> ♪ what a day for picking daisies, and lots of red balloons ♪ >> i don't know if a girl that's 20 younger than me, her dad's not going to get paid the kind of wage and have the kind of pension my dad had, and so o the cof college will be out of reach for her. and no, i don't think that she'll get there. ♪ >> macgillis: this assessm dayton is hard to reconcile with the city's extraordinary past. it's no exaggeration to say that dayton was once the epitome of industry and ingenuity in the american heartland. >> dayton, ohio was the silicon valley of its age. it was the center of the most important inventions.

it was the center of aviation. it was the center of automotive ventions. and it was the center of a great many lesser inventions, which collectively brought form to the american 20th century. >> orville writ piloted the crude flying machine in the now-classic, 140-foot, 12-second first flight. >> macgillis: we all know about the wright brothers, of course, who got their start making bicycles in dayton. but they weren't alone. in the early 1900s, dayton was filing more patents per capita than anywhere else in the cotry. one of the most important was the cash register, whichvo tionized the retail business and made national cash register a dominant presence in dayton. >> look at the spirit around here. you feel it anywhere you go in the plant. that ncr family spirit is no bunk. >> what happened in dayton was innovation became industry, beca general motors, became

delco, became national cash register. there were 70,000 or 80,000un good-payinn jobs in dayton, ohio. >> macgillis: when world w ii broke out, dayton's heavy industries retooled for the war effort. rubber, auto parts, airplane gears, propellers-- all indispensable, and all manufactured in dayton. general motors had pioneered in applying mass production methods to the manufacture of bombers-- bombers to blast the way for our fighting forces. dayton has a story to ll-- the story of a city at war. >> macgillis: the war effort rased workers' fortunes acr the country, and dayton was no exception. >> if you look at the period from roughly the 1930s to the 1970s, you had a period of broad-based prosperity. the middle class and those at the bottom saw their incomesor risequickly than those at

the top. tens, hundreds of millions of r ericans, over time, became owners of housing e first time. >> macgillis: sensing opportunity, people were pouring into dayton-- whites fm appalachia and blacks from the deep south. >> dayton is crammed, jammed, every living facility packed. this is dayton on a monday night, or a wednesdanight. the retail stores are open. the markets are open. the department stores are open. the banks are open. >> mcgillis: by 1960, the cities population reached 262,000. >> and then, sadly, things get ugly fast. in part it's because a lot of people were terrified of what this racial integration wouldme . >> macgillis: a lot of the new workers that came to dayton were black, coming up apart of the great migration from theouth. and people were not comfortable with their new neighbors. and so, we get the first round of white flight.

and that means a bunchthings happen, right? l one, you're noonger invested in what goes on in the city. so you're consumed, quite rationally, with making sure that all your tax dollars help your suburbaschool district. (dog barking) when you hollow a community ou of its lawyers, its doctors, its nurses, its teachers, those who hold communities best together, what you're going see is terribly predictable. the pathologies of urban life consumed communities. >> macgillis: and many families who wanted to moveub to the surbs and other parts of town found the do blocked. >> banks literally drew lines around neighborhoodso decide which african-americans were going to get loans for which hos. that's what we call redlining. so then an african-american whoo d afford to buy the home where the great school was, orth was close to a park, or et cetera, et cetera, couldn't. >> macgillis: in dayton, the result was african-americans being largely clustered in west

dayton, where money and resources steadily declined. , >> west daytonyou had middle-classfrican-american and white families livg side by side, kids who went to school, two-parent homes, a car, you know, the typical house with the two ds, a dog, and a white picket fence. (siren blaring in distance) now we have diladated hoing. we are losing our hospital. we have lost our biness. and that has become the new normal in west dayton. (dogs barking) (talking in background) >> macgillis: mike and willa strickland and six boys live in west dayton's hilltop homes. >> you know where the top is? >> uh-uh. c>> macgillis: it's a pub housing complex in aen crime-ridd neighborhood. >> before y'all eat, i need you r l to say y'all prayers. >> lord, thanks e food,

thank you for nourishing and lovi my body. in jesus, mary, all praise. >> macgillis: moving here was their best option, dpite working two jobs, but it was a step up from the homelessth shelte were in before. >> the shelter was an experience. it was very different, bause they dealt with the outbreak of like, bedbugs, and something called scabies tt i never knew nothing about. and it was just, le, really overwhelming. >> well, at the time, we just had one income coming into the house, so it was, uh, it was, wa could e to afford it, but it was, like, we couldn't afford to pay anything else, you know what i'm saying, and take care of the kids. >> could y turn it up, please? >> no. >> macgillis: willa had just nsarted working in customer service for anance company. mike is a line worker at a meat packagg plant. >> my life is dierent than my parents' life. they was middle-class. they both had good decent jobs, so... my daddy was a... he was a

chemist, and my mom, she was a registered nurse. >> if you already had food, youh ld have said you had food already before you gave me that. i grew up right here o west end of town. i moved when i was about eight, so i didn't really kind of grow up my older days here. i moved to atlanta, then i came ck when i graduated high school. ♪ when i came back, it's just, like, nothing was here. >> they just tore everything down and didn't replace it. j now it'st like a ghost town. >> so the community is considered to be heavy with poverty. it is no longer attractive for corporate america to invest in. and so people or corporations pull out, without anapology, very intentional, and leave the community desperate. >> macgillis: the business community's exit from west dayton can be seen most starkly in a remarkable statistic: while

an estimated 40% of the city's population lives here, there are no grocery stores to serveem th it's not a problem confined just to dayton. millions of americans live in one of these so-called food deserts. >> so essentially what we have here in west dayton is no sustainable way to access fresh foods. (birds squawking) this is an abandoned kroger parking lot. the store has been closed nowr out 20 years. there is no place to buy a ked potato, there is no place to get a cup of coffee, to have a sip of tea. you can't even buy a salad here. if you want to buy a salad in west dayton, the only place you can get it is a burger king or a mcdonald's. ♪ >> macgillis: as west dayton has been falling behind the rest of dayton, on a larger scale, cities like dayton have been

falling behind the me prosperous parts of the country, going back decades. >> if you look at the decline of manufacturing and the decline of areas where it once was vibrant, the real turng point is the late 1970s. starting in e late 1970s, corporations started to much more aggressively push back against labor unions. and they did so in part because the economy was becoming a bit more global, so they were able to threaten that they would move production overseas. and so we saw a plummeting of the role of labor unions ecisely at the time that inequality was rising. (cheering)is >> macgiand then the reagan era ushered in tax cuts for the wealthy, and a wave ofti deregu. at the same time, shareholders starteexerting more influence on the way companies did business. >> you had bankers sitting in esw york, corporate execut boards far away from these communities, that thought, you know, labor was expendable.

and unfortunately, we have this idea that what's good for wall street is od for everybody else. (tding bell ringing) wall street was pushing a lot of companies to offload labor costs from their balance sheet, outsource jobs abroad. >> macgillis: in 1993, bill clinton signed nafta, which sped the flight of many auto-parts a kers from the dayton are mexico-- a deal president trump has since been harshly critical of. t worst trade deal ever made by any country, i think, in the world. >> macgillis: but many economists say that the biggest hit on manufacring areas came in 2000, wn china was admitted into the wld trade organization, which still echoes today in the trade war between the u.s. and china. >> when globization happened, when the loss of the dominance of organized laborappened, that wealth was not in just one place.

the wealth here was across a whole community. and when a community sits on eat, and that's what they created from, and that goes away, that's why you see such a struggle today as we move forward to redefine our ecomy now. >> macgillis: from 2001 to 2007, the dayton metro area lost almost 23,000 jobs. >> delphi really scaling back theiproduction here in the united states. a lot of that work is going to mexico and china, so...is >> macgillto put it another way, nearly 1 in 3 local jobs in manufacturing vanished during that time. and things only got worse from there. >> today, we're announcing our plan to, over time, cease production at ford/gm truck assembly plants. >> these gas prices, they're not going down... >> macgillis: in 2008, gm closed its massive dayton operation, citing rising gas prices and plunging sales. >> it unds like tough times in dayton, ohio... >> gm will close the plant for good later this year, two days fore christmas.

>> macgillis: it was one of the ast big auto plants in a town that once had moo industry jobs than anywhere but detroit. >> we produced quite a few gm brands-- gmc envoy, the isuzu ascender, saab, buick, oldsmobile. >> basically, it is a shift in strategy. >> macgillis: rodney brickey was one of more than 2,000 gm workers la off that day. he'd put in 14 years, starting back wn his father worked there. >> the insurance was pretty much unbeatable, and the wages were pretty high. i'd say it probably averagedt ound $35 an hour. >> when the plant closed here, economically it was devastating for this area. >> because when you're making that kind of money and something like this closes, it's next to impossible to find something that's compatible with that kind of

wages. >> unemployment, which now... >> macgillis: but the problems for dayton, and the rest of ther co were about to get worse. >> ...could lose their jobs. major nancial institutions have teetered on the edge of collapse and some have failed. >> the numbers of jobs lost, 190,000 jobs... no macgillis: the global e was melting down on its way to we great recession, and it was taking dayton doh it. >> ... that unemployment rate is worrying... >> it s kind of like a one-two punch. i mean, we had vivid memories of what happened in the 1970s,on it wasn't thatago, and it was, like, "oh, no, not again." >> and now to ohio, where the economic signs are n good. in fact, they're going from bad to worse. >> macgill: in 2009 came the hardest hit of all from the company that was more identified with the city than any other: national cash register. >> ...says it's packing up and moving south. >> the ncr corporati dayton. it had been here forever. to all of us who lived in dayton, we thought it was going

to be here forever. >> dayton's only fortune 500 company, ncr, is heading o and down south. >> 598 employees will lose their jobs when the company pulls out of here in late ptember. >> macgillis: the company moved to the atlanta suburbs, where it already had a large operation. the c.e.o. saiit had become increasingly hard to recruit people to live and work in dayton. >> and daytonians are mad. we're still mad.ec that took a of our soul, and this community has nott recovered om the loss of ncr. you still hear people talknc abouleaving the community. it's a scar. >> macgillis: it's a story that's been repeated in many small industrial cities, all across the country. >> there's a really fundamental change happening in the economy. if you think about where wealth lives, it basically ves in a couple of places: it lives in financial assets-- so, on wallre

-- or in intellectual property-- so, in silicon vaey. it's in a handful of people, a handful of companies, and you've had no real growth in the underlying economy. you've had wage stagnation for 20 years. and so, the bottom falls out. there's, there's nobody earning any money. there's no one left to buy stuff, and these economies collapse. (siren blaring in distan) >> we have hit double digits on the unemployment rate now. >> macgillis: by 2010, dayton'se unempl rate topped 12%. >> it is worse than economists have been expeing, and this is the highest since the early 1980s. >> macgillis: and while all this was happening in the early years of this cade, city officials began seeing the first signs of an even bigger disaster. >> federal and local officers are involved in cracking down on the heroin problem that's growing in dayton. >> macgillis: dayton was hardly the only city being hit with a heroin problem, but its grip was especially strong he

s it has us asking how bie heroin problem nin the miami valley, and what can be done to stop it. >> macgillis: the ro the problem could be traced back years, to the kind of work that had once maddayton thrive: hard, physical jobs,etitive motions, day after day. >> the opioid addiction issue happens in places where people use their bodies to make a living. you have a guy that's, you know, not feeling really well, or a woman, and, "my back really hurts," goes to see their doctor. their doctor gives them what they perceive to be a non-addictive substance.an i think that's where a lot th this came from. >> you know, one omost serious crises facing people... >> the issuef opiate addiction in the dayton area is unique. but this particular part of the country was targeted very heavily by pharmaceutical companies, when drugs likeon oxn first came on the market. >> macgillis: by 21 the state

was reporting that opioid prescriptions had rise1,000 percent in ohio and many users were getting hooked. ashley sturgill was one of them. she first took opiates for chronic back pain whenhe was working as a waitress. >> i can remember exactly when i realized that i was an addict. i, uh, was prescribed oxycontin, me and my daughters' father both. and, um, my insurance was cut. so i didn't have any, and ino didn't i got really, really, really sick. and i think it was my mom or myn aunt i callewas telling them how sick i was. and, uh, they told me to lay down, and they pretty new that i was addicted to them at that point. >> she was eating, wha 30 a day? >> probably, at least. yeah, i have a very high tolerance. >> and that would kill a lot of people. >> and people think because i'm small, that, you know, that's not the case, but i was probably ing triple what other people were doing. and then everything just kind of wt downhill from there. >> a doctor who fbi officials say ran a pill mill inayton

proclaims his innocence. >> macgillis: ashley says she was getting her pills from a doctor willing to write illegal prescriptions, a practice that law enforcement eventuallyd cracwn on. >> ...believe he wrote as many as 40 fake prescriptions per day. (weapons cocking) >> macgillis: but there was an unintend consequence. >> you know, we took the pil away from the addicts, not knowing we had so many addicts. when you do that, you have people with addiction problems. and now they go seek anotherl illebstance, and that was heroin. >> police were executing several tosearch warrants in the d neighborhood, all relating to heroin trafficking. >> macgillis: as drug cartels began moving heroin to dayton, they were helped by a feature at had once been a boon to its manufacturing economy-- the l cityation at the so-called crossroads of america. >> you have interstate 75 coming straight from the southern borders, then it hits interstate 70, which crosses from new york to chicago. so it's veryasy to distribute products across the united states from dayton, ohio.

a macgillis: so with the drugs flowing freely intty that was already reeling from an economic collapse and suffering the despair that came with it, dayton had a full-blown epidemic on its hands.ha by then, itaken over ashley's life. >> i knew she was on the pills, and i thought she got clean. but i actually, uh... she would use the bathroom a lot, and lock the door, and turn the water on.e y i picked the lock on the bathroom door and opened it, and she had a needle stuck in her arm. that's when i knew for sure. >> sorry, i get emotional. i hate thinking about it. >> i thought i could just throw her out and move on, but i couldn't do that.lo her. i knew we could do it. and we're getting through now. or sorry.

>> it was a lot ofbut, i mean, we did it. she did it.or >>, i just hate... that's a rough one for me, so... (sniffling) >> macgillis: ashley was o the lucky ones. she sought treatment for her addiction after discovering she was pregnant. but across dayton, as syhetic opioids like fentanyl had begun entering the market, addicts were dying by the hundreds. am the state of ohio has become ground zero for erica's overdose crisis, kilng more people across the country than ever before. >> 911, what's the address of your emergency? >> my boyfriend is oding. and it's, it's bad, please hurry. >> the epicenter is in ohio, where officials say they are on track for 10,000 overdose deaths this year. that is higher than the total for the entireation in 1990.>> acgillis: most of the victims end up here, in front of

the county coroner, dr. kent harshbarger. >> she was 45 years old. and she was found sort of in an abandoned house that's used for drugs regularly. i need to get photogs. what i see is just the same tragedy, the same story, repeating itself over and over again in that addicted population. but it doesn't exclude anyone-- every racial group, socioeconomic group, we see in this current crisis. all the internal organs are in the right spot, a little bit of fluid in the chest, the lungsle are a littyperinflated. the cost is staggering to any one community, and t smaller the community, the harder it is to absorb that economic crisis that this is creating. tere's not enough resourc fix the bridges and the roads, and then you throw in an opioid crisis, and the, the problem becomes insurmountable. i think we're done. the system is being overwhelmed.

we have had to bring some of our equipment that we have already for mass fatality event here to ilding. it's a refrigerated trailer, we have two of them. each one of them will hold 18 setsf remains, and we've had to bring them here from time to time, because our coolers are full. ♪ >> macgillis: in just the first six months i2017, he had seen more fatal overdoses in montgomery country, which includes dayton, than in the entire year before. >> overdoses, they're now the nuer-one killer of people under the age of 50. more people die from that than c from carshes... >> macgillis: the number ofas fatalities hince declined, due in part to there being less fentanyl on the street.ad but thction problem is still raging.ca yosee the devastation at any of the support groups that meet virtually every day in the city. thisne was called families o addicts. >> f.o.a. is a nonprofit that i

started back in november 2013. i have 11 years of my own recovery from alcohol and other drugs currently, but at the time that i had started this, when i asund out that my daughter was using heroin, it an animal of a different coloror me. but what she did is, she educated me more than anyone about what was going on with her. >> macgillis: the night we were there, addicts and their families took turns celebrating triumphs that may sound small, but were monumental victories on the road to recovery. >> here we go. >> there we go. >> here i come. of yeah. >> i'm taking one hese, because today marks my 90 days of being sober.in (cheand applauding) >> i'm going to take one of these, because just got out of prison, it's a month on the 20th. i have a job. i've got a car, i've got a phone, i just made it through my sfirst paycheck last nigh i'm super-proud of myself, so... (clicks tongue) (applauding)

>> this isor my son, justin. he's going to be ten months clean on the 17th, and we couldn't be prouder of you. pplauding) >> i guess i'm going to takend one, a. because i... i'm going to start to take care of myself. >> it's a big step. pplauding)♪ ♪ >> macgillis: if you spend enough time in dayton, you see that the opioid epidemic spares nobody-- not even newborns. at the city's largest hospital, one out of every ten babies in the neatal i.c.u. is here becae they may be in withdrawal from opiates. there's even a specialrogram designed take care of the overwhelming number of addicted

mothers-to-be run by dr. christopher croom. >>rior to the beginning of this program, there wareally nothing available in thisr community fothat particularpu patienlation. you have women of childbearing age in a stressecommunity where opiates are available and, consequently, you've got opiate-addicted pregnant women. these women are judged horribly, because they're using drugs, numberne, and they're exposing their child. so seeking out help during pregnancy is a hard thing to do. (equipment beeping) >> macgillis: ashley's daughter reagan arrived on new year's day, and spent the first week of her life being monitored for thdrawal. >> i was a little scared of what was gonna happen when she was born, how she was gonna be. you're being such a good girl. the fact that she could go through withdrawals, it breaks

my heart. you know you're always-- i'm going to get emotional-- you're gonna have that gut, you know? because, you know, you're the one, you're the addict, so you feel like you pushed this onto your baby, like... but, you know, like i said, you feel horrible. (reagan fussing) >> okay, yes. >> ashley is exceptional for a couple of reasons. number one, she is in recovery. she's had a long history of addiction and several attempts at trying to get in recovery, and this is the first time she's been successl at it. you know, that's a huge accomplishment. >> macgillis: in the end, reagan had just mild symptoms of withdrawal. but l this medical attention can cost as much as 20 times what a regular birth does. it's just one of the ways the opioid problem will be a burden on dayton for years, if not generations, to come. >> you know, what's struggling for us is, we're the ones paying for it-- theaxpayers are paying for the burden, they're

paying for the police services, the fire services. police and fire, they did 3,700 runs in the city of dayton.ch we've exged 125,000 needles across the county last year, a 60% increase. (radio squawking) the judicial system has been clogged by folks tt come through it. and multiply that by 282 people that died last year, thatt doesn't coe number of people that are addicted. this is an issue that far succeeds just an economic issue. ♪ >> macgillis: as dayton tries to pick itself up and revitalize its economy, it finds itself in a situation that's become common in cities like this. after all the overdose deaths, the job losses, and people just leaving for opportunities insewhere, the population dayton is barely more than half ofhat it was at its peak 5 years ago. and even though the number of jobs has returned to what it was before the recession, employers

are finding there aren't enough qualified workers to fill them. i mean, dayton, you come there, and you know that it was once this city that was this big center of innovation. and you come there now, and what hits you is just emptiness of it. u have this downtown with these big, beautiful buildings and these rgeous, 15-, 20-story bank buildings and old hotels, and these streets that are so wide-- like boulevards,nd f, and they're just almost completely empty. if you're trying to build yourself, your numbers back up, quite simply, from a point where you've lost 50% of yourn population years, one obvious possible source fothat is going to be immigrants and refugees. he city of dayton declared itself as immigrant friendly. so while the trump administration has taken a hard line on immigration, in dayton, some newcomers have been part of the efforts to revitalize.

the ahiska turks are ethnic turks from the former soviet union who came to the u.s. as refugees over a decade ago. roughly 12,000 of them settled in dayton, including islom shakhbandarov. >> back in 2007, when i moved te dayton, peas running away from this community. street was dirty. ll basi part of dayton was dying. but i discover the life in the u.s. could be different if we move here due to the cost of living here and affordability of real estate. >> macgillis: so when you came here, you saw the city in a completely differe way. >> yes, i see the opportunity, because it was almost pty, and there was room to fill it. after six months, i was already a daytonian. >> macgillis: he and some other ahiska turks went into business together. starting with a single used t trucy built a transportation company called american power, which now has

over 30 employees. >> this place was basically non-functioning for five or six years before we get it.r there was a mirehouse-- small, but that was pretty much it. >> you got it for a good price? >> yes, we did. we always do. >> it's now been a year since the immigrant-friendly plan was adopted here, and... >> the ahiska turks have served, like, as school board members, as community aders. they have taken an old recreation site th actually was closed and created it as their own community site.ey ave started businesses in the community and have taken over entire neighborhoods of the city of dayton, and made them vibrant communities once again. >> these houses, these houses was abandoned. majority of people who live, like these two houses, they both was abandoned. it was abandoned neighborhood. we bought hous for $5,000, $6,000. there are houses that i bought for $2,000.

you knowit's... nobody wants... it's the burden in the city.an my community see that as an opportunity. >> macgillis: and like so many fosuccessful daytonians be him, islom has already moved out of the city center and into the suburbs. >> it's the first time i ever built a house from the ground, and i believe the otheuse is gonna be much better. we're gonna build many, many,ny many, many more. >> macgillis: the ahiska turks are not the only foreigners who have found opportunity here. >> the language of economic development in the american heartland is changing. >> macgillis: cho tak wong, ase -made chinese billionaire, runs one of the largesass companies in the world his newest and biggest factory is in dayton, making glass for the american market. he and his translator agreed to a rare interview at his office here. why was it necessary for a chinese company come in to

build up our supply chain for auto glass? (speaking inese): >> the factory floor is buling again at this manufacturing plant in moraine, ohio. >> macgillis: the location of his new factory couldn't have been more symbolic-- empty gm plant, now fuyao glass america. la >> it's thest chinese investment in ohio's history, and in the top ten chine sinvestment in the unitedtates. a company that invests over $600illion into your community, into a project, that employs over 2,300 people within three, three-and-a-half years, that's a pretty big deal. >> macgillis: among the new employees were a lot of former w

gmkers. >> i was actually a ttle bit excited that at least somebody was trying to bring some jobs back into the area. you know, at's why i went ahead and applied early. i was actually in the third group red into the plant. both gm and fuyao, i actually started in the same part of the plant, in the same corner. >> macgillis: but the starting wages were different than what he was used to at gm. >> you started out at $12 an hour. after 90 days, you got a raise up to $12.84. >> macgillis: the starting pay has since gone up to $15 an hour, but that's still barely enough to keep a family above the poverty level. will american worker to get used to lower manufacturing pay than they had back ten, 20, 30 years ago? (speaking chinese):

>> manufacturing is not what it used to be. we used to think of manufacturing as these good, stable, middle-class jobs. but because of the decimation of the industrial heartland, essentially now those who are building manufacturing companies in former industrialreas are doing so on a totally new model, a model that's built on much, much lower pay, and much weaker benefits and job security. (music playing over speakers

>> macgillis: in december, fuyao's employees gathered on the factory floor for thean compy's holiday dinner. it was a more festivoccasion than 2008, when gm shuttered this factory two days before christmas. ♪ down by the river that runs through the heart of the city,uc the scene ismore somber. st. vincent de paul's is one of zens of charitable food pantries serving the dayton area. >> i got 49. a lot lower than i tht it was going to be.st usually, it julow down to about 70 or 80. (chuckles) >> macgillis: last year, they gave out free groceries more than 31,000 times. >> getting desperate, the whole crowd running up... >> yeah, you nev know what's going here-- 49? >> number 39, your food is ready. please meet your shopper at the door. number 39.

>> the majority of people who come to our pantry work.we ctually have a significant number that come here; they'll give me a ticket, and they'll at, "i have to be at wo 10:00," or "i have to be work at 9:30, please make sure i get my food." people who are coming are people who will probably neverco r from the great recession. we have milies watering down soup, and moms trying to figure out how to make a box of mac and cheese last for two days. >> are you tired? you're being really good. >> we visit homes with no food in the cupboard at all, there is nothing >> number 46, your food is ready.se pleet your shopper at the door. >> i cannot overstate the change that happened in 2008 and from there on, it was a game-changer for us. people who have never needed help came to us, and they continue to. and we still see the, the impaca fromevent. jobs have come back, but it's not the kind of jobs we lost. people who were making a good, middle-class income are now making ten or $12 an hour.

people lost half of their pension. people didverything they were supposed to do, and it didn't work. >> you're bagging up here todays >> y, ma'am. >> okay, you can head this way. all i've seen is the need increase, increase, and increase. i mean, we used to serve 150 families.w we're rving 350 and up. all i see is the need going up and up and up. >> 350, your food is ready... >> hey!ou >> thank okay. wow, okay, hold on. >> a lot of the jobs here in dayton are minimum wage, no benefits. so by the time they provide all that to their family, groceries are the last on the list, and so they need to come here. >> cupcake! >> yeah, look, they have cupcakes right here. look at that. >> i don't like to see kidser comie with their parents. it just,t really bothers me. it bothers me to see children here, because i know they'll be re 20 years from now wit their kids. >> 336, your food is ready.

please meet your shopper at the door. >> macgillis: taylor hardy visits food pantries like this couple of timemonth. ♪ she works full-time, but says th even with $230 in food stamps every month, she needs charities like st. vincent's to help feed her family. >> will you get me the, um, red sauce out? >> mm-hmm. >> macgillis: taylor was working as a nursi assistant. her boyfriend, andrew, was weatherizing houses. both earned a bit more than $13i an hour, buter had any savings. >> we make $2,0 a month and we pay $300 for each car, so that's $600. >> we've got rent, which is about $675. >> $675, so there's $1,300. >> (fussing) >> sit right there, mommy's almost done-- here, he, i'm going to make you a taco. our gas and electric, that's

$3, easy. and then we pay for diapers-- we can't forget that-- for daycare and home that's usually about $70 every t,o weeks. here you go, go o take it rd sit. >> for both of uoughly $40 aor week for gas f the cars. >> the cost of living is outrageous. i think i have five dollars in my bank account righ it's sad, it's really sad that i work all these hours and i miss the time with my kids and my family to make nothing. >> we're barely just making it. >> come on, let's go. eat. >> the poverty level is set by the federal government. and the poverty level for a family of four is $24,300. and when we stop and think about a family of four for $24,300, to that being the verty level, that's nowhere

near what somebody would need to actually survive in today's dollars. >> working-class wages have essentially been flat or declining for three decades. and we know that upward mobility, the chance that someone will move up the incomed , has stagnated. you know, what makes a society move forward confidently into the future is this sense of personal optimism, the idea that one's hard work is rewarded. that one has the ability, if they seize the opportunities before them, to rise economically and socially, and to look to the future with optimism rather than fear. (birds squawking) >> macgillis: but theris very little sense of optimism among the lunchtime crowd at the house of breadoup kitchen. across dayton, wages have dropped an estimated 19% from what they were before the recession. and the work is very different, too. >> right now, i work at

el greco's up on salem avenue. restaurant work, and that's really out of my league there. i ed to be a diesel mechan by trade. $8.50-an-hour job is not very much money, you know, so... i got rent i got to pay, $100 a week. >> i.ork in a plastic factory we process recycled plastics and put it into a form, like little moblack pellets that can bed into useful objects by others. tu we sell the pellets to other companies, who i use these pellets to mold objects. >> we come here to eat, so theki ds can eat at home. you know, because, you know, we're stggling. >> it is what it is, you know. you got to make, you g to make do with what you got, so... really, you got to have faith in yourself. ♪ t

>>nk our unemployment rate is better than it has been in a long time. the issue in dayton is not how many people are employed or how many people are unemployed. it's, what kind of jobs do they have? >> macgillis: one of the other things you realize when you talk to people at these soup kitchens and food banks, people with the jobs, is just how humble the work has become in dayton. he now you have all jobs that are no longer about inventing new things, t instead about the logistics of handling and pkaging and moving things that are made elsewhere. take dayton corrugated, who have been making boxes f here 40 years. last yr, they spent nearly a million dollars on new equipment just to keep up with demand-- but most of that new demand is

fromompanies making products outside dayton. >> we are making more boxes now than we ever have. when the recession came along, everybody just kind of slowed down we just kind of hunkered down and tried to make profit, to stay in business ourselves. as the economy is coming back, now we can expand. >> macgillis: the starting pay here is $13 an hour, and, like other employers, he's struggled to fill jobs. >> people e a big problem now. you know, we've got a lot of really good people here, and it's hard to get more. the drug problem is a real issue for companies ke us. because it's really hard to find good, qualified workers. ♪ >> macgillis: as you go around dayton today, you see this thnsion between the economic and social damage an

determination to rebuild. there are small businesses cropping up in old industrial n buildings; black chamber op commerce is meeting in a downtown coffee sh. (talking in background) >> macgillis: ...and young inventors are designing hetheir prototypes, like t wright brothers did here over a century ago. >> dayton is not unique in the problems that we are facing. that is common among urban communities all across the s ited states. but what is uniqueat dayton is still small enough to cght some of these wrongs. we're not a new yoy, we're not a chicago. we're dayton, ohio. so this is the community campaign, that's where we are today. this is how you change communities. >> macgillis: in a nearly empty corner of the city earlier this summer, group of residents were trying fix one of their

most urgent problems-- the lack of grocery stores in west dayton-- by raising money for a community-owned co-op. >> greetings, how's everybody doing? you're good? i know, we're hot. there's some water over here if anybody needs some water before we take out. there was about five or six of us that had the wild idea, "well, if we're living in a food desert, what if you opened a grocery store?" nobody had ever done it before, and everybody kind of looked atk uswe're crazy. (talking in background) we had so many people join in the last twoonths, or last month, that we're at 1,500 members right w, you know? and so it's, like, we got a lot of momentum. everywhere i go, people areki asking and t about the market. ♪ >> macgillis: the market will be called "gem city," an old nickname from dayton's better days. >> to me, it's about, like, how to get resources that are ofaving the community to be reinvested insidur community. and the noti that we're not waiting for others to do it, but we're doing it ourselves.

♪ >> macgillis: this question of what you do about places like dayn, places whose glory days have passed, is ack really tone for this country, because we've really never been good about figuring out what to do with the places that are no longer on the cutting edge. the places that are no longer t th hubs of innovation. we've never done that; we've never felt the need to do that. just... we move on to t next thing, move on to the next place. but the gaps between places have gotten so big these daysat he disparities at either end of the spectrum are increasingly affecting us all. so we can't just move on from these cities and expect that th'll fix themselves. their fates are wrapped up in big decisions being made about our nations economy and politics. the cities are a landscape of opportunity. or at least they should be, in a country that likes to pride itself on picking up and starting over.

♪ bs >> go to prg/frontline for more on the decline of rust belt cities. >> there's nobody earning any toney. there's no one lefuy stuff and these economies collapse. >> and follow alec mcgillis' reporting on the issue at propublica. >> and you come there now and what hs you is just the emptiness of it. >> check out more stories in the wnet chasing the dream initiative addressing poverty and opportunity in america.co nnect to the frontline community on facebook, twitter or pbs.org/frontline. >> he gripped my arm. >> and he started to massage my shoulders. >> in a forceful way. >> stories with uncanny similarities. >> he came back. >> in a robe. >> just like, an open robe. >> if you were in his movie, you had a shot at an academy award. >> he used these non-disclosure agreements. >> it was a show of power....

>> i think aot of people turned a blind eye. >> ...and control. >> i think his career is over, but you know, who knows? anything can happen. frontline is made possible by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you.an by the corporation for public broadcasting. major support is provided by the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. more information is available at maound.org. the ford foundation, working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide. at ford foundation.org.up additionalrt is provided by the abrams foundation, committed to excellence in journalism. the park foundation, dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. the john andelen glessner family trust. supporting trustworthy journalism that informs and inspires. and by the frontline journalism fu, with major support fro

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you're watching pbs. ♪ ♪ hold, hold on hold on to me ♪ 'cause i'm a little unsteady ♪ >> what's the situation there? >> how do you explain that? >> are you ready for trld that we are facing today? ♪

- [carlos] former news anchor, gretchen carlson, has been excelling since childhood. from a young violin prodigy, to being crowned miss america-- - [announcer] miss america is-- - [carlos] to becoming a nationly recognized face on fox news. - he looks at me for that. - but from the very inception of her tv career, e was faced with one traumatizing encounter after another. so, what compelled this brilliant and accomplished woman to fight back by launching a historic legal battle agponst one of the most rful men in media, turning her into a symbol of progress for millions of women? - sexual harassment is not about sex. it's about power and about what somebody does to you to try and take away your power. - [carlos] and what gave her the courage to turn this potentially career-ending event