>> narrator: tonight... >> our economy is soaring ou jobs are booming. >> narrator: a frontline, propublica special... >> jobs have come back but it's not the kind of jobs we lost. >> narrator: correspondent alec macgillis examines the growing disparities between our cities. >> people who were making a good, middle-class n income are making $10 or $12 an hour. >> narrator: once thriving places like dayton, ohio. >> you think about where wealth lives, it lives on wallre stet, or in silicon valley. and you've had no real growth in the underlying economy. there's no o left to buy stuff and these economies collapse. >> narrator: cities that have beo left behind, struggling come back. >> what makes a society move

forward?e' the idea that s hard work is rewarded. that one has the ability to rise economically, and socially, and to look to the future with optimism rather than fear. >> narrator: a pbs "chasing 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. major supporis provided by the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation, commitd to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. more information is available at macfound.org. the ford foundation, working with visionaries on the frontne of social change worldwide. at ford foundation.org.s additional supportovided by the abrams foundation, committed to excellence in journalism. the park foundation, dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. the john and helen glessnerly farust. supporting trustworthy journalism that informs and inspires. and by the frontline journalism

fund, with major support fromjo and jo ann hagler. support for "left behind america" is provided by wnet through the "chasing the dream from the jpb foundatior funding additional funding from the ford foundation. corporate support is provided by... >> the zip code you're bornet into canmine your future, your school, your job, your dreams, your problems... at the y, our goal is to create opportunities no matter who you are or where you're from. the y, for a better us. (rio squawking) >> it sounds like tough times in dayton, ohio, when you hear about the thousands of layoffs at... >> we have hit double digits on

the unemployment rate now. ed this is the highest si the early 1980s. >> ...stating that 598 employeeo will lose their when the company pulls out... >> ...has become ground zero for america's overdose crisis, country...re people across t >> 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... ob>> how big the heroin prm now is... >>the economy's so bad righ now, and the job loss in the >> this is a big day for donald trump, donald trump has won the ste of ohio. >> ...is just going to cause anm econ, just, destruction to 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. wo the city itseld go for hillary clinton. the county it's part of backed donald trump. the rst time a republican ha won there in 28 years.ep this area because i thdayton 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 arewe also b cities. between cities that are absorbing an ever greatere sh prosperity, and places like this that ared. being left beh small and midsize cities that used to matter a whole lot to c

what ourntry invented, made and aspired to. they don't seem toatter as as much now. but they do. they are heavily cancentrated in our politi battleground states. and are at the heart debate about trade and employment. they are ground zero of a drug epidemic that's on pace to claim another six lives beforeis this filver. so, how did all this happen in a country that is supposedly at the crest of an economic recovery? ♪ (cars driving by, horn honking) the poverty rate in dayton iss 34.5%, whicharly three times the poverty rate nationwide.

and remember, 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 ird of the people in this city are living in poverty. ♪ >> dayton is a place that believed in, you work hard, you pl by the rules, and good things will come to your family. r the past hundred years, you know, until about the great recession, that was continuing to happen, right? they believed your child could do better.m, 'm a product of the american dream. you know, my parents, my dadto worked at general , um, he got a good wage. that wage he saved to help send me and mbrother to school. my brother is an attorney, i'm the mayor of dayton, right? >> ♪ what a day for picking daisies, and lotof red balloons ♪ >> i don't know if a girl that's 20 years younger than me, her dad's not going to get paid the kind of ge and have the kind of pension my dad had, and so

the cost of college will be out of reach for her. and no, i don't think that ♪ e'll get there. >> macgillis: this assessment of dayton is hard to reconcile with the city's extraordinary past.o it's no exaggerationy 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 inventions. and it was the center of a great many lesser inventions, which collectively brought form to thr american 20th ce >> orville wright 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 makingon bicycles in da but they weren't alone. in the early 1900s, dayton was filing more patents per capita

than anywhere else in the country.rt one of the most imt was the cash register, which revolutionized the retail business and made national cashi er a dominant presence in dayton. >> look at the spirit around here. you feel it anywhere you go inpl tht. that ncr family spirit is no bunk. >> what happened in dayton was innovation becamindustry, became general motors, became delco, became national cash register.re there 0,000 or 80,000 good-paying union jobs in dayton, ohio. ar macgillis: when world w ii broke out, dayton's heavy industries retooled for the r effort. rubber, auto parts, airplane gears, propellers-- all indispensable, and all manufactured in dayton. >> general motors had pioneered in applying mass production methods tohe manufacture of bombers-- bombers to blast t

way for our fighti forces. dayton has a story to tell-- the story of a city at war. >> macgillis: the war effort the country, and daytono across exception. >> if you look at the period from roughly the 1930s to the 1970s, you had a period ofbr d-based prosperity. the middle class and those at the bottom saw their incomes rise more quickly than those ath top. tens, hundreds of millions of americans, over time, became owners of housing for the first ti. >> macgillis: sensing into dayton-- whites fre pouring appalachia and blacks om the deep south. >> dayton is crammed, jammed,er living facility packed. this is dayton on a monday night, or a wednesday night. .e 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 getug fast. in part it's because a lot of people were terrified of what this racial integration would mean. >> macgillis: a lot of the new workers that came to dayton wera black, coming up a of the great migration from the south. and people wernot comfortable with their new neighbors. >> and so, we get the first round of white flight.an d that means a bunch of things happen, right? one, you're no longer invested in what goes on in the city. so you're consumed, quite rationally, with making sure that all your tax dollars helpol your suburban scistrict. (dog barking) when y hollow a community out of its lawyers, its doctors,ts nurses, its teachers, those who hold communities best together,s what you're going to is terribly predictable. the pathologies of urban life consum communities. >> macgillis: and many black

families who wanted to move to the suburbs and other partof town found the door blocked. around neighborhoods tdelines which african-americans were going to get loans for whichme ho that's wt we call redlining. so then an african-american who could afford to buy the home where the great school was, or that was close to a park, or et cetera, et cetera, couldn't. >> macgillis: in dayton, the result was african-americanscl being largely ustered in west dayton, where money and resources steadily declined. >> west dayton, you hadic and white families livdecan by side, kids who went to school, two-parent homes, a car, you know, the typical house wit the two kidsg, and a white picket fence. (sir blaring in distance)da now we have dilapid housing.ho we have lost our busin.

and that has become the new normal in west dayton. (dogs barking) (talking ibackground) >> macgillis: mike and willa strickland and their six boys live in west dayton's hilltop homes. >> you know where the top is? >> uh-uh. m >>acgillis: it's a public housing complex in a crime-ridden neighborho. >> before y'all eat, i neeyou all to say y'all prayers. >> lord, thanks for the food,yo thanfor nourishing and loving my body. in jesus, mary, all praise. their best option, destee was working two jobs, but it was a step up from the homeless shelter they were in before. >> the shelter was an experience it was very different, because they dealt with the outbreak of like, bedbugs, and sething called scabies that i never knew nothing about.e, and it was just, leally overwhelming.e

>> well, at me, we just had one income coming into the house, so it was, uh, it was, we could be able to afford it, but it was, likewe couldn't afford to pay anything else, you know what i'm saying, and take care of the kids. >> could you turn it up, please? >> no.ll >> macgillis: had just started working in customer service for an insurance company. mike is a line worker at a meat packaging plant. >> my life is different than my parents' life. they was middle-class. so...both had good decent jobs, my daddy was a... he was a chemist, and my mom, she was a registered nurse. >> if you already had food, you already before you gavhat.ood i grew up right here on the 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 back when i graduated high school ♪ when i came back, it's just, like, nothing was here. >> they just te everything down and didn't replace it. now it's just 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. anso people or corporation pull out, without any apology, 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 serve them. it's not a problem confined just to dayton. millions of americans live in one of these so-called food deserts.>> o 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 w for about 20 years. there is no place to buy ake 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 o west dayton, ty place you can get it is a burger king or a mcdonald's. ♪ >> macllis: as west dayton has been falling behind the rest cities like dayton have been, falling behind the more prosperous parts of the country, going back decades. >> if you look at the decline of manufacturinand the decline vibrant, the real turnints is the late 1970s.e starting in te 1970s, corporations started to muchiv more aggrey 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 unionsec ely at the time that inequality was rising. (cheering) >> macgillis: and then the reagan era ushered in tax cuts for the wealthy, and a wave of deregulation. at the same time, shareholderser started exng more influence on the way companies did business. >> you had bankers sitting inrk new corporate executives, boards far away from these communities, that thought, y know, labor was expendable. and unfortunately, we have this idea that what's good for wall street is good for everybody else.di (t bell ringing) wall street was pushing a lot of companies to offload labor costs from their balan sheet, outsource jobs abroad. >> macgillis: in 1993, bill clinton signed nafta, which sped the flight of many auto-parts makers from the dayton area to meco-- a deal presidentha trumsince been harshly critical of. >> the worst trade deal ever

made by any country, i think, in the world. >> macgillis: but many economists say that the biggestu hit on manufacng areas camein in 2000, when cha was admittedld into the worrade organization, which still echoes today in the trade wa between the u.s. and china. >> when globalization happened,f when the loss the dominance of organized labor happened,in that wealth was noust one place. the wealth here was across a whole community. and when a community sits on that, and that's what they're away, that's why you see such a struggle today as we move now.ard to redefine our economy >> macgillis: from 2001 to 2007, the dayton met area lost almost 23,000 jobs. >> delphi really scaling back their production here in the united states.ha a lot ofwork is going to mexico and china, so... >> macgillis: to put it another way, nearly 1 in 3 local jobs in manufacturinvanished during

that time. omd things only got worse 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, unging sales. gas prices and >> it sounds like tough times in dayton, ohio... >> gm will close the plant for good later this year, two days before christmas. >> macgillis: it was one of the last big auto plants in a town that once had more auto 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 inte st. >> macgillis: rodney brickey was one of more than 2,000 gm workers laid off that day. he'd put in 14 years, startingn back ws father worked there. >> the insurance was pretty much

unbeatableand the wages wereig pretty i'd say it probably averaged out around $35 an hour. >> when the plant closed here, economically it was devastating r this area. >> because when you're making that kof 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 the country, were about to get worse. >> ...could lose their jobs. major financial institutions have teetered on the edge of collapse and some have failed. >> the numbers of jobs lost, 190,000 jobs... m gillis: the global economy was melting down on its way to the great recession, and it was taking dayton down with it. >> ... that unemployment rate is worrying...s >> it nd of like a one-two punch. i mean, we had vivid memories ofhat happened in the 1970

it wasn't that long ago, and it was, like, "oh, no, not again." >> and now to ohio, where the g economic signs are nd. in fact, they're going from bad to worse.: >> macgill 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.>> he ncr corporation was dayton. it had been here forever. to all of us who lived in to be here forever.it was going >> dayton's only fortune 500 condany, ncr, is heading out down south. >> 598 employees will lose their jobs when the company pulls out of here in late september. >> macgillis: the company moved to the atlanta suburbs, where it alady had a large operatio the c.e.o. said it had become itincreasingly hard to rec people to live and work in dayton. d >> atonians are mad. we're still mad. that took a piece of our soul,

and this community has not recovered yet from the loss of ncr. you still hear people talk about ncr leaving themm ity. 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 lives in a couple of places: it lives in financial assets-- so, on wall street-- or in intellectual property-- so, in silicon. valley 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 forrs 20 yea and so, the bottom falls out. there's, there's nobody earning any money. stuff, and these econo buy collapse. (siren blaring in distance) >> we have hit double digits on the unemployment rate now. >> macgillis: by 2010, dayton's

unemployment rate topped 12%. >> it is worse than economistsin have been expe and this is the highest since the early 1980s. >> macgiis: and while all this was happening in the early years of this decade, city officialsst began seeing the figns of an even bigger disaster. >> federalnd 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 p heroblem, but its grip was especially strong here.ha >>s us asking how big the heroin problem now is in the c miami valley, and wh be done to stop it. >> macgillis: the roots of the problem could be traced back years, to the kind of work thata had once made yton thrive: hard, physical jobs, repetitive 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. and i think that's where a lot of this came from. >> you know, one of the most serious crises facing people... >> the issue oiate addiction in the dayton area is unique. but this particular part of the country was targeted very heavily by pharmaceutical companies, when drugs like oxycontin first came on therk . >> macgillis: by 2011 the state prescriptions had rise000 rcent in ohio and many users were getting hooked. ashley sturgill was one of them. she first took opiates for chronic back pain when she was working as a waitress. >> i can remember exactly when i realized that i was an addict. i, uh, was prescribedon oxn, me and my daughters' father both. and, um, my insurance was cut. so i didn't have any, and i didn't know, i got really, really, really sick.

and i think it was my mom or my aunt i called and was telling them how sick i was. wn, and they pretty much knew that i was addicted to them at that point. 0 >> she was eating, what, day? >> probably, at least. yeah, i have a very hi tolerance. >> and that would kill a lot of people. >> and pple think because i'm small, that, you know, that's not the case, but i was probably doing triple what other people were doing. and then everything just kind of went downhill from there. >> a doctor who fbi officials tosay ran a pill mill in dce proclaims his innoe. >> macgiis: ashley says she was getting her pills from a doctor willing to write illegal prescriptions, a practice th law enforcement eventually cracked down on. >> ...believe he wrote as many as 40 fake prescriptions per day. (weapo cocking) >> macgillis: but there was an c unintendedonsequence. >> you know, we took the pills away from the addicts, not kn.ing we had so many addic when you do that, you have people with addiction problems. and now they go seek another illegal substance, and that was heroin.

>> police were executing severae ch warrants in the dayton neighborhood, all relating to macgillis: as drug cartels began moving heroin to dayton, they were helped by a featur that had once been a boon to its manufacturing economy-- the city's location at the so-called crossroads of america. >> you have interstate 75 coming straight from the southern borders, tn it hits interstate 70, which crosses from new york to chicago. so it's very easy to distribute products across the unit states from dayton, ohio. flowing freely into a city 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. by then, it had taken overhl 's life. >> i knew she was on the pills, and i thought she got clean. but i tually, uh... she would use the bathroom a lot, and lock the door, and turn the water on.

one day i picked the lock on the bathroom door and opened it, and she had a needle stuck in her ar 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 coul't do that. i love her. i knew we could do it. and we're getting rough now. >> sorry. >> it was a lot of work but, i mean, we did it. she did it. >> sorry, i just hate... that's a rough one for me, so... (sniffling) >> macgillis: ashley was one of the lucky ones. f she sought treatme her addiction after discovering she was pregnant. but across dayton, as synthetic opios like fentanyl had begu entering the market, addicts were dying by the hundreds. >> the state of ohio has become

ground zero for america'sli overdose crisis, kil more people across the country than ever before.dd >> 911, what's the ass of your emergency? >> my boyfriend is oding. and it's, it's bad, please hurry. i >> the epicentin ohio, where officials say they are on track for 10,000 overdose deaths this year. that is higher than the totalio for the entire nin 1990. >> macgillis: most of the victims end up here, in front of the county corer, 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 photographs. what i see is just the same tragedy, the same story, repeating itself over and over again in thaaddicted population. ery racial group, everyanyone-- socioeconomic group, we see in this current crisi all the internalrgans are in the right spot, a little bit of

fluid in the chest, the lungs are a little hyperinflated. the cost is staggering to any one community, and the smaller the community, the harder it is to absorb that economic crisis that this is creating.er s not enough resources to fix the bridges and the roads, and th you throw in an opioid crisis, and the, the problem becomes insurmountable. i think we're done. i the systbeing overwhelmed. we have had to bring some of our equipment that we havey alrer mass fatality events here to the building. w's a refrigerated traile have two of them. each one of them will hold 18ma sets of s, and we've had to bring them here from time to time, because our coolers are full. ♪ >> macgillis: in just the first7 six months in he had seen more fatal overdoses in montgomery country, which includes dayton, than in t entire year before.

>> overdoses, they're now the number-one killer of people under the e of 50. more people die from that than from car crashes... >> macgillis: the numb of fatalities has since declined, due in part to there being less fentanyl on the street. but the addiction problem is still raging. you can see the devastation atpo any of the s groups that meet virtually every day in the city. w this o called families of addicts. >> f.o.a. is a nonprofit that i started back in november 2013. i have 11 years of my own recovery from cohol and other drugs currently, but at the time that i had started this, when i found out that my daughter was using heroin, it was an animal of a different color for me. but what she did is, she educated me more tn anyone her.t what was going on with >> 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. h ere we go. >> there we go.er e i come. >> yeah. >> i'm taking one of these, yscause today marks my 90 of being sober. (cheering and applauding) >> i'm going to take one ofus these, because i jt 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 ms paycheck last night, so i'm super-proud of myself, so... (clicks tongue) (applauding)or >> this is f my son, justin. he's going to be ten months clean on the 17th, and we couldn't be prouder of you. (applauding) >> i guess i'm going to take one, and... because i... i'm going to start to take care of myself. >> it's a big step. (applauding) ♪ >> 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 inal the neon i.c.u. is hereey because may be in withdrawal from opiates. there's even a special program designed take care of the overwhelming number of addicted ristopher croom.orby dr. >> p to the beginning of rethis program, there was ally nothing available in this community for that particular patient population. you have women of childbearing age in a stressed community where opiates are available and, consequently, you've got opiate-addicted pregnant women. these women are judged horribly, because they're using drugs, o number, and they're

exposing their child. so seeking out help during pregnancy is a hard thing to dot (equipeeping) >> macgillis: ashley's daughter reagan arrived on new year's day,nd spent the first week her life being monitored for withdrawal.e >> i was a litared of what was gonna happen when she was born, how she was gonna be. you're being such a good gir the fact that e could go through withdrawals, it breaks my heart. you know you're always-- i'm going to get emotional-- you're, gonna have that guou know? because, you know, you're the one, you're the adct, so you feel like you pushed this onto youraby, like... but, you know, like i said, you feel horrible.in (reagan fu >> okay, yes. >> ashley is exceptional for a o coupreasons. 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'

been success it. you know, that's a huge accomplishment. >> macgillis: in the end, reagan withdrawal.ld symptoms of but all this medical attention t can cost as much as es what a regular birth does. it's just one of the ways the opioid probl 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-- the taxpayers are paying for the burden, they' paying for the police services, the fire services. police and fire, they did 3,700 runs in the city of dayton. we've exchanged 125,000 needles across the county last year, a 60% increase. (radio squawking) the judicial system has been clogged by folks that comero thh it. and multiply that by 282 people that died last year, that doesn't count the number of ople that are addicted. this is an issue that far succeeds just an ecomic 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 elsewhere, the population in dayton is barely more than half of what it was at its peak 50 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 onc this city that was this big center of innovation. and you come there now, andat wh hits you is just the eminess of it. you have this downtown with these big, beautiful buildingsrg and these us, 15-, 20-story bank buildings and old hotels, and these streets that are so wide-- like boulevards, kind of, 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 your population in 50 years, one obvis possible source for th is going to be immigrants and refugees.it >> last year theof 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 f turks from tmer soviet union who came to the u.s. as refugees over a decade ago. roughly 12,000 of them settled in dayton, includingslom shakhbandarov. >> bk in 2007, when i moved dayton, people was running away from this community. street was dirty. basically, 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. >> macgillisso when you came here, you saw the city in a completely different way. cause it was almost empty, and there was room to fill it. after six months, i was already a daytonian. >> mgillis: he and some othe ahiska turks went into business together. starting with a single used truck, they built a trsportation company calle american power, which now has over 30 employees. >> this place wabasically non-functioning for five or six years before we get it. there was a minor warehouse--l, smut that was pretty much it. >> you got it for a good price? >> yes, we did. we always do. >> is now been a year since the immigrant-friendly plan was adopted here, and...sk >> the aturks have served, like, as school board members, as community leaders. ey have taken an old recreation site that actually was closed and creed it as

their own community site. they have started businesses in the community and have taken over entire neighborhoods of the city of dayton, and made again.ibrant communities once >> these houses, these houses was abandoned. majority of people who live, like these two houses, they both was abandone it was abandoned neighborhood. f we bought housesor $5,000, $6,000. there are houses that i bought for $2,000.it you know, 's... nobody wants... it's the burden in the city. and my community see that as an opportunity. >> macgillis: and like so manycc susful daytonians before him, isl has already moved out of the city center and into the suburbs. >> it's the first time i evert bua house from the ground, and i believe the other house is gonna be much better. we're gonna build many, many, many, many, many more.

>> macgillis: the ahiska turks are not the only foreigners who have found opportunity here. >> the language of economicve pment in the american heartland is changing. >> macgillis: cho tak wong, a self-made chinese billionaire, runs one of the largest glass coanies in the world. his newest and biggest factory is in dayton, making glass for the american market. he and his transtor agreed to a rare interview at his office here. why was it necessary for aom chinese company toin to build up our supply chain for autolass? (speaking chinese): >>nghe factory floor is bust again at this manufacturing plant in moraine, ohio. >> macgillis: the location of his new factory couldn't have been more symbolic-- the empty

gm plant, now fuyao glass america. vestment in ohio's history, and in the top ten chinese investment in the united states. a company that invests over $600 million into your communy, into a project, that employs over 2,300 people within three, tee-and-a-half years, that's a pretty big deal. >> macgillis: among the new employees were a lot of former gm workers. le>> i was actually a littit excited that at least somebody was trying to bring some jobs back into the area.at you know, why i went ahead and applied early. i was actually in the thirdre group into the plant. both gm and fuyao, i actually started in the same part of the plant, in the same corner. >> macgillis: but the startingre wages weifferent than what he was used to at gm. >> you started out at $12 an hour. after 90 days, you got a raise

to $12.84. >> macgillis: the starting pay has since gone up to15 an hour, but that's still barely enough to keep a family above ll american workers need to get used to lower manufacturing pay than they haback 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, midd-class jobs. but because of the decimation of the industrial heartld, essentially now those who are building manufacturing companies in former industrial areas are doing so on a totally new model, a model that's built on much, much lower pay, and ch weaker benefits and job security. (mic playing over speakers >> macgillis: in december, fuyao's employees gathered on the factory floor for the company's holiday dinner. it was a more festive occasion than 2008, when gm shuttered this factory two ds before christmas. ♪ down by the river that runsh throe heart of the city, the scene is much more somber. st. vincent de paul's is one of the dozens of charitable food

pantries serving the dayton area. >> i got 49. a lot lower than i thought it was going to be. usually, it just flow down to about 70 or 80. (chuckles) >> macgillis: last year, theyga out free groceries more than 31,000 times. >> getting desperate, the whole crowd running up... k >> yeah, you nevw what's going here--9?d >> number 39, your f ready. please meet your shopper at the door. number 39. m >> tority of people who come to our pantry work. we actually have a significant llmber that come here; the give me a ticket, and they'll say, "i have to be at work at 10:00," or "i have to be work ak 9:30, pleasesure i get my food." people who are coming are people who will probab never recover from the great recession.mi we have es watering down soup, and moms trying to figure out how to make a box of macch and eese 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. please meet 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 impact from that event. 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 t or $12 an hour. people lost half of their pension. people did everything they were supposed to do, and it didn' work. >> you're bagging up here today? >> yes, ma'am. >> okay, y can head this way. all i've seen is the need increase, increase, and increase. i mean, we used to serve 150 families. we're now serving 350 and up. all i see is the need going up and up and up. >> 350, your food is ready... >> hey! >> thank you. okay. wow, okay, hold on.

>> a lot of the jobs here in dayton are minimum wage, no benits. 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 see kids coming here with their parents. it just, it really bothers me.hi it bothers me to seeren here, because i know they'll be here 20 years from now with their kids. >> 336, your food is ready. please meet your shopper at the door. macgillis: taylor hardy visits food pantries like this a couple of times a month. ♪ she works full-time, but says that even with $230 in food stamps every month, she needsit chs like st. vincent's to help feed her family. >> will you get me the, um, red sauce out? >> mm-hmm. >> macgillis: taylor was workins

as a nursingtant. her boyfriend, andrew, was weatherizing houses. both earned a bit more than $13 an hour, but neither had any savings. a >> we make $2,30nth 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, herei'm going to make you a taco. our gas and electric, that'ssy $300, ea. and then we pay for diapers-- we can't forget that-- for daycare and home. that's usually about $70 every two weeks. here you go, go sit, go take it and sit. >> for both of us, roughly $40 a week for gas for the cars. >> the cost of living is outrageous. i think i have five dollars in my bank account right now. 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 poverty 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 upwardha mobility, the chance someone will move up the income ladder, has stagnated. you know, what makes a society move forrd confidently into the future is this sense of personal optimism, the ia that one's hard work is rewarded. that one has the ability, if they seize the opportunities

before them,o rise economically and socially, and to look to the futurwith optimism rather than fear. (birds squawking) >> macgillis: but there is very little sense of optimism among the lunchtime crowd at the housu of breadkitchen. 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 used to be a diesel mechanic by trade. $8.50-an-hour job is not very much money, you know, so... i got rent i goto pay, $100 a week. or >> i win a plastic factory. we process recycled plastics and put it into a form, like littlel k pellets that can be molded into useful objects by others.

so we sell the pellets to other companies, who in turn use these pellets to mold objects. >> we come here to eat, so the kids can eat at home. you know, because, you know,gg we're stng. >> it is what it is, you know. o you got to make, you gotke do with what you got, so... really, you got to have faith in yourself. ♪ >> i think our unemployment rate is better than it has been in a ng time. the issue in dayton is not how many people are employed or how many people are unemployed. ity, what kind of jobs do t have? >> macgillis: one of the other things you realize when you talk to people at these soup kitchenn and food, people with the jobs, is just how humble the

work has become in dayn. now you have all these jobsut that are no longer a inventing new things, but instead about the logistics handling and packaging and moving things that are mad elsewhere. take dayton corrugated, who have been making boxes here for 40 years.r, last yea they spent nearly a million dollars on new equipme just to keep up with demand-- but most of that new demand isom fromnies making products outside dayton. >> we are making more boxes now than we ever have. when the recession came along, everybody just kind oflowed down. we just kind of hunkered down and tried to make profit, to stay in business ourselves. acas the economy is coming now we can expand. >> macgillis: the starting pay here is $13 an hour, and, likeot r employers, he's struggled to fill jobs.a

>> people arg 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 like us. cause it's really hard t find good, qualified workers. ♪ m gillis: as you go around dayton today, you see this tension between the economic and social damage and theto determinatioebuild.ne there are small bues cropping up in old industrial buildings; a new black chamber of commerce is meeting in a downtown coffee shop... (talking in background) >> macgillis: ...and young inventors are designing their prototypes, like the wright brotherdid here over a century ago. >> dayton is not unique in t problems that we are facing. co that is on among urban communities all across the

united states. but what is unique is that dayton is still small enougho right some of these wrongs. we're not a new york city, we're not chicago. we're dayton, ohio. so this is the community campaign, that's where we are today. this is how you change communies. em macgillis: in a nearly y corner of the city earlier this summer, a 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 knowwe're hot. there's some water over here if anybodneeds some water before we take out. there was about five or six of us that d the wild idea, "well, if we're living in a food desert, what if you opened up a grocery store?" nobody hadver done it before, and everybody kind of looked at us like we're crazy. (talking in background) we had so many people join in the last two months, or

last month, that we're a1,500 members right now, you know? and so it's, like, we got a lot of momentum. everywhere i go, people are asking and talking about the market. ♪ >> macgillis: the market will be calledcity," an old nickname from dayton's better days. >> to me, it's about, like, how toet resources that are leaving the community to be reinvested inside of ourmm ity. and the notion that we're not waiting for otherso do it, but we're doing it ourselves. ♪ ll >> mac: this question of what you do about places like dayton, places whose aglory days have passed, really tricky one for this country, because we've really never been gd about figuring out what to do with the places that are no longer on thein cuedge. the places that are no longer the, the hubs of innovation. we've never done that; we've never felt the need to do that.s we.. we move on to the next thing, move on to the next place. but the gaps between places

have gotten so big these days that the disparities at either end of the spectrum are increasingly affecting us al so we can't just move on from these cities and expect that'l thfix themselves. their fates are wrapped up inma big decisions bein about our nations economy and politics. the cities are a landscape of opportunity. or at least they should be, in a country th likes to pride itself on picking up and starting over. ♪ >> we stand for connecting every person. for a global community. >> facebook systematically went from interconnecting people to essentially having a surveillance system of their whole ves. >> facebook has come under fire for its role... >> i mean everybody was pretty upset that we hadn't caught it during the election.

and it was a very intense time.a >> . zuckerberg will testify... >> i still have questions. if we're going to makein sure tha018 and 2020 this doesn't happen again. >> narrator: next time, on frontline. >> go pbs.org/frontline for more on the decline of rust belt cities. t >> there's no one lebuy stuff and these economies collapse. >> and follow alec macgillis' reporting on the issue at propublica.om >> and youthere now and what hits you is just the emptiness of it. >> check out more stories in the wnet, "chasing the in dream iative". connect to the frontline community on facebook, twitternt or pbs.org/fline. >> frontline is made possible by contritions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you.or and by theration for public broadcasting. major support is provided by the john d. and catherine t. macarthur undation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world.on more informas available at macfound.org. the ford foundation, working o with visionarithe front

lines of social change worldwide. at ford foundation.org. additional support is provided by the abrams foundation, e committed ellence in journalism. the park foundation, dedicated to heightening plic awareness of critical issues. the john and helen glessner family trust. supporting trustworthy journalism that informs and inspires. and by the frontline journalism fund, with major support from jon and jo ann hagler. support for "left behinder a" is provided by wnet through the "chasing the dreamti init," with major funding from the jpb foundation and additional funding from e ford foundation. corporate support is provided by the y, for a better us. dia access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org >> for more on this and her frontline programs, visit our website at pbs.org/frontline.

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david m. kennedy: the american story is all about individual aspiration and achievement. is is the land of absolutely unlimited opportunity. we can become whoever we want to be. w we can go wherever t to go. it's part of our national myth. indeed, no society can cohere over time if it doesn't possess some myths that people believe in common. rice: that's what holds us together, this great american creed that it doesn't ma where you came from. it matters where you're going. condoleezza rice: it starts regathering oursels around values, experiences, stories, if you will, about what it is to be an american.