It's The Dying City, Stupid
Yesterday I took a walk down Elmwood, over to Main and down to the waterfront. The new buildings, rehabbed apartments and developing waterfront are sure sights for Buffalonians' sore eyes. We must not, however, lose sight of the fact that most of the rest of the city continues on an accelerating downward spiral.
Outside of downtown and the sliver of real estate between Main Street and Elmwood Avenue, our city is crumbling. Today's reminder of that comes from the Buffalo News, Riverside is the latest neighborhood to fall prey to the house-flippers.
A Buffalo State College analysis found that the neighborhood's economic and social problems could make it Buffalo's next area ripe for house flipping - a real estate practice that has decimated swaths of the city's East Side.
Signs of house flipping already are emerging.
"It's a neighborhood that is in a great deal of decline and transition," said Wende Mix, an associate professor of geography and planning at Buffalo State College, whose geo-economic models have been used by the Mayor's Anti-Flipping Task Force.
"In terms of decline, it appears they're on their way to becoming a lot like the East Side," Mix said.
. . . and also a lot like that part of the West Side between Richmond Avenue and the river as well as Black Rock. The stories of the residents who refuse to give up are, indeed, inspiring. In fact, I see the same sort of hard work and positive attitudes in my own neighborhood. You'll see the odd houses scattered around where the yards are maintained and the houses painted.
Block clubs abound on the West Side and often are able to make their complaints heard in City Hall. Garden walks have been instituted here, too, and maybe one of the most successful citizen-groups in the city, The Massachusetts Avenue Coalition, has been working tirelessly for some 10 years now to stem decline. But the decline continues and shows no signs at all of slowing.
The economic forces that are working against Buffalo are too big to be solved by neighborhood residents struggling each day just to keep the ugliness at bay. Buffalo grows older, poorer and weaker with each passing census and there's only one solution: massive growth. A little growth won't do.
Somehow, Buffalo's activists and leaders need to find the will to call for change in Albany. Not just a change in faces but a change in philosophy. New York must reduce the size of its government and cut the taxes that keep progress here at a dribble. It will only be through serious and widespread business growth that the wealth that provides jobs can be generated.
Now, I know a few of Buffalo's activists and leaders, so I also know that asking you to vote for Republicans would be as successful as suggesting you eat puppies for breakfast tomorrow. But you're not stupid people -- can't you find just a couple Democrats or Greens who understand what's going on here?
Isn't there a progressive somewhere in town who surreptitiously acknowledges that subsidizing artists, while it might make downtown a bit more hip, won't do a damned thing to stop Riverside or South Buffalo from collapsing? Really, there's got to be someone out there who's interested in really saving Buffalo instead of just making the nice bits prettier.
The Detroitification of Buffalo is well underway. First to go, of course, was the East Side; followed by the West Side and Black Rock. Lovejoy's fading around the edges and South Buffalo's not very far behind. Fortress Elmwood's turn will come -- it'll take longer but the signs are already there. Utica Street is oddly run-down all the way from Main to Delaware, across Elmwood and through to Richmond.
Richmond's great houses are increasingly absentee-landlord rentals -- especially below Bryant. Forest Avenue is run-down starting within a block from Elmwood and the blight is spreading back down Ashland, Norwood and the northern blocks of Richmond. The stretch of Delaware between Forest and Potomac isn't doing so hot, either. Things still look generally good, though, in the Elmwood Village and I can forgive the residents for wanting to believe that its prosperity will be a positive force that spreads outward.
Well, I thought the same way when I bought my West Side house in 1992. A scant two blocks away was the Left Bank, Romanello's (at that time,) the Essex Street Pub and Big Orbit. Richmond was on a reconstruction binge and I was convinced that the forces for rehabilitation would continue to spread towards Niagara. It didn't happen. I didn't realize it then, but I do now. In a city where poverty's growth exceeds the growth of wealth, it's the blight that has to spread faster.
It's a physical law.
Business is a good thing and encouraging profit-making is not only sensible but crucial -- it's the profits of business that pay for everything else. Buffalo sorely needs some business-made profits. Encouraging the arts just isn't enough. Artists make dirt and don't support many other jobs. I'm glad there are people who want to be artists, but Niagara-On-The-Lake Buffalo ain't. And the idea that 1/4 million people will one day live off the arts or that business will locate to Buffalo because of them is naive and egotistical.
So step up to the plate, folks -- come up with a real solution for Buffalo's stagnation. I swear, if local Democrats ever got behind and elected a candidate who actually believed in business, profit and free enterprise -- and proposed ideas to back up his talk, I'd crawl across broken-glass in Madras shorts to hear an Ani DeFranco concert -- and I'd pay for my own ticket.
C,
Great post!...Elmwood Avenue is increasingly becoming the place to go for everything you don't need...concentration of capital on the deck of the Titanic, me thinks. Meanwhile everyone in steerage class still wants sidewalks, safe streets and good schools.
Beers at Merlins...soon!
Posted by: david | July 02, 2006 at 01:11 AM
Classic post, start to finish.
I was noticing same thing the other day driving down and seeing now at least four abandoned businesses between Elmwood and Grant, and some houses on westward blocks looking like scenes for a sequel to Flipped movie. Then turned right on Grant it's even worse... abandoned houses galore, at least one boarded and graffiti covered. A couple nicely kept ones scattered amidst the rest, gotta really feel for those people trying their best.
Posted by: b | July 02, 2006 at 05:59 PM