fix buffalo today, archive

While enjoying the 60 degree winter night and returning from Elmwood Avenue on my bicycle, I just couldn’t get the whole “vacant house” thing out of my head. Fires, boarded-up houses, shrinking tax base…… I read in this morning’s BN that another crime was committed in an abandoned house where a young woman was dragged and raped. I first wrote about these sorts of crimes here. Perhaps someone should start a blog about “vacant houses” as a central part of the 21^st century urban landscape. Interesting things can be found on Technorati when you look for them. Bruce is blogging from Detroit and has an interesting spin on similar urban phenomena.

And then I started to think just how many houses on my block might be empty and vacant. I counted seven. That’s 50 percent of the houses! I walked around the block and down a few more streets to double check the extent of this phenomenon with an eye towards cataloging this for some future project. Checking to see if gas meters have been removed in a few cases just to make sure. More on this later…..

So, a few hours later, I’m sitting here compiling census data for a related project and was interested in Buffalo's declining population and other demographic trends. It appears at some time between 2000 and 2003 – 16,616 people have moved! When I drilled down into the economic and job loss data, it's worse that you think.

And then it really occurred to me that there might be more than a strong positive correlation between declining population and this “vacant” urban landscape. I know that at least once a year I help a friend move to Columbus or Charlotte and this has been going on for 10 years. Yet when I did the math, subtracting the 2003 population figure – 276,032 - from the 2000 number – 292,648, divided by three and then again by 365….wow! Are we really losing 15 people/day?

Someone please check my math. Tell me this isn’t happening….

Is anyone out there correlating the data and helping our elected and annoited understand that the defining characteristic of the 21st century urban landscape is the "vacant house."

Ok, in part this is why the initiative to save the Woodlawn Row Houses was started.