fix buffalo today, archive

BY Steven Malanga

February 23, 2005
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/9607

Fed up by 30 years of a declining economy, rising taxes, and a swollen public sector, the folks of Erie County, N.Y., have risen up and rebelled, swamping their elected officials with e-mail and petitions objecting to another increase in taxes and demanding spending cuts instead. So vociferous have been their complaints that legislators, accustomed to ignoring the best interests of their constituents in order to protect their own patronage-laden budgets, have actually paused and are now trying to figure out how to balance the books without raising taxes.

With luck, what's happening in Erie County will spread to the rest of New York State and to New Jersey in time for each state's upcoming gubernatorial elections. Bereft of a charismatic figure to galvanize public support and to discipline their increasingly dysfunctional legislatures, both states have been practicing fiscal folly over the last several years, raising taxes, borrowing furiously, and spending incontinently. The result has been one budget crisis after another so that, even as other states' budget woes ease with the national recovery, New York and New Jersey still face huge deficits.

It's not hard to figure out why the residents of the greater Buffalo area have revolted. Once a great industrial economy, the area started facing intense competition from other regions and countries decades ago. Rather than help face these challenges, government contributed to the problem, raising state and local taxes and increasing the burden on businesses by, among other things, creating one of the most expensive workers compensation systems in the country, so that jobs threatened by competition disappeared quickly, and the area sank into decline.

What didn't decline, however, is public consumption of tax dollars. Thanks to corruption and patronage, government squandered valuable resources in the area. A recent series in the Buffalo News, for instance, highlighted how the city has wasted much of the nearly $550 million in federal urban aid it has received in 30 years on a series of projects that failed, on a network of politically connected social service groups of unproven and unprovable value, and on city hall salaries. At the same time, the county's budget and tax structure is groaning under the weight of a growing Medicaid bill, foisted on the county by New York State - the only state that requires localities to contribute so heavily to Medicaid. Indeed, the very sales tax that Erie residents are now protesting against was instituted in the early 1970s to pay for the county's Medicaid costs.

The final straw, however, was the recent budget proposed by Erie County Executive Joel Giambra that included a sales tax increase but preserved hundreds of patronage jobs. That impelled a loose coalition of business owners and taxpaying groups to bombard county officials with e-mail and petitions - enough to scare legislators who had recently voiced support of the tax increases. At the heart of this citizens movement is the perception from a growing number of local residents that what's happening in Buffalo is not a clash of liberal versus conservative ideas on government spending, but a widespread, nonpartisan recognition that the system is rigged by the public sector against taxpayers. "It doesn't matter if they are [politically] Left or Right. They're all saying, 'Enough is enough,' " is how one small business owner describes the revolt.

The larger question is whether voters throughout New York and New Jersey will come to the same conclusion any time soon. Both states have steeply increased spending throughout the recession, financing the increases with tax and fee increases, fiscal tricks, and immoderate state borrowing. The deficit New York State needs to close next year is $4 billion, while Jersey's is also $4 billion after the former governor, James McGreevey, borrowed $2 billion last year to increase state spending by 17% - a fiscal calamity because the borrowing to cover operating expenses means there will be an immediate shortfall in next year's budget, even before new spending increases.

Anyone looking at the fiscal situation in either state should soon figure out that, as in Buffalo, the issue is not liberal versus conservative, but taxpayers versus tax-eaters. A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, which measured the fiscal needs of each state based on such factors as poverty levels, number of school-age children in each state, and other things that drive public spending, concluded that neither New Jersey nor New York has unusually heavy fiscal needs. But both states tax their citizens at the high end of the scale, accumulating huge revenues that go to expanding the size of the public sector through higher salaries and pensions for public employees, among other things, without producing any special benefits for citizens, who feel they have reached the end of their willingness and ability to pay.

That kind of a formula is a prescription for a tax revolt even in tax-friendly Blue States like New York and New Jersey. And although both states lack the kind of initiative and referendum that voters used so effectively in California to sweep Governor Schwarzenegger into office, each state does have a gubernatorial election coming up - this November in New Jersey and next November in New York. The crucial question is whether any candidate can arise in either state to be the champion of the kind of people now hanging out of windows in Erie County shouting, "I'm fed up, and I'm not gonna take it any more!"

Mr. Malanga is a contributing editor of City Journal, from whose Web site this is adapted, and the author of the forthcoming "The New New Left."

ANALYSIS by David Staba

Erie County's government implodes in spectacularly pathetic fashion.

More than two years after the Seneca Niagara Casino opened, Niagara Falls still waits for the first shovel in the ground not paid for with state money.

An accountability-free authority that's supposed to concern itself with making sure the buses and trains run on time, and that airplanes actually land at both airports under its control, instead unveils grandiose plans for Buffalo's waterfront -- which rely entirely upon the nation's most heavily burdened taxpayers coughing up more than a quarter-billion dollars.

Back in Niagara Falls, the current occupants of City Hall can afford to create jobs for their friends and loved ones, but not fund the libraries under their control.

And voters in Buffalo and Erie County brace for an election season centered around a flawed field of mayoral candidates and an incredibly vague merger plan that not even its proponents seem able, or willing, to explain.

As a good friend and former editor at the Niagara Gazette used to ponder when such characteristic foolishness ensued -- "How did this happen?"

A better question might be, "What took so long?"

If there's any good to come from the ongoing collapse of Erie County Executive Joel Giambra's fiscal house of cards, it's that harsh light will finally shine on the rodentia infesting the halls of government and quasi-public boardrooms of Western New York.

And the latter are in even greater need of fumigating. The region's self-proclaimed "business advocacy" organization, the Buffalo Niagara Partnership, is the common thread connecting Giambra, Buffalo Mayor Tony Masiello, the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority's fantasy of building a new downtown Buffalo on the taxpayer dime while continuing to neglect Niagara Falls International Airport, and the gum-and-string governmental merger plan.

The Partnership backed Masiello in each of his first three mayoral campaigns, helping build a war chest that scared off any serious opposition in 1997 and 2001. It also gave the region Giambra, a Democrat-turned-Republican and an alleged reformer whose primary previous experience was in helping make sure business continued exactly as usual in Buffalo's City Hall for the better part of two decades.

Word has it that the self-important organization led by Andrew Rudnick plans to back state Sen. Byron Brown in this year's mayoral race, but the Partnership's prior generosity to Masiello helped him build a war chest of more than a $1 million for an increasingly likely re-election bid.

Assemblyman Sam Hoyt proved himself the most sensible mayoral hopeful last week when he pulled out of the race. In addition to the economic problems that have dogged the city for decades, the eventual survivor will have to operate under the emasculating eye of Buffalo's state-imposed control board. That body is headed by -- you guessed it -- another member of the Partnership board, Brian Lipke of Gibraltar Steel.

Not that the Partnership much cares who holds what office, as long as they go along with the program. That, of course, entails making sure members of the Partnership get as much free stuff as possible.

The breathlessly announced plans for the dormant stretch of waterfront the NFTA has squatted on for nearly half a century follow the Partnership playbook perfectly.

Former Carborundum Corp. President Luiz Kahl heads the NFTA, while also serving as president of The Vector Group, a private investment group based in Williamsville. He also serves on the Partnership's board of directors.

Other members include NOCO patriarch Reginald Newman, whom Kahl -- his longtime friend and sometime business partner -- guaranteed a monopoly on jet fuel and cargo handling at Buffalo-Niagara International Airport while making sure its poor cousin in Niagara Falls provided no competition, and Carl Montante, managing director of Uniland Development Corp.

Last month, to the surprise of absolutely no one, Uniland's $750 million vision for housing, retail, office and hotel space and, you guessed it, a convention center was chosen by Kahl's NFTA.

Uniland's sketches of its proposed mini-city look nice enough -- if you like the cookie-cutter red-brick office parks that the company has built throughout Amherst and other suburbs, sterilized cubicle farms that sucked thousands of jobs and much of the life out of Buffalo's existing downtown.

The notion that a city government that needed the imposition of a control board nearly two years ago just to remain solvent, a county government whose leader claims it can't afford to keep plowing or patrolling its streets and a state government that can't pass a budget on time somehow are going to come up with $300 million to give to Uniland isn't just laughable. It's shameful.

Then again, the Partnership's leaders had their capacity for shame surgically removed long ago. When Adelphia's financial scandal broke in 2002, the Partnership propped up one if its own, Mark Hamister, as the white knight riding in to save the Buffalo Sabres, then owned by the cable-television company.

Problem was, Hamister didn't actually want to spend much of his own money. His purchase offer hinged entirely on his demand for about $40 million in public money, and collapsed quickly after the public found out.

It's clear from the timing of both the Uniland fantasy and the cobbled-together merger plan that would combine the City of Buffalo and County of Erie, but leave the scores of surrounding towns and villages intact, that the Partnership plans to use the utter disgust its minions have already generated to its advantage.

"People are so mad right now, they'll go for anything that even sounds like reform, or something new," said one Buffalo business owner.

One of the Partnership's greatest allies, the Buffalo News, appears poised to help sell its latest schemes, just as the region's largest daily newspaper has played cheerleader to every other bill of goods sold by the exclusive group of country-clubbers and kitchen-cabineteers.

Despite the push by proponents to get the merger plan on the ballot in November, the News has yet to offer any substantive look at its merits, or flaws. Instead, the paper has channeled its resources into a self-laudatory and self-indulgent bit of navel-gazing entitled "Why Not Buffalo?"

Sporting a bizarre hood ornament of a logo and a rather desperate-sounding title, the promised year-long series blames the area's woes on the scapegoat favored by politicians and business-advocacy groups alike -- you.

"Lose the attitude," reads an introductory story in the newspaper's First Sunday insert, a bit of preachiness that embodies the blame-the-victim mentality favored by the local elite and its media mouthpiece.

"You know the one -- the we-can't-get-out-of-our-own-way, we-can't-get-anything-done, Buffalo-is-doomed attitude that feeds the beast of economic and cultural stagnation that could devour this city. If we let it.

"Lose it. Now."

Aha! So that's the problem. It's not the politicians who act as if public money and property are theirs to give -- or take -- or the backroom dealers who put them in power and keep them there. It's those of us who spend our waking hours trying to pay bills, keep a job or run a business and raise a family without the benefit of professional domestic help who brought this upon ourselves.

What a relief. And here we thought it was the people who discuss how best to divvy up our money, while they enjoy leisurely lunches at the Buffalo Club.

Thankfully, though, the News is going to save not just Buffalo, but the entire area.

"Over the next 12 months, the newspaper will make this effort a top priority, by producing a series of stories that will define our region's central problems in new and innovative ways," read yet another introductory story. "Better yet: These stories will offer real solutions for change."

Thank goodness. "Real solutions" from an institution that backed just about every development that it now pours gallons of ink into bitching about -- from building the new University at Buffalo campus in the suburbs in the 1960s to the NFTA's infamous train to nowhere to an imbecilic plan for expanding the Peace Bridge that created a seemingly endless stalemate. Oh, and let's not forget that the News has repeatedly endorsed both Giambra and Masiello.

It's a safe bet that those "real solutions" will include ideas just as bright as the Uniland proposal, which centers on building a 300,000-square-foot convention center. This, even though a study released last month by the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institute shows that demand for such facilities is steadily plunging, with even places with much more to offer conventioneers -- like New York, Chicago and Atlanta -- desperately trying to attract events by giving away space.

Such support from the region's dominant media outlet emboldens our "leaders," elected and otherwise, to advance their agendas without fear of second-guessing or accountability. In November, Giambra gambled that he could grab another sales-tax penny to hoard in the county coffers -- which he's been busy depleting for five years -- by threatening the public with a draconian "red" budget.

No snowplowing or sheriff's patrols, Giambra warned gloomily. No libraries -- a tempting target for politicos in both Niagara Falls and Buffalo -- or zoo for the kids.

Just one problem there. He couldn't even get the members of his adopted party to back his power play. Instead, he had to rely on his old party to come through with enough votes for a two-thirds majority. And with that sort of leverage there for the taking, opportunist extraordinaire Al DeBenedetti, the lone city legislator to ultimately oppose the penny increase, snatched it.

Forget that DeBenedetti used to parcel out the same patronage jobs he now rails against under former County Executive Dennis Gorski, or that the self-appointed protector of the citizenry couldn't find the time to pay his own property taxes until learning the story was about to break.

And forget that the whole "red budget-green budget" charade was meant to blame Albany for rising Medicaid costs. After weeks of repeating Giambra's finger-pointing, even the News finally pointed out that the increase in the Medicaid tab accounts for only a fraction of the money pit Giambra himself dug by doling out a 30-percent tax cut without even trying to slash spending by a similar amount.

That, of course, would have meant trimming a list of patronage hires that makes Niagara Falls Mayor Vincenzo V. Anello's Friends and Family Plan look downright austere by comparison, or saying "no" occasionally when Giambra's pals at the Partnership came around looking to dip their beaks in the government trough.

Instead, Giambra thought he could walk his political high-wire indefinitely. At least until last Friday, when DeBenedetti gave it a good twang.

The legislator's second flip-flop in less than a week triggered a rebellion among Giambra's immediate underlings, with the sheriff, comptroller, district attorney and county clerk each either filing or threatening lawsuits in an attempt to avert the thousands of layoffs promised by Giambra if he couldn't get that extra penny.

Maybe, just maybe, the self-proclaimed leaders -- in government, business and the media -- who have made Western New York what it is today will watch Giambra's self-immolation. And realize that they, and not the people they supposedly serve, are the ones in need of an attitude adjustment.

David Staba is the sports editor of the Niagara Falls Reporter. He welcomes e-mail at dstaba13@aol.com.

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Artspace Archive • Annals of Neglect • BAVPA • Where is Perrysburg? • Broken Promises...
Writing the City • Woodlawn Row Houses • Tour dé Neglect - 2006

The Convention Follies, Part 5: A Conversation with Jane Jacobs
by Hank Bromley

Even though—or perhaps because—she has no formal training whatsoever in architecture or planning, Jane Jacobs has utterly transformed the field of urban planning. Born in Scranton in 1916, she observed first-hand the demise of a regional coal-dependent economy and the towns it formerly sustained. A series of writing and editing jobs in New York City bred a lifelong fascination with cities: how they function (or fail to) as living, complex webs of relationships in dynamic balance; their fundamental role in economic life; the parallels in the behavior and needs of urban economies and natural ecosystems.

Her first and most famous book appeared in 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities was a frontal assault on urban policy of the time. Its first sentence reads "This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding." No mere "quibble" over technique, the book denounced the very "principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning and rebuilding." Professional planners were dismissive of the unlettered upstart. The New York Times’ reviewer, on the other hand, called it "the most refreshing, provocative, stimulating, and exciting study of this greatest of our problems of living which I have seen." As discussed in Part 2 of this series (Artvoice v11n6), the book illustrated the importance of densely interwoven, diverse, mixed-use streetscapes, full of varied pedestrian traffic and indigenous vitality—polar opposite of the prevailing (and since discredited) Garden City model of "urban renewal" that bulldozed communities and scattered new high-rise residential structures across plains of greenery, replacing the "chaos" of traditional city life with tidy sterility. In the years following the book’s appearance, Jane Jacobs helped lead a successful community campaign to block a Robert Moses plan for just such a project in her beloved Greenwich Village neighborhood.

In 1968, with two draft-age sons, she and her husband moved their family to Toronto, where she has lived ever since, continuing her writing and her local activism. Her books since then have included The Economy of Cities (1969), on the processes of economic growth and decline, The Question of Separatism (1980), on Quebec and sovereignty, Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), on the primary role of cities in regional and national economies, Systems of Survival (1992), on the two moral systems of business and politics, and her current book, The Nature of Economies (1999), analyzing economies as a form of natural ecosystem, developing according to the same principles.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Jane Jacobs about her work, the shared features of economies and ecologies, the nurturing and abuse of cities in general and Buffalo in particular, and convention centers; Tim Tielman, executive director of the Preservation Coalition of Erie County, joined us. Following is a slightly condensed version of our conversation. JJ=Jane Jacobs, HB=Hank Bromley, TT=Tim Tielman.

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HB: I thought I’d start by asking how you started writing about cities and what makes them work.

JJ: Well, I really explain all that in the Introduction to The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In brief, I was working for an architectural magazine, and I became dismayed at how unrealistic the plans that I was writing about were. I saw that they didn’t really make very magnetic or attractive city areas; people seemed to shun them instead of enjoying them. And then I was fortunate in having a good mentor who had been thinking about the same things, the head worker of a settlement in East Harlem. And he got me thinking along the lines of how city streets work.

HB: In ways that professional planners hadn’t really been considering?

JJ: No, they didn’t like the street.

HB: What was the reception to Death and Life when it first came out? I had heard that it was initially treated quite negatively by the professionals.

JJ: Well, it divided into two startlingly different kinds of reception. I got a very good public reception. The planners hated it. The architects were divided.

HB: What determined the nature of the division, which side one came down on among the architects?

JJ: I used to wonder about that, and I decided there were foot people and car people. I treated that in the later Introduction I wrote for the Modern Library edition of Death and Life.

JJ: What I’ve just explained, about the reception of it, was for when it came out. It doesn’t hold for now. There are quite a lot of planners who like it now.

HB: Yes, I was going to ask about that, as well. It’s been half a lifetime for you since you wrote that, and indeed for many of the readers an entire lifetime since it was written—

JJ: Yes, more than a lifetime—

HB: So I was wondering what kinds of things have changed in that time about your own understanding of the topics discussed there, and in the reception.

JJ: Well, it’s a generational difference in the reception. Somebody said "Progress occurs funeral by funeral," and I think that’s basically what happened. There were a lot of planners who never could embrace this view, but they retired; they died, a lot of them, and a new generation saw things differently.

HB: So these days it’s treated as a classic text, really, but it seems the policy-makers don’t get it yet. Why is it so hard for the people making decisions about how to run cities, outside the planning profession, to grasp what makes their own cities work?

JJ: That’s a very good question, because it is puzzling. The people they represent, the public, seem to be ahead of them, by and large. I think maybe we have to reach the sad conclusion that policy-makers are old-fashioned and behind in getting it, in understanding things. They take received knowledge and often don’t test it against reality; they just assume it never changes. I don’t know how to explain it, it’s a strange obtuseness.

TT: People meeting people seems to be an essential characteristic of why cities exist, the need for people to come together, and I think the argument for public subsidy of convention centers is "What’s more fundamental to cities than people getting together?" What would the proper role for—

JJ: I think you’ve jumped to the wrong conclusion. That’s called teleological thinking: people do get together in cities, but it’s not because they decide "Well, we’re going to get together and we’ll have a city." No, you have to have work in a city, or you have to draw a whole lot of taxes or tribute of some kind. Essentially, cities are economic units, and from those economic circumstances you get various social things, but you have started that train of thought altogether wrong by saying the reason for the cities, if I understood you, is for people to get together. That’s like saying the reason for plants is to use the rainfall.

HB: The plants show up where there’s good rainfall for them to use, and cities appear where there’s a good reason for people to get together.

JJ: And they persist where there’s a good reason for them, and if they lose those economic reasons, they begin to dwindle away. That’s been one of your troubles in Buffalo.

HB: Yes, in one of the footnotes to Nature of Economies you briefly mention Buffalo and why you think our economy has dwindled. Given our position now, as a city that has fallen on hard times, what kinds of actions would be appropriate for local officials to take, that would promote the conditions for the kinds of activities that we do want to see?

JJ: Well, you can’t decide ahead of time what activities you want to see. Economic life is full of surprises, and if you decide what you’re going to base your economy on—what do you have to think about? Things that already exist. You’re ruling out innovation right away, and yet innovation is of the essence for a live and prospering economy. And that’s a very important thought for Buffalo, because as I see it, the beginning of Buffalo’s decline economically was it becoming too much of a branch plant sort of city, depending not on innovation that came from itself, or that grew organically from what it was already doing, but copycat stuff, or bestowed stuff. It stopped being an original city. And those things die away, and if the custom, or the spirit of a city’s self-confidence and its innovation and its belief in its own people has in the meantime been lost, there’s nothing to depend on for the future. That’s the sort of thing I think has happened in Buffalo and I think is illustrated by this cavalier attitude toward disposing of things that have been engendered locally, that are the kind of innovation and local initiative that Buffalo desperately needs. And the idea that such things should be despised or treated with contempt or ignored, in favor of some copycat thing that has nothing to do with local innovation, is very disturbing.

HB: What are the kinds of local resources you have in mind that we should be building on rather than—

JJ: The kinds of things that I read in Hank’s article about the existing businesses in the district the convention center is planned for [Part 3 of this series, in Artvoice v11n9], these are the things that are the economic treasure. They come out of the city itself, they come out of the people itself. And there was a time when Buffalo had a lot of originality, you can tell that from the architecture and from the public amenities that are left.

HB: So if you can’t predetermine what the economic drivers are going to be—

JJ: No, who predicted in Seattle, for instance, when they thought their whole economy hung on what happened in Boeing, who predicted that computers and Microsoft…it’s impossible.

HB: Right, so if these developments have to arise out of the efforts of individual innovators, what role can the government play in promoting the right sort of conditions to enable that?

JJ: The government often needs to remove barriers of one sort or another, and certainly not destroy these things. That was the great tragedy of urban renewal, that so much was destroyed, and lots of cities simply haven’t recovered from it. It’s taken New York a long time to recover. It’s healing itself now, New York City. Newark, not at all yet. Cities can destroy themselves beyond a point of no return, if they just become inert and dumb.

HB: By trying to copy ideas from elsewhere rather than building on what’s unique about them and growing their own ideas?

JJ: And valuing the ideas of their own people.

TT: The convention center project proposed in Buffalo right now shares a lot of the features of bad old urban renewal projects—

JJ: Yes—

TT: And I’m wondering if the reason for that is that the underlying laws, the funding and everything, is still based upon the 1940s legislation and elected officials simply find it easier to follow the path of least resistance to the money, rather than pay attention to, or get educated about, what actually makes cities work.

JJ: I think that you’ve got it. If the inducements of the money weren’t there, the subsidies of one sort or another, I don’t think we’d be bothered by this nonsense.

TT: Now, is one of the problems with urban development that money is available? If it were a free market, and cities had to make do as they had for millennia in the past, we’d actually have better cities than with this government intervention we have now?

JJ: Yes, except with qualifications. There are certain things that cities do need to finance in a public way, in fact that any settlement needs to. You can’t rely just on moneymaking activities in the private sector to supply everything. I hate to keep sounding like an advertisement for my books, but I went into this in a book called Systems of Survival, in which I separated the worlds of work into guardian operations, which have to do with territory—that means politics, religion, all the things that people have to do who are responsible for administering or guarding territory, and providing public amenities for it—and the other division is what is usually referred to as the private sector—commerce, manufacturing, banking, that sort of thing. When the two get mixed up—it’s sometimes inevitable that they do, but mostly it’s not, and in every case it’s hazardous to mix them—they get corrupt, and they get skewed in non-functional ways. The urban renewal kind of subsidies are a terrible example of mixing this sort of thing, so that the politicians you’re talking about, the policy-setters, they’re really guardians, they’re really territorial administrators, but they have provided monetary incentives for the private sector to do things it wouldn’t do otherwise, and that’s a mess.

[These comments should not be taken as a blanket condemnation of all subsidies. In Death and Life, she draws a careful distinction among kinds of subsidies, promoting some while criticizing others. She says subsidies given to builders and developers to construct segregated housing for low-income tenants have led to the public housing disasters so many cities are now tearing down; that would presumably qualify as "monetary incentives for the private sector to do things it wouldn’t do otherwise." But she does advocate subsidies to individual tenants (residents and businesses), so that the market could still determine what kinds of structures were needed where, while the government stimulated diversity by helping people who otherwise couldn’t afford it get into the game—without creating ghettoized all-subsidy districts, since tenants would be renting units alongside those paying full price. She also recommends subsidies for rehabilitation of existing buildings.]

TT: One of the justifications for the site chosen for the convention center is that, "Well, the buildings, they kind of look junky (even though they’re mostly occupied), the people who live in the hotels are not the kind of people we want downtown, the businesses are just small ones, and anyway, what we could do is move everyone out, give them a new place of business elsewhere in the city or in some industrial park, and the people—well, there’s plenty of other housing available." Is there some value, above and beyond the wages paid by a business and the supplies they buy within the local economy, in having them in a particular place within a city?

JJ: Yes, they are not dopes about where they locate. You can’t put them in the boondocks and expect them to operate the same. Location in a city is very important, and being in a central location is most important for the small businesses, because they aren’t as self-sufficient. You can look at downtowns, which are the most economically intense parts of cities, not only in New York State or in America, but all over the world, and what do you find? If it’s a lively place, if it’s not dying, if its windows aren’t all boarded up, what you find is it’s full of small enterprises. This is not an accident. It’s telling you something. The cities grow in a way that we can only call organic, in the sense that one thing depends on another and another and another—they’re webs of mutual support. And if they don’t have that, they die away. You can’t make a downtown like a one-crop plantation and get anything out of it. One trouble with having great massive things, like a convention center, smack in the middle where small things were flourishing, is that it turns an area that had diversity and variety and opportunity of many kinds in it—small kinds, but many kinds—into something resembling a one-crop place.

HB: So the effect of putting an enormous single-purpose entity within this fine network of the city core is the same as putting a huge field of a single crop in the middle of an ecology: it renders the whole thing essentially sterile, incapable of generating anything new.

JJ: That’s right, and wow, watch out when a disease hits that one thing.

HB: It no longer has the resilience of the natural system that relied on the interdependence of many different ingredients.

JJ: Right. Buffalo has many examples of that. Look at all the grain-handling infrastructure. You know, all these special uses, no matter how big and impressive, they’re temporary. Life is temporary.

HB: One of the common themes across your books seems to be the value of difference, of heterogeneity.

JJ: Oh, absolutely. That’s where all the safety lies, where the future lies, where expansion lies—healthy expansion.

HB: You’ve suggested that not only is that how nature works, and how cities work—since cities are a part of nature—but that it’s the way things work for humans as well.

JJ: Yes.

HB: So one thing that’s hard for me to understand is how it is that for a lot of people—setting aside those of us who love cities and are drawn to the difference and the tension and the dynamism—a lot of people tend to be suspicious of the different, to want to withdraw into homogeneous communities, and avoid outsiders or even vilify outsiders. You see the ethnic conflict of the outsiders being "bad." Where does that come from?

JJ: That’s right, that’s their problem and it’s a sad problem, but you cannot make cities to accommodate that.

HB: Right, but why, if this is the way of nature, and this is what’s good for us—this heterogeneity and mixing—how is it that so many people end up repulsed by it, and preferring to withdraw into some homogeneous community?

JJ: Well, they’ve had bad experiences. And they haven’t had much good experience with diversity and variety. But now, this connects with the convention center thing. The cities that are successful with conventions are not successful primarily because they build a hall. It’s because it’s the kind of a city people want to go to.

HB: Right, they don’t have a lot of conventions in New Orleans because of the convention center, but because people want to come to New Orleans anyway.

JJ: That’s right, and people say "Oh, hooray, we’re going to have a convention in such-and-such," or "Oh my god, we’re going to go to Milwaukee"—whatever. People are looking for—people who go to conventions, people who visit other cities—are by definition looking for something different from where they live. In fact, they complain that the airports are all the same, they complain about "Oh, it’s no different from being home." The great tourist attraction places are full of surprises and diversity and differences from what people may normally have.

HB: And they appreciate that when they go on vacation. Yet when they choose a place to live—I have colleagues who will come join the university as faculty, and many will choose to buy a place out in the suburbs, where it looks just like where they came from. They’ll see all the same stores; it’s interchangeable. And some say that’s great, because it’s predictable, and they know what they’re getting into, and it’s familiar, and it’s comfortable. Others of us look at that and say "It’s sterile and lifeless, and I want to be surprised, I like unpredictability.’

JJ: Yeah.

HB: But we seem to be in the minority. So many people are moving to the suburbs and cities are losing population.

JJ: Well, not all of them. The ones that are really healing and are liveliest are gaining population now. These things change. One thing you can be sure of is life is not going to go on the same. Every once in a while, a generation comes along that just can’t stand what the previous ones did. Victorianism came to an end that way, and it’s one reason so many wonderful Victorian buildings were destroyed later. There was a real hatred for Victorianism. And yet it had been the thing for several previous generations. A lot of people are more adventurous than that, they don’t want just the culture that was handed down to them, and if it seems too oppressive to them and too pervading to them, they really get nasty about it. I don’t think that’s changed, and you can’t predict when it’s going to happen and what it’s going to be.

HB: So at some point you think there’s going to be a reaction against the suburbanization, and the malling of America?

JJ: Yes, sure there is. In fact, a lot of malls are now going out of business. Probably because there were too many of them, and because people are bored with them. You know, people get bored, and one thing that your colleagues of all kinds probably have in common is that they hate boredom, and some of them get bored sooner than others.

HB: So in time, hopefully people will recognize what the more diverse and heterogeneous environments offer, and turn back to that? And turn against the sameness and homogeneity of the suburban style of development?

JJ: You don’t have to say "hopefully," it’s bound to happen. It’ll happen whether you want it to or not.

HB: You mentioned that some malls are losing business and closing. One of the other issues that’s caused strong feelings in Buffalo is the loss of retail activity downtown. Some years ago, before I moved here, one of the strategies that was tried was to convert Main Street to a pedestrian mall and to build the light rail system down the center of the street and stop car traffic.

JJ: This was another imported idea that didn’t arise in Buffalo. Your policy-makers saw it in some other places, and "Okay, we’ll try that in Buffalo." So it didn’t grow out of Buffalo, it was an applied, artificial thing.

HB: There have been proposals to reopen Main Street to car traffic again. I know you’re not a big fan of cars, but do you think in this case that would be a helpful move?

JJ: I don’t know Buffalo well enough to answer that in detail, but I can tell you this: The trouble with cars on a main street is not cars per se. In fact you have to have some for servicing and all that. The trouble is cars to which everything else is sacrificed. And how is everything else sacrificed? Well, the roads are made too wide, too hard to cross. The cars are allowed to go too fast. Too much parking is provided. Those things are not necessary for allowing cars on a main street. Disneyland out in California gives you some lessons about this. It has streetcars and other conveyances running through those little streets. They go slowly; the streets are easy to cross; the parking is all somewhere else, not cutting up the interesting places people want to be. Those are good principles for any main street that you want to be good for business. You can have cars there, but they can’t be racing through. You can have the street, but it can’t be unfriendly to pedestrians.

HB: We’re seeing that debate played out near the edge of town, also on Main Street, where the original campus of the university is. The state transportation department came in with a plan to widen the street and smooth the traffic flow and synchronize the lights, and it was exactly the issues you’re talking about: do we displace everything else to make it optimal for the cars, or do we try to maintain the pedestrian traffic and help the retail businesses with wide sidewalks and so on?

JJ: Well, that’s what transportation departments do. The reason cities need so much transportation, somebody has said, is not to move so much, as to exchange things. That’s what cities are all about, exchanging.

HB: And what’s the implication of that for what transportation departments—

JJ: If you begin to think it’s all about moving—it’s like magic carpets, getting from here to there the fastest way possible and skipping everything in between—you’re missing the point.

HB: It just moves you through from one place to another, but the point is what happens while you’re there.

JJ: That’s right.

HB: That reminds of what I take to be one of the main points of the current book, The Nature of Economies, that what’s important for an economy isn’t so much the wealth that gets pumped in from the outside, but how efficient the region is at keeping that wealth local, and exchanging it back and forth, before it exits the region. So we shouldn’t be looking so much at import and export rates, but the efficiency of re-use and exchange, just as in the biological sense, a rainforest works well and a desert does not, even if they’ve got the same amount of sunlight and perhaps even similar soil, not because of the difference in inputs but because all the energy coming into the desert just bounces back out. One of the claims that we hear frequently from the main proponent of this convention center idea, getting back to that, is that building a convention center is a printing press for money. People come in from out of town and spend their money here.

JJ: Yes, and what do they spend it on here? What they spend it on is imported into Buffalo, and goes right out in their stomachs, or however. It’s not going to help Buffalo much.

HB: Well, I suppose the argument is they spend it on staying in hotels, and—

JJ: Well, they don’t stay there long if they don’t enjoy Buffalo.

HB: And then they buy things while they’re here, there are services that are needed to support them and the convention center, and those generate jobs, and the people who have those jobs then spend their money elsewhere. Isn’t that the kind of local multiplier we’re talking about?

JJ: You know what? If this were a very good foundation for an economy, just this sort of thing, the Caribbean islands would be so rich, and all the people who live on Jamaica and Nevis and so on would be such rich people.

HB: And why aren’t they?

JJ: Because everything’s imported and goes right out again.

HB: The example that occurred to me in reading that part of the book was maquiladora export processing zones, where if you just measure imports and exports, there’s a tremendous amount of wealth passing through, but it’s just like the sunlight in the desert: it’s abundant coming in, and then it bounces out, and it doesn’t bounce around within and get exchanged, with the opportunity to generate additional wealth with each exchange. It just passes right through.

JJ: That’s right. And you know, you could have said the desert is the way it is because it lacks the rain input. But one thing that’s been discovered is that deserts are often made by the plants that had been there being all eaten up by goats or whatever [not by a reduction in rainfall]. And the deserts can be reclaimed by reestablishing the ensemble of plants; [the community] itself creates the conditions of survival.

HB: So, if you have something that has deteriorated into a desert, what kinds of steps—thinking again of the economy—

JJ: It’s pretty hard to get it back, it’s a very hard long-term thing if it’s really reached that stage. It can happen, but it’s much easier to stop it becoming a desert before it does.

TT: One of the themes in Death and Life and some of your other books is the necessity of proximity, various pathways going to and from one block to another, short blocks, as creating conditions which allow economies to develop. The same argument is being used by some people regarding location of the convention center: it must be right on top of a convention center hotel, and it must be right on top of a burgeoning entertainment district, because that’ll create synergy. And on the other side are arguments that a convention center can be located seven, eight blocks away, or a mile away, convention center attendees have different behavior patterns, and they will go further for entertainment, whereas someone working on a daily basis in a downtown needs something absolutely close at hand. What’s your feeling on that debate?

JJ: I think the idea of making a kind of compound for the out-of-towners, the convention people, and plunking it right in the middle of Buffalo, is terrible. If they get to like Buffalo, if they enjoy Buffalo, it’ll be because Buffalo is a place that its own people like, and its own people enjoy. That’s true of any city. People like to go to conventions in New York, because they can go to the theater and all those amazing restaurants, and find anything they want in a toy store, and so on. But that wasn’t made for out-of-towners; out-of-towners share in it. The same could be said of Paris, or any great destination. The basis is the local use, and then the gravy is visitors’ use.

HB: You can’t build local development around visitor use, then.

JJ: And when somebody gets a bigger convention center, or Buffalo’s falls out of favor, look how much will fall out of favor, in what a vital place [if it’s built downtown]. And you can be sure that it will. When you add up all the subsidies and tax forgiveness and destroyed things that really aren’t recompensed—they never have been—it’s very doubtful whether convention centers pay. Certainly not ones in ho-hum sort of towns.

HB: And it’s something that a great many cities have been convinced recently that they should be using as a strategy, so we’re looking at an incredible number of competitors who are expanding or upgrading their facilities at the very same time.

JJ: So expand it. You can have a convention center, but for heaven’s sake, don’t do it where you’re destroying what innovation you do have.

HB: That gets back to Tim’s initial question. If you’re going to build it, against our advice, you can at least build it someplace where you’re not displacing something else; build it on a parking lot or something that’s abandoned.

JJ: That’s right, make it an addition to Buffalo, not a displacement. Don’t act as if there’s a zero-sum economy in Buffalo and if you add something you’ve got to take something equal away. You never get anywhere that way.

HB: One of the problems we face when we talk about preserving what we have that’s already special and we oppose projects that—

JJ: You’re called against progress.

HB: That’s right. We’re obstructionist, we’re preventing progress, we’re looking backward, we’re just trying to prevent people from doing anything to get things started in Buffalo, even though when they recognize that Buffalo has been inert they say, "Well, we need to do something, like build a convention center."

JJ: You need to do something—I hate to keep repeating myself—that’s unique to Buffalo, that comes out of Buffalo itself. You don’t want to keep acting like a company town.

HB: Again, it seems that it makes us susceptible to the charges of being obstructionist and selfishly preventing progress. Do we just put up with that, let them call us that, or do we have a way of countering it?

JJ: You put up with it, and you tell your side of things. Also, turn those arguments around. Don’t be frightened by them, they’re not true in the first place, and in the second place, selfishness: for goodness sake, who’s going to reap any rewards from this?

HB: Largely, it seems, it would be people involved in construction, lawyers and bankers involved in making financing arrangements, for whom if the thing fails, so much the better, because then we build another one ten years later and they profit all over again.

JJ: Sure. Show that they’re being selfish. Show that they’re being old-fashioned and repetitive and afraid of new and different things, and new and different ways of doing things. Why let them have all the arguments about progress and selfishness, which are specious? And don’t mind if you’re called names, you get thick skins. Don’t be defensive, go on the attack. You have to explain why you’re right, but you have to explain it aggressively.

HB: I think we’ve covered a lot of the ground I had hoped to. To wrap up, in looking around at what you see these days—after many years of observing the world and how it works, and what things change and why they change—what gives you the most hope about the future, and what worries you the most?

JJ: The thing that gives me the most hope about the future is the young people. They don’t know how hard it is to make change, or to improve things, and it’s a good thing they don’t know how hard it is, because they have lots of energy and they often have lots of idealism, and they work at it. By the time they’ve gotten tired, and they know how much effort it takes to move things a few inches, there’s another generation coming along. That’s what gives me the most hope. That sounds so banal, but I don’t know anything as hopeful as that.

HB: And what do you find most worrisome, what makes you anxious about the future, if anything?

JJ: I suppose the things that are done out of despair, and out of hatred. When I look at the worst mistakes of city planning—to take one example, although I think this is true of any activity—I marvel at how these policies were set by people who hate cities. You can’t prescribe decently for something you hate. It will always come out wrong. You can’t prescribe decently for something you despair in. If you despair of humankind, you’re not going to have good policies for nurturing human beings. I think people ought to give prescriptions who have ideas for improving things, ought to concentrate on the things that they love and that they want to nurture.

HB: That certainly describes our group and our feeling about the city of Buffalo.

JJ: That’s right. If you have somebody who says "Oh, Buffalo is for the birds, and you’ve just got to go somewhere else to learn what to do" and so on, no, that’s not good, nothing good will come of that. People who see what is good about Buffalo, and there’s an awful lot that is good about Buffalo—it’s a wonderful place with a wonderful heritage, goodness, it’s got a much better architectural heritage than Toronto does, it’s got a glorious architectural heritage, just go out on the streets of Buffalo and marvel at what’s there.

HB: And that’s what we should be building our revival around.

JJ: That’s right.

Hank Bromley teaches at the UB Graduate School of Education and is a member of Citizens for Common Sense. He can be reached at hbromley@buffalo.edu

__________________________________________________________________________
Artspace Archive • Annals of Neglect • BAVPA • Where is Perrysburg? • Broken Promises...
Writing the City • Woodlawn Row Houses • Tour dé Neglect - 2006

• Something in Buffalo - Some of these places are really cool, especially the H. H. Richardson Complex on Elmwood Avenue
• A few sites in Buffalo and Rochester
• Sleepy City - Way cool photos
• Excellent NYC adventures - The Forgotten City
• Modern Ruins & Urban Exploration - This is a "meta" site with all sorts on planet wide links added 6/3/05

This is the model letter which may help you when you write your own. Something short and to the point. A few paragraphs should be sufficient.

Thanks,

David

Dear :

I am writing to ask you to participate in an exciting project in Buffalo - a project that will build affordable family housing, revitalize a community, create local jobs, stimulate small business development and bring national attention to the "creative class" in our city. Called the Artspace Buffalo Project, it will provide affordable housing and work space to low-income artists and their families, as it anchors the rich arts and cultural landscape in Buffalo.

A letter of support from you for this project is critical if Artspace Buffalo is to happen.

The Artspace Buffalo Project will provide:

• 60 affordable apartments with work spaces for low-income artists and their families.
• Hundreds of short-term and long-term local jobs, and a supportive environment for the creation of small businesses.
• The resources to preserve and re-use the Buffalo Electric Vehicle Building, located at 1219 Main Street at Northampton.
• An opportunity to link the multi-million dollar investment in the Buffalo-Niagara Medical Corridor to the revitalization of a depressed Eastside neighborhood.

Our partners in this project, ArtspaceUSA, have seen these results and more with each project they have developed.

We need you to partner with us in bringing this exciting project to Buffalo. Without an allocation of low-income housing tax credits, the project cannot move forward.

Please help by writing NYS Department of Housing and Community Renewal Commissioner Judith Calogero, 38-40 State Street, 6^th Floor South, Albany, NY 12207, and urge her to allocate low income housing tax credits to the Artspace Buffalo project.

So that we can include it with the Artspace application, your letter of support must be forwarded to Steven J. Weiss, Cannon Heyman & Weiss, LLP, 50 Fountain Plaza, Suite 301, Buffalo, New York 14202, Attention: Artspace; letters may be faxed to 716-856-2311 or e-mailed to sweiss@chwattys.com. They must be received no later than February 18, 2005.

Creating Sustainable Cities, One Neighborhood At A Time

NY Professor to make the case for sustainable cities at an annual conference in Melbourne Australia.

Feb 10, 2005, 07:00 am PST

Contributed by Zvi Leve

Prof. Michael Sorkin believes that "the recovery of the human scale of urban interaction" is essential for the creation of sustainable cities. "We know how to do this," he says from his office in New York, "but under pressure from developers, public officials and architects of shrivelled imagination, it is something we fail to celebrate and demand." Prof. Sorkin moved into the relatively recent academic discipline of urban design because the architecture profession has failed to effectively tackle "the vapid suburbanisation of the planet as part of a more general decline in the politics of compassion and responsibility". The more traditional discipline of urban planning has also failed to do much more "than produce mechanical, alienating, dreary cities that lack the vitality of less regulated, more spontaneous places".

Full story: Rescuing the city's lost soul

Source: The Age, Australia, Feb 09, 2005.

Related News: Architecture/Landscape/Urban Design

• Feb 10 - Interpreting Celebration, A Decade Later
• Feb 09 - Mexico’s New Breed Of Architects
• Feb 09 - Homeowners' Wish List
• Feb 09 - Toronto's Subtle Architecture of Exclusion
• Feb 08 - What Would It Take To Make Toronto Beautiful?
• Feb 08 - Reshaping Toronto
• Feb 07 - The Kids Are Alright In Green Housing Competition
• Feb 07 - Keeping A Roof Over Our Heads
• Feb 07 - Take Me Out to a Cool Stadium
• Feb 06 - Students Compete In Cool City Contest
• Feb 04 - The Future Of Urban Malls
• Feb 03 - Port Redevelopment Offers New Urban Opportunity
• Feb 03 - Terminated Vistas And The Power Of Urban Retail
• Feb 02 - Cities Search For Ways To Stay Green
• Jan 30 - Concerns About Europe's Largest Urban Revitalization Project
• Jan 29 - New Urbanists' Vision For A College Town
• Jan 28 - City Living In The Suburbs
• Jan 27 - Preventing Avalanches And Landslides
• Jan 26 - 'Chain' -- A New Film About Sprawl
• Jan 26 - Influential Architect Phillip Johnson Dies

2005 Planetizen Top 10 Book List

	A Field Guide To Sprawl by Dolores Hayden (W.W. Norton & Company, New York) Reading and viewing A Field Guide to Sprawl by Dolores Hayden is at once intriguing, terrifying, morbidly fascinating, and fun. In her new book, Hayden, a prolific Yale professor who has written extensively on suburbs and sprawl (Designing the American Dream, Building Suburbia), brings a vision of urban planning’s most contentious issue into the 21st century. The results, as eloquently illustrated by Jim Wark’s low angle aerial photography, are not pretty. From starter castles to tire dumps, drive-throughs to litter on a stick, Hayden’s "devil’s dictionary" has captured the modern vocabulary of America’s great non-urban wilderness. After a brief introduction to the causes and consequences of sprawl (which Hayden defines as "unregulated growth expressed as careless new use of land and other resources as well as abandonment of older built areas"), the book presents 51 definitions epitomizing the phenomenon, each brought to life by Wark’s photos. The aerial shots are at times powerfully common, scarily familiar, and completely shocking. Readers steal glimpses of obscenely large tract mansions benefiting from the Federal government’s mansion subsidy, then ogle over the massive, often impervious surface areas of truck cities, mall gluts and category-killers. While Hayden has elegantly assembled the book’s colorful terminology, she did not invent it. Instead, she cultivated the creative words from books, newspaper articles, the "lively slang" of real estate developers, and general word of mouth. The resulting portrait of the American landscape is often ugly and depressing, but by updating the vocabulary of the debate on sprawl, Hayden has equipped planners and citizens alike with the tools they need to speak about sprawl and do something about it. Buy this book
	Better Places, Better Lives: A Biography of James Rouse by Joshua Olsen (Urban Land Institute, Washington, D.C.) Better Places, Better Lives: A Biography of James Rouse chronicles the life of one of the most influential developers in American history. Author Joshua Olsen, a former Fulbright scholar and real estate professional, thoroughly reviews Rouse’s long career, from the creation of some of the first enclosed suburban shopping malls to the promulgation of the "festival marketplace" as a tool for city revitalization. Along the way, Rouse promoted part of the urban renewal concept – seeking to break up the "grim, massive inner city" into "neighborhoods of human scale" – that made its way into the Housing Act of 1954. Later Rouse made the realization that demand for enclosed shopping malls with ample parking existed even in regions with milder weather that did not require a climate-controlled shopping experience, and today the results are ubiquitous. Given enough capital, Rouse embarked on an epic quest to build Columbia, a new town in Howard County, Maryland – one that, according to Olsen, was designed to respect the land, create a place to encourage human growth, create a whole city (not just a residential suburb), and make a profit. In the 1970s and 80s, Rouse’s ideas would spark development of Faneuil Hall in Boston, the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, and Harborplace in Baltimore. In his retirement, Rouse would turn his focus to the poor, advocating for the role of the private sector in support of public needs, such as affordable housing. Olsen’s detailed account of "The Messianic Master Builder" (LIFE Magazine, 1967) encompasses Rouse’s family life, religious beliefs, and complex and sometimes contradictory urban theories. One of Rouse’s heroes, Daniel Burnham, famously proclaimed, "Make no little plans..." Better Places, Better Lives attests to Rouse’s sometimes controversial fulfillment of Burnham’s lofty goal. Buy this book
	Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs (Random House, New York) Ever since publishing her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, Jane Jacobs has expanded her focus, writing on The Economy of Cities (1969), Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), and The Nature of Economies (2000). Now, with Dark Age Ahead, she tackles her most impressive topic yet: western civilization. Jacobs, using the sweep of human history as evidence (somewhat in the fashion of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, which she frequently cites), argues that western culture is heading towards a "dead end." Focusing on the United States and Canada, with some references to Europe, Jacobs believes that as our culture shifts from agrarianism to a "technology-based future," we are in real danger of losing our memory of the old world, and before we know it, we could enter our own Dark Age. How could this be possible in the time of libraries, television, and the internet? Jacobs convincingly asserts that a significant part of any culture is transmitted from generation to generation by word of mouth and setting an example for others. Teachers and cooks, for example, don’t just read books to learn their trade – they learn firsthand from others with experience. In a manner similar to aboriginal cultures the world over that have suffered cultural Dark Ages (mostly) brought on by outside forces and a shift in economies, few people in the U.S. today remember what it’s like to leave their homes unlocked while on vacation. According to Jacobs, our entire vision of the past could slip away. Jacobs describes how the five pillars of society – community and family, higher education, science and technology, governmental representation, and self-regulation of the learned professions – are showing signs of decay. Later, asserting the interlocking nature of cultural problems, she attempts to "unwind" one of the "viscous cycles" damaging our cities and landscape: In the 1930s and 40s, depression and war led to homelessness and a lack of affordable housing, which led the government to promote homeownership and long-term, low-interest mortgages. This trend led Americans to sprawl into the countryside, taking down farmland along their way, and furthering the loss of our agrarian culture. Ultimately, Jacobs proves optimistic – Dark Age Ahead is a warning, not a death knell. Suburbs, for one, can be densified and mass transit introduced. In general, by recognizing the problems facing our culture today, we can avoid downfall "by tenaciously retaining the underlying values responsible for the culture’s nature and success." Buy this book
	Encyclopedia of 20th-Century Architecture R. Stephen Sennott, Editor (Fitzroy Dearborn, New York) A monumental effort, the 1,500+ page Encyclopedia of 20th-Century Architecture runs the gamut from complex architectural theories like deconstructivism to a building block of American commerce, the department store. In between are a wide variety of deeply interconnected people, places, buildings, and theories constituting 100 years of architecture and planning. While a substantial portion of entries deal with architects, firms, specific buildings, and architectural materials, schools, and movements, planning issues are heartily represented. General concepts like the Garden City movement, historic preservation, public housing, utopian planning, and edge cities join Jane Jacobs, Victor Gruen, and Le Corbusier in thorough discussions on issues of the built environment that have shaped the modern world. For over five years, an international team of 300 writers – architectural historians, architects, engineers, preservationists, urban historians, critics, and scholars – crafted this painstakingly researched work. Each article in the three volumes runs from 1,000 to 4,000 words and includes an extensive bibliography for further reading on the subject. Capsule biographies give readers enough background information to understand the variegated issues, and large black and white photographs help illustrate them. The editor concedes that many entries had to be omitted for lack of time and space, although one term – perhaps belonging to the 21st century – remains curiously without an entry: sprawl. Buy this book
	The Natural Step for Communities: How Cities and Towns can Change to Sustainable Practices by Sarah James and Torbjorn Lahti (New Society Publishers, British Columbia, Canada) The Natural Step for Communities: How Cities and Towns can Change to Sustainable Practices can be summed up in one word: eko-kommuner. In case your Swedish is a little rusty, that means "eco-municipalities." And in case your green planning vocabulary isn’t quite up-to-date, eco-municipalities are local governments "that have adopted changes to sustainable practices throughout municipal policies and operations." This easy-to-read, user-friendly work by planner and sustainable development expert Sarah James and Swedish planner and economist Torbjorn Lahti focuses on the little-known efforts of over 60 Swedish towns to achieve a totally sustainable existence, using green techniques from ethanol-powered cars to sustainable agriculture and waste management. Although Sweden, unlike the United States, has signed onto the United Nations’ model local sustainable development action plan (known as Agenda 21) and funds local sustainable development activities, the authors argue that in both countries, it is up to local municipalities to initiate their own environmental policies. After discussing the basic concepts of sustainability and the efforts of Sweden’s eko-kommuner, The Natural Step for Communities outlines a how-to guide for municipalities to develop their own programs, based on a theory of sustainability – the Natural Step framework. The guiding objectives of this framework are to eliminate dependence on fossil fuels, wasteful use of scarce metals and minerals, dependence on persistent chemicals, and encroachment upon nature, while meeting human needs fairly and efficiently. The authors believe that communities can achieve these goals with a bottom-up planning approach and a holistic, systems view, using local input to achieve political consensus and take action. The question is, can a grassroots sustainability movement in a country as large as the United States really take hold without Federal support? Buy this book
	The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella, Editors (Oxford University Press, Oxford) Inspired by the events of September 11 but about much more, The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster investigates urban disasters throughout history and around the world, in an effort to determine how and why cities almost inevitably recover and thrive in their wake. According to editors Lawrence Vale (MIT professor and author of Architecture, Power, and National Identity and Reclaiming Public Housing) and Thomas Campanella (UNC professor and author of Republic of Shade and Cities from the Sky), city resilience in the face of disasters from volcano eruptions, to starvation, biological warfare, and displacement from urban renewal, is almost universal. Even totally devastated cities often survive as sites of tourism, education, remembrance, or myth. Warsaw rebuilt itself after annihilation in World War II; Mexico City survived and transformed itself after a 1985 earthquake; Washington, D.C. remained its nation’s capitol even after many of its monuments were burned. What makes cities able to bounce back from catastrophe so forcefully and symbolically? Who decides how they recover, and whom the recovery benefits most? The Resilient City presents a cogent theory of urban resilience and recovery using evidence from 14 essays representing various types of disasters. Each event varies in the scale of its destruction, the loss of life, and the cause (natural (such as earthquakes), natural with human intervention (forest fires), human (terrorism), or sociopolitical/economic (collapse of a local economy)). And each city responds to trouble differently, a complex mix of politics, propaganda, and culture. Among the editors’ key conclusions are the ideas that cities’ narratives of resilience are highly contested political necessities that ultimately have the power to spark national renewal and symbolize a greater resilience – that of the human spirit. Buy this book
	Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It by Mindy Thompson Fullilove, M.D. (One World, Ballantine Books, New York) Between 1948 and 1973, urban renewal displaced a million people in 2,500 neighborhoods in 993 American cities. Of those neighborhoods impacted by the far-reaching Federal program, approximately 1,600 were African-American – a statistic that led many to equate urban renewal with "Negro Removal." In Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It, Columbia University professor and psychiatrist Mindy Thompson Fullilove humanizes the disproportionate impact of urban renewal on African-Americans. Many of those displaced by urban renewal, Fullilove argues, have suffered from root shock, or "a traumatic stress reaction related to the destruction of one’s emotional ecosystem." This condition of shock brought on by displacement, a result of the loss of a massive web of connections – of a way of being – is the problem the 21st century must solve, according to Fullilove. Through a careful of study of three African-American neighborhoods devastated by urban renewal – the Hill District in Pittsburgh, Central Ward in Newark, and Roanoke, Virginia – along with intriguing artwork, cartoons, historic photographs, and maps, Fullilove puts a face to communities lost a generation ago. In the process, she develops an "aesthetics of equity" in the hope of avoiding future calamities in neighborhood revitalization efforts: respect the common life the way you would an individual life, treasure the buildings history has given us, break the cycle of disinvestment, and ensure freedom of movement. Root Shock acknowledges that there is a time for black Americans to mourn their heritage lost to urban renewal, as well as a time to heal and regroup. At the same time, a task for everyone remains the creation of neighborhoods in which to dwell, not divide. Buy this book
	Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World by Robert Neuwirth (Routledge Press, New York) The Mirriam-Webster dictionary defines a squatter as "one that settles on property without right or title or payment of rent." In the United States, many people think of squatters as homeless people who move into abandoned buildings, often in inner-cities, laying low so as to avoid eviction by the police. Around the world, however, squatting is not only a way of life for millions of people who can’t afford market prices – it’s a phenomenon that has spawned entire squatter metropolises of up to 300,000 people, some complete with their own mayors, planning departments, and municipal bus services. Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World by investigative reporter Robert Neuwirth tracks these off-the-radar settlements that include one in every six people on the planet – a proportion that could reach one in four by 2030. Neuwirth, who has contributed to The New York Times, The Nation, and City Limits, spent two years living in the squatter alter-egos of Rio De Janiero, Istanbul, Mumbai, and Nairobi, Kenya. During his time in Africa, Neuwirth witnessed 20 squatter families sharing a single latrine in a primitive shantytown without basic services – and some reveling in their freedom. In Rio, extensive gangs intimidated – and maintained order – in City of God-like favelas. In Mumbai, many of the six million squatters have lived without property rights for over 40 years, yet have secretly secured electricity, water, and well-built (from scratch) homes for entire communities. And in Istanbul, where an ancient custom permits usurpation of property as long as a home is built overnight, a huge squatter non-city operates smoothly, with its own departments of public works and sanitation. Neuwirth’s shadow cities paint a complex portrait of "a huge hidden economy" that forces readers to re-evaluate their concepts of property rights, land ownership, and what it means to have a place to live. For further information, please visit the author's blog at http://squattercity.blogspot.com Buy this book
	Squares: A Public Places Design Guide for Urbanists by Mark C. Childs (University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque) In Squares: A Public Places Design Guide for Urbanists, Mark C. Childs has created an elegant, easy-to-read, and well-organized traditional planning handbook to help designers, planners, public officials, students, developers, and community leaders understand the history and theories of public spaces, in order to create convivial places that meet the needs of their community. Childs, a faculty member and director of the Design Planning Assistance Center in the School of Architecture at the University of New Mexico, defines conviviality using its Latin roots, as "the enjoyment of a festive society, as a means of living together...the vibrant sense of belonging to a settlement." To create these democratic common spaces, according to Childs, planners must analyze a community’s civitas (its goals and reasons for coming together), genius loci (how it best interacts with its landscape), and urbanitas (its traditions of built form). After reviewing the history of public places, from Native American ceremonial mounds to Nolli’s 1748 plan of Rome, Childs embarks on a series of 126 design queries to frame his discussion. There are general questions – "How may the civic place inspire stories and other artwork that in return help enrich the life of the place?" – along with the highly specific – "How can the texture of the floor enrich the design of a civic place?" Each response includes a concise, concrete answer, often linking to the design theories and "mini-case studies" sprinkled throughout the book. In addition, each chapter features clear (although not in color) maps, designs, and photographs, as well as a brief "excursion" pieces written by guest authors about their own experiences with public places. Collectively, Squares is a useful reference material for those interested in creating or improving upon public open space in their community. Buy this book
	Urban Sprawl and Public Health: Designing, Planning, and Building for Healthy Communities by Howard Frumkin, Lawrence Frank and Richard Jackson (Island Press, Washington, D.C.) Discussion of the issue of obesity in America seemed to reach its apex in 2004, and the planning community served its own special purpose in the debate. Has suburban sprawl created less walkable communities, which in turn have increased rates of obesity? Or is the obesity problem simply a result of a poor diet and lack of exercise? Overall, do the design and location of places people live have a tangible effect on their health? Urban Sprawl and Public Health: Designing, Planning, and Building for Healthy Communities addresses this all-encompassing question through careful analysis of a variety of health problems impacting the United States. In addition to increased rates of obesity and diabetes, many Americans suffer from asthma and depression and anxiety, while some aging baby boomers are beginning to experience arthritis, osteoporosis, and disability. The book, begun in 2000 by two physicians who have specialized in health and the environment for over twenty years (Frumkin and Jackson), along with a landscape architect, transportation and land use planner (Frank), is geared towards planners and architects with little knowledge of public health, as well as public health professionals with little background in planning. The authors "propose that urban health—a field that has until very recently focused on the diseases of poverty in the inner city—needs to be broadened to consider health on a systems basis, across an entire metropolis." Calling for a rebuilding of walkable American communities, they link automobile-oriented sprawl to air pollution, physical inactivity, decreased water quantity and quality, increased mental health issues, and the erosion of social capital, all unfairly concentrating on women, children, elderly, poor, minorities, and people with disabilities. Although health and planning have been linked before, Urban Sprawl and Public Health contributes to the ongoing discussion by clearly outlining current issues in the context of recent health studies and planning theories. Buy this book

Honorable Mention

• Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles
  By Eric Avila
• The Bones of the Earth
  By Howard Mansfield
• Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century
  By Andrew Wiese
• Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality
  by Rhonda Y. Williams
• Up Against the Sprawl
  by Jennifer Wolch, Manuel Pastor Jr., and Peter Dreier, Editors

December 15, 2004 Wednesday

FINAL EDITION SECTION: VIEWPOINTS; Pg. A9

HEADLINE: CITY SHOULD JUMP AT CHANCE TO SELL LAND IN PERRYSBURG
Let me get this straight. A private logging company will be paying 90 percent of the purchase price ($333,900) for the closed and unused J.N. Adam Development Center in Perrysburg to the City of Buffalo, and Councilman David Franczyk is contemplating refusing the agreement because he is afraid a few more trees will be taken down than he feels is appropriate?

This is the same Council president who represents a city government that could desperately use the money to fund city operations, save jobs and correct some deficiencies caused by years of mismanagement. Go figure! I guess this adds another meaning to the phrase of not being able to "see the forest for the trees."

John R. Wicka, Lake View

December 16, 2004 Thursday

S-TIER EDITION SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. B3

HEADLINE: PLAN TO SELL CITY'S SITE IN PERRYSBURG HITS A SNAG;
LOGGING FIRM WANTS OLD HOSPITAL LAND

BYLINE: By Brian Meyer - NEWS STAFF REPORTER

The state's plan to sell a 650-acre site in Perrysburg to a logging company hit a snag Tuesday when the Common Council delayed approving the deal.

Buffalo is being asked to give up its reversionary interests at a site that was once home to the city's tuberculosis hospital. In return, the city would receive 90 percent of the purchase price, or $333,900.

State officials, control board staff members and the supervisor in Perrysburg have urged the Council to approve the plan. They note that Buffalo will receive revenue, the land will be returned to the tax rolls, and Perrysburg would be given the site's water system to meet pressing needs in the town and village.

The state Dormitory Authority, which is handling the deal, had hoped the Council would take action Tuesday.

That didn't happen. Some Council members want written guarantees that Trathen Land Co. of York will manage the former J.N. Adam Developmental Center property in an environmentally responsible way.

Meanwhile, other entities have contacted the city to signal their interest in the site.

Another timber company, a development agency in Cattaraugus County and an educational institution in Ohio have all expressed some level of interest, according to Council President David A. Franczyk.

He said initial correspondence leads him to believe that a "better deal" might be struck with more favorable terms and stronger guarantees. Franczyk and others want assurances that many buildings on the site will be preserved and that entire forests won't be cut down.

But Claudia S. Hutton, a spokeswoman for the Dormitory Authority, said Trathen won a competitive bid and considering new proposals now would delay the sale for a year.

"We would have to throw out the bid and start all over again," she said.

Franczyk accused state officials of showing a "take-it-or-leave-it" attitude. "I'm disappointed with their bureaucratic mentality. They want to make the deal, walk away and not think anything about the future," Franczyk said Wednesday.

He acknowledged there are risks if the deal collapses. If the state returns the property to the city, Buffalo could face additional financial pressures and liability issues. Franczyk added that cynics might wonder why he's taking a hard environmental line when the Cattaraugus County site is 35 miles south of Buffalo.

"I'm not just a resident of the city. I'm also a resident of the state and the planet. I have certain values," he said.

Thomas S. Trathen, president of the logging company, visited Buffalo this week to try to convince city officials that Trathen has a solid 22-year track record and owns or manages more than 50,000 acres of land.

"Our long-term forest approach has actually kept many forests in New York as working forests," said Trathen.

Franczyk said he has no reason to doubt Trathen's intentions. But he said the company's pledge to adhere to "high standards" in managing the forests is vague and that no firm plan has been presented for preserving some existing buildings.

e-mail: bmeyer@buffnews.com

December 22, 2004 Wednesday

FINAL EDITION SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. B6

LENGTH: 520 words

HEADLINE: SOME COUNCIL MEMBERS STILL SKEPTICAL OF LAND SALE

BYLINE: By Brian Meyer - NEWS STAFF REPORTER

BODY:


More concerns surfaced Tuesday as the Common Council continued to dissect a state plan to sell land in Cattaraugus County to a logging company.

Buffalo fits into the picture because it has reversionary rights to the 650-acre Perrysburg campus of the former J.N. Adam Developmental Center. The city has been facing pressure from state and control board officials to give up its interests in return for $333,900 -- or 90 percent of the price that Trathen Land Co. would pay for the land.

At a Finance Committee meeting, Council members tagged on several issues to a growing list of questions about the sale, including:

The status of gas wells on the site. City Real Estate Director John Hannon assured lawmakers that the wells have been "dry" for a long time and that they are only being used as storage facilities by a utility company.

The future of a stained-glass dome that graces the ceiling of a dining room at the former J.N. Adam Developmental Center. Council President David A. Franczyk said the dome is believed to have been built for the Pan-American Exposition of 1901. He said experts no longer think the dome was from the famed Temple of Music exhibit, but he said the creation is still historic. Moving the dome back to Buffalo, however, might cost $1 million, Franczyk told lawmakers.

The value of other assets on the site, including cherry trees. Until recently, Council concerns centered on fears that the sale agreement failed to ensure that the logging company would manage the land in an environmentally responsible way. Trathen said it has a solid track record that demonstrates its commitment to properly managing forests. Franczyk plans to visit one of Trathen's properties in York) next week.

Lovejoy Council Member Richard A. Fontana joined the ranks of skeptics Tuesday when he branded the state plan a "shortsighted sale."

"It's a bad deal for the city," said Fontana, who called the proposed selling price a "pittance."

But Council Majority Leader Marc A. Coppola said some might be overlooking the "warts" that confront site developers, including environmental issues. He said that while several outside entities have questioned the terms of the deal, no one else has "offered a penny" for the site.

"Where's the money if (the property) is worth so much more?" asked Coppola.

The property was once home to Buffalo's tuberculosis hospital. The city later turned the property over to the state, which operated it as a facility for mentally ill and developmentally disabled people for more than 40 years. The state closed the facility 11 years ago, but the city maintains reversionary rights.

Some Council members said they're sensitive to the fact that by delaying the sale, Perrysburg residents are being left in limbo over a water system transfer that would address pressing needs in the the town and village. They asked legal experts to see if the water system could be given to Perrysburg even if the Council doesn't authorize the sale of the land.

State officials said they're still hopeful the Council will approve the sale at its Tuesday meeting, the last session of the year.

e-mail: bmeyer@buffnews.com

December 29, 2004 Wednesday

FINAL EDITION SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. B3

HEADLINE: CITY AGAIN DELAYS SALE OF LAND IN PERRYSBURG

BYLINE: By Brian Meyer - NEWS STAFF REPORTER

The Common Council delayed action Tuesday on the state's push to sell land in Perrysburg to a logging company, the second time this month the plan confronted hurdles in City Hall. New claims surfaced that the state failed to perform an adequate environmental review, prompting the Council to keep the plan bottlenecked in committee.

Meanwhile, a state official insisted the site was subjected to proper environmental scrutiny. Buffalo has reversionary rights on the Cattaraugus County land, which once housed the city's tuberculosis hospital. The city has been offered $333,900, or 90 percent of the proposed sale price, to give up its interests in the 650-acre site. The move would pave the way for selling the former J.N. Adam Developmental Center to Trathen Land Co.

Council President David A. Franczyk claimed an environmental review performed in 1998 failed to specifically address the impact a logging operation would have on the site. Earlier in the day, Franczyk met in York, Livingston County, with Trathen officials. He was accompanied by legal and environmental experts.

Franczyk later said it is not his intention to derail the deal, claiming his only motive is to make sure all proper procedures have been followed.

"The characterization of delay is confused with due diligence," said Franczyk.

He warned the city could face legal problems if it authorizes a land deal without proper environmental scrutiny.

The state Dormitory Authority previously warned city officials that failure to finalize the deal this month could doom the sale and prompt the state to pass along expenses. But Paul Burgdorf, an authority spokesman, left the door open to continued dialogue.

City Real Estate Director John Hannon said he still believes the deal is good for all parties.

"I think we can work it out. It's all about negotiating," he said.

The dispute over past environmental studies isn't the only concern. Some Council members have been pushing for written guarantees that Trathen will manage the land responsibly, while others have criticized the terms of the sale. In recent weeks, city officials reported that numerous entities have expressed interest in the site. State officials countered that Trathen was selected after an extensive bidding process.

Also at Tuesday's meeting, the Council:

Approved an amendment requiring vendors that bid on many city contracts to pledge to work toward a goal of having at least 25 percent of their work force made up of minorities and 5 percent made up of females. Sponsor Antoine M. Thompson of Masten said the clause formalizes what many city departments are already implementing. Thompson called it a critical step toward promoting inclusion.

Approved a resolution calling for a more environment-friendly policy when the city buys products. Advocates said the Council vote in favor of a PBT-free purchasing policy puts Buffalo on a path to becoming the first city in the state with such a policy. PBTs, or persistent bioaccumulative toxins, are found in many products. The pollutants are difficult to destroy and build up in the environment.

e-mail: bmeyer@buffnews.com

January 5, 2005 Wednesday

S-TIER EDITION SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. B2



HEADLINE: REJECTION EXPECTED ON PERRYSBURG LAND SALE

BYLINE: By Brian Meyer - NEWS STAFF REPORTER

The Common Council will reject the state's plan to sell a 650-acre site in Perrysburg to a logging company, city lawmakers predicted Tuesday.

A lengthy debate indicated that supporters lack the six votes required to waive the city's reversionary rights to the Cattaraugus County campus of the former J.N. Adam Developmental Center. At least five of nine Council members said questions about plans to sell the site to Trathen Land Co. had not been resolved. Ellicott Council Member Brian C. Davis, chairman of the Finance Committee, said he will push for a final vote Tuesday, and expects the deal to be rejected.

"It's clear the support isn't there," he told committee members. "There's no reason to continue to jerk this guy around."

Davis was referring to Thomas S. Trathen, president of the York-based logging company. In recent correspondence, Trathen has urged approval of the deal.

"I have gone to great lengths to educate and clarify how the property will be managed," he wrote in an e-mail. "I feel this is a win-win scenario for all parties."

But Council members said they were worried about the environmental impact of logging activity. "I will not vote to sell the property to a logger," Lovejoy Council Member Richard A. Fontana said. "I've seen what they do in the Southern Tier.

Some contend the city could get a better deal than the state's offer to give Buffalo $333,900, or 90 percent of the sale price.

J. David Swift, a former national parks ranger who has lived in Perrysburg for 15 years, met with the Council members Tuesday. Contrary to studies that downplay reuse prospects, the land, he said, has "incredible potential." He said options might include a nature center, an environmental studies facility, a satellite campus for colleges or housing for senior citizens. He said some of the more than 50 structures on the site could be rehabilitated.

But everyone agrees that redeveloping the land would cost money the city does not have.

"It's going to come down to dollars and cents when all is said and done," University Council Member Bonnie E. Russell said.

Swift claimed 10 properties on several acres could generate $500,000 in seed money to spur redevelopment efforts. Swift said he would like to assemble a group of investors interested in environmentally friendly ventures.

City Real Estate Director John Hannon, who has been involved in the Perrysburg saga for 12 years, said previous efforts to market the site have fizzled. "There is no real demand for any type of use out there other than maybe agricultural," he said.

Council President David A. Franczyk, whose initial concerns prompted lawmakers to delay action, said the Council appeared ready to reject the plan next week. He also denied rumors that his office has been actively pitching the site to another logging company.

Even if the deal with Trathen is rejected, South Council Member James D. Griffin and other lawmakers said the state should transfer the site's water system to Perrysburg to ease pressing needs in the town and village.

e-mail: bmeyer@buffnews.com

January 6, 2005 Thursday

FINAL EDITION SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. B3

HEADLINE: EXECUTIVE MAKES CASE TO PURCHASE PERRYSBURG SITE

BYLINE: By Brian Meyer - NEWS STAFF REPORTER

The head of a timber harvesting company interested in buying a Perrysburg site that was once home to Buffalo's tuberculosis hospital is stressing his company's reputation for responsibly managing forests.

Thomas S. Trathen, president of the York-based Trathen Land Co., said he remains hopeful the Common Council will allow the state to sell the 650-acre site in Cattaraugus County. Buffalo has reversionary rights to the campus of the former J.N. Adam Developmental Center.

Trathen made his comments one day after several Buffalo lawmakers predicted that the Council would reject the sale at Tuesday's meeting.

Some Council members have raised environmental concerns, while others have questioned the terms of the deal that gives the city $333,900, or 90 percent of the sale price. Others want to see detailed plans for refurbishing many buildings on the site.

Trathen reacted angrily Wednesday to what he viewed as some Council members' effort to malign the logging industry.

He argued that his company, which owns or manages more than 50,000 acres of forests, has won numerous awards for its "responsible, low-impact" timber-harvesting techniques. He also cited a recent letter from the Western New York Land Conservancy lauding Trathen's "commitment to maintaining the rural nature" of its land.

Trathen said he finds it hard to fathom that the Council will kill a deal he claims will benefit all parties. "I'll be shocked if this doesn't pass on Tuesday based on the facts of the transaction," he said.

Trathen also released a letter he received this week from Perrysburg Town Supervisor Morton Sprague indicating that, with only a couple exceptions, area residents strongly support Trathen's purchase. The deal includes transfer of the site's water system to Perrysburg to meet pressing needs in the town and village.

e-mail: bmeyer@buffnews.com

January 10, 2005 Monday

FINAL EDITION

SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. B1

HEADLINE: SEEKING ASSURANCES ON LAND SALE;
CONCERN ABOUT LOGGING FOR 'FUTURE GENERATIONS'

BYLINE: By Mark Sommer - NEWS STAFF REPORTER

On a recent afternoon, snow glistened on the trunks and limbs of maple, beech, red oak and the rarer black cherry trees that occupy hillsides in Perrysburg.

Stillness filled these Cattaraugus County woods. But it may not for long.

Turquoise paint marks on some of the trees were evidence of the logging outfit seeking to buy the state-owned property.

Trathen Land Co. wants to log the 450 acres of forest and pasture, and develop an additional 200 acres where a hospital once treated tuberculosis patients and later people with developmental disabilities. The company would also acquire eight two-story hillside homes with garages and woods in the back yard for resale.

Standing in the way of the sale is the Buffalo Common Council, which is expected to vote Tuesday.

Council President David A. Franczyk, who leads the opposition, has asked -- unsuccessfully -- for legally binding assurances from Trathen that it will practice sustainable forestry methods and reuse buildings designed by architect John Hopper Coxhead.

"I want to make sure future generations can enjoy this beautiful land and property," Francyzk said of the three properties 40 miles south of Buffalo.

Company owner Tom Trathen has balked at signing the agreements, arguing that it is unfair to revisit terms already negotiated. He is supported by Empire State Development Co., the state agency that advertised for a buyer.

"We believe the results of our competitive bid are good for the City of Buffalo and the State of New York," said Claudia Hutton, spokeswoman for the state Dormitory Authority, which is working with Empire State Development. "It's a win-win situation."

New York State owns the land, but under a 1960 agreement, the land would revert to its original owner, the City of Buffalo, if it is no longer used to treat people with mental disorders. The state is offering Buffalo 90 percent of the purchase price, or $339,300.

Empire State Development has unloaded significant properties in recent years -- many of them former psychiatric centers -- it considers surplus land. Doing so has allowed the properties to return to the tax rolls and has absolved the state of costly maintenance and environmental cleanups. It wants to do the same in Perrysburg.

"The state is not making money off the sale, but would reduce its future operating costs by millions because it would no longer maintain the property," Hutton said.

The Masiello administration and the Buffalo Fiscal Stability Authority also support the sale. So, too, do the town and village officials of Perrysburg, who are eager to add the property to the tax rolls and have the property's water system transferred to the town.

"We have waited a long time for this as a community, and we're hoping the sale will go through," said Myrton Sprague, supervisor for the Town of Perrysburg, which has a population of 2,700.

"The (former hospital) is just sitting there deteriorating, and we're thankful that Trathen Land Co. is willing to try to salvage what they can," Sprague said.

David Swift, a former National Park Service ranger whose home borders a section of the woods for sale, disagrees. He thinks that logging the forest is wrong for Perrysburg, but would support a limited timber auction conducted by the City of Buffalo if it bought time for a better solution to be found.

"My main concern is the preservation of the woods and the wildlife, and the quality of the air and the watershed," Swift said.

Francyzk said he shares those concerns. He wants a 1998 environmental study to be updated and believes that it is required. Empire State Development contends that the earlier review was adequate.

Trathen said he would adopt a forest-management plan that takes a long-range view.

"Our goal as a forestry company is to see land stay in a productive forest, versus the land being stripped or clear-cut. We know the right things to do for the forest."

The land for what began as a tuberculosis sanitarium was donated by then-Mayor James Noble Adam in 1910. It opened two years later bearing his name. The self-sustaining complex included a dairy, greenhouses and a zoo.

It also generated its own power, with three steam boilers and two electric generators.

The hospital was converted in 1960 as an adjunct of the former Gowanda Psychiatric Center. In 1987, it became part of the mental retardation service system, closing in 1993.

Some of the original hospital buildings are still used for offices, and seven group homes are located on the site.

Karen Blake, a former Cattaraugus County legislator, faults Empire State Development for failing to take the town's suggestions for future use and taking an unimaginative approach in marketing the properties.

"One of the things that upsets me is that the only bidders seem to be loggers," she said. "I have thought there is a lot more potential in that property than just for timber."

Blake thinks that the property would make an ideal retreat or senior citizens center. Other ideas have included a summer educational center for inner-city youth.

Trathen said that his logging company has a history of managing multiple-use properties and is getting an undeserved bad rap.

"It's a benefit that an organization like ours is involved, and that's basically not being appreciated. For the land to go under our stewardship is a break for the property, and for everyone concerned," Trathen said.

Trathen Land would be responsible for tearing down and repairing deteriorating structures, removing asbestos and excavating a dump site. Those expenses alone could cost millions, he said.

Trathen said he would decide what buildings to rehabilitate after an architectural engineer makes an evaluation.

Francyzk believes that some of the buildings designed by Coxhead -- who also designed Delaware Avenue Baptist Church -- are eligible for the State Registry of Historic Places. He has asked the state for an opinion.

He and others have also expressed concern about a yellow and gold glass dome many believe was in the Pan-American Exposition's Temple of Music, the site of President William McKinley's assassination in 1901.

Trathen has agreed to get the city's consent should changes with the dome be considered.

Melissa Brown, collections manager of the Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society, said blueprints and photographs of the Temple of Music prove that it was not there; neither is there evidence that it came from other buildings at the Buffalo World's Fair.

"It's an urban myth," Brown said.

The Council is expected to vote Tuesday, and proponents of the sale appear short of the six votes needed for passage.

Blake, a critic of the sale, said, "So many people in Western New York have emotional and historic ties here. It's not just a piece of abandoned property."

e-mail: msommer@buffnews.com

GRAPHIC: Ronald J. Colleran/Buffalo News David Swift, a former National Park Service ranger who lives nearby, doesn't want a company to log woods around this former hospital in Perrysburg. Buffalo's Common Council may decide Tuesday whether those plans go forward.

January 12, 2005 Wednesday

FINAL EDITION SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. B2

HEADLINE: COUNCIL REJECTS SALE OF 650-ACRE PERRYSBURG SITE

BYLINE: By Brian Meyer - NEWS STAFF REPORTER

The Common Council on Tuesday rejected the state's plan to sell a 650-acre site in Perrysburg to a logging company, prompting Mayor Anthony M. Masiello to say that the vote "makes no sense."

In a 5-4 vote, the Council sent a message to Albany that it wants to see a new deal before giving up the city's reversionary interests in the Cattaraugus County site. Some lawmakers said there were no written guarantees that the campus of the former J.N. Adam Developmental Center would be managed in an environmentally responsible way.

Other lawmakers questioned the terms of a deal that would have given Buffalo 90 percent of the purchase price, or $333,900. The site was once home to the city's tuberculosis hospital.

Council President David A. Franczyk, who was the first official to raise concerns about the sale, said the vote sends a signal to the state Dormitory Authority.

"We want the state to go back to the drawing board and work with us to do a development that we can all be proud of," he said.

Joining Franczyk in voting to deny the proposal were Dominic J. Bonifacio of Niagara, Richard A. Fontana of Lovejoy, Joseph Golombek Jr. of North and James D. Griffin of South.

Some lawmakers believe the site could be redeveloped in a way that brings even more revenue to the city, a claim that sale advocates have challenged. The plan would have sold the site to Trathen Land Co. of York.

President Thomas S. Trathen, who one week earlier said he would be "shocked" if the Council didn't approve the plan, learned about its defeat from a reporter.

"Obviously I'm very disappointed with the decision," he said, adding that the company will have to study its options.

State control board officials and the Masiello administration supported the deal, claiming the city needs the revenue.

"It's hard to justify keeping a site that's 40 miles from Buffalo with buildings on it that are in disrepair," said Masiello. "It makes no sense."

Some have warned that if the state gives the site to the city, Buffalo would be saddled with potential liability and additional costs.

In other action, the Council:

Unanimously approved a plan that, if approved by Masiello, would give tax breaks to homeowners who make major improvements to their properties. Assessment "rebates" would be given to residents who make improvements in excess of $5,000 -- rehabilitation projects that typically result in increased assessments and higher tax bills.

Majority Leader Marc A. Coppola, the bill's lead sponsor, said property owners would receive a 100 percent exemption from paying additional taxes on the capital improvements in the first year. The exemptions would gradually decline until they are phased out in the ninth year.

Unanimously approved what some consider a compromise for funding the construction of new firehouses. The state control board wanted the Council to reconsider plans to sell bonds to build two new fire stations and expand a third. The oversight panel wanted lawmakers to use state funds that have been set aside for re-engineering services.

e-mail: bmeyer@buffnews.com

January 19, 2005 Wednesday

FINAL EDITION SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. B1



HEADLINE: STATE WARNS OF LIABILITY IF PERRYSBURG SITE ISN'T SOLD;
OFFICIAL TELLS COUNCIL TO DECIDE IN ONE WEEK

BYLINE: By Brian Meyer - NEWS STAFF REPORTER

If the Common Council prevents the state from selling a Perrysburg site to a logging company, Buffalo could be forced to take back the property and shoulder all the risks, a state official warned Tuesday.

The comment infuriated Council President David A. Franczyk, who characterized it as a threat and said he won't be bullied by a "visionless bureaucracy" in Albany.

The Council voted, 5-4, last week to reject the state's plan to sell the campus of the former J.N. Adam Developmental Center to Trathen Land Co. of York. Some lawmakers want written guarantees that the 650-acre site will be managed in an environmentally responsible way. Others think the city could get a better deal.

The state has offered to give Buffalo 90 percent of the sale price, or $333,900, in return for the city's relinquishing its reversionary rights. The Cattaraugus County property includes dozens of buildings, many in disrepair.

Marc Ganz, director of real property for the state Dormitory Authority, met Tuesday with the Council's Finance Committee. He told lawmakers they have one week to decide whether they will give up Buffalo's interests so that the sale can be finalized or risk seeing the property returned to the city.

"This is not a negotiation. We are asking you merely to make a choice here without further delay," said Ganz.

Officials on both sides seemed to imply that if the deadlock drags on much longer, a judge may ultimately have to decide which entity is responsible for future costs at the site. Some city officials said they don't believe the state can just hand over the deed without Buffalo's first accepting the property.

While Franczyk reiterated his willingness to discuss a possible compromise, he said he was turned off by Ganz's attitude.

"You don't get very far by making threats," said Franczyk. "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar."

Meanwhile, Ganz seemed to question lawmakers' priorities. "We urge you to attend to Buffalo instead of Perrysburg, to Forest Avenue instead of Perrysburg Forest, to Erie County instead of Cattaraugus County," he said.

Also attending the meeting were Myrton Sprague, supervisor for the Town of Perrysburg, and Anthony Kota, mayor of the Village of Perrysburg.

They said most residents support the sale to Trathen Land Co., and not just because the deal includes transferring the site's water system to Perrysburg to meet pressing needs.

"We feel it's a fair offer," he said. "With all liabilities there, we don't think you'll get anything better."

e-mail: bmeyer@buffnews.com

January 24, 2005 Monday

FINAL EDITION SECTION: VIEWPOINTS; Pg. A7



HEADLINE: LAND FOR SALE IN PERRYSBURG WILL BE MANAGED RESPONSIBLY

I feel obligated to clear up a few misconceptions in a recent letter about the sale of J.N. Adams Developmental Center in Perrysburg. This project was undertaken more than a year ago, and all proper city and state officials were notified at that time.

As for the parcel between Hooker Hill Road and Edward's Corners Road, it is 155 acres, not 50 acres. There has not been any marking of trees or high grading for silviculture there or, for that matter, on any of the 650 acres by Trathen Land Co.

The Department of Environmental Conservation has conducted environmental impact studies on logging for years, and considers it "a temporary disturbance." We also adhere to New York State Forestry Best Management Practices. The utmost consideration is given to protecting water and erosion control.

The buildings on the site are in such a state of disrepair that it would be financially unfeasible to consider reconstruction. Just ask any resident or maintenance worker in Perrysburg. A drive by the facility does not tell the whole story.

Yes, it is a very beautiful campus setting. The Trathen group has been educating people in New York, Pennsylvania and Canada for as long as we have been in business. We welcome any visitors to our facilities and land holdings in Western New York who would like further information.

Brett Lefford

Land Manager, Trathen Land Co. Copyright 2005 The Buffalo News
Buffalo News (New York)

January 25, 2005 Tuesday
FINAL EDITION SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. B3

HEADLINE: VOLKER WARNS CITY ON LAND DEAL

BYLINE: By Brian Meyer - NEWS STAFF REPORTER

Western New York's most senior state lawmaker has warned the Common Council that if it continues to stall a Perrysburg land deal, the state should reconsider helping Buffalo in its struggle to make an economic rebound.

At least one Council member described the letter from State Sen. Dale M. Volker, R-Depew, as "blackmail."

Volker questioned the Council's 5-4 vote two weeks ago against allowing the state to sell the former J.N. Adam Developmental Center in Cattaraugus County to a logging company.

In return for giving up its rights to the return of the 650-acre site, which it once owned, the city would receive 90 percent of the sale price, or $333,900.

City officials released Volker's letter Monday after a Council caucus.

"The City of Buffalo needs the state to help them out of its current financial situation," Volker wrote. "Denying a legitimate sale such as this is a clear sign that the city does not desire to cooperate with the state and that the state should strongly reconsider its future investment in Buffalo's needed turnaround."

Council President David A. Franczyk, the first lawmaker to question environmental and fiscal aspects of the deal, blasted Volker's letter.

"I thought it was blackmail," he said. "All these threats and blackmail won't move this issue forward."

Franczyk told Council members some "positive movement" was made Friday after he spoke with an official from Trathen Land Co., the York-based timber harvester that wants to buy the site. Franczyk said discussions have involved possibly stronger guarantees that the land would be managed in an environmentally responsible way. But he added that questions remain about the fiscal terms.

Last week, an official from the state Dormitory Authority warned that if the Council failed to pave the way for the land sale this week, Buffalo could be forced to take back the property and shoulder the risks.

If the Council continues to "needlessly stall" the sale, Volker warned, he would have no choice but to support transferring the property to the city. He said the move would saddle Buffalo with the cleanup costs; environmental remedies; unpaid school, county and local taxes; and liability for dozens of buildings on the site.

"This is an additional debt burden the city residents neither need or deserve," Volker wrote.

But at Monday's caucus, Franczyk fired back his own warning. He said the city would have solid legal ground to sue state economic development officials for improperly maintaining many buildings on the site.

e-mail: bmeyer@buffnews.com Copyright 2005 The Buffalo News
Buffalo News (New York)

January 31, 2005 Monday
FINAL EDITION SECTION: VIEWPOINTS; Pg. A11

HEADLINE: DEVELOPMENTAL CENTER SITE DESERVES PROTECTION BY CITY

I have a personal interest in the management of J.N. Adam Developmental Center in Perrysburg. As a boy, my father lived at the facility for three years as a tuberculosis patient.

And I am in the timber and timberland business.

After inspection, I found trees marked for harvest below the recommended size, including the parcel between Hooker Hill and Edwards Corners. Some trees are inferior and should be culled and replanted to ensure forest integrity.

Almost all of these marked trees, 8 to 10 inches wide, are of sufficient quality to render future revenue in the form of grade timber. They need time to mature. Temporary disturbance will only occur when a strict harvest plan is implemented.

A strict plan "guarantees" harvesting mature timber only, removing tops from the forest, replanting rare Black Cherry saplings and maintenance and erosion control. This guarantees healthy forests and lucre revenue indefinitely.

The buildings' interiors and exteriors are beautifully constructed of steel, concrete, brick and marble, far from the poor state that Trathen Land Co. would like the City of Buffalo to believe. Demolition is ludicrous. The city could gain from future sales of these buildings separately or as a whole without spending a penny.

The Common Council has legal and moral responsibilities to preserve and or market Buffalo's interests to the best of its abilities, for Buffalo and Perrysburg.

Jim Mancuso

Buffalo Timber, Forestville

February 4, 2005 Friday

FINAL EDITION SECTION: VIEWPOINTS; Pg. A11

HEADLINE: COUNCIL SHOULD HOLD FAST ON PERRYSBURG PROPERTY

There is a proposal on the table to sell at a give-away price some heavenly forested land owned by the City of Buffalo. This is the Perrysburg property, the former J.N. Adam Developmental Center site in Cattaraugus County.

It consists of about 650 acres.

There are not many old growth forests left in our area. For those who love nature, and old trees, it is priceless. The idea of selling it far below its market value is so foolish it should not be considered. In fact, I hope the forest can be preserved.

I understand the Buffalo Common Council has not rushed to approve the sale, and I hope they reject it out of hand. I also hope that those who read this letter will urge Council President David Franczyk and the other Council members to say no and to thank them for not being rushed to make a decision.

I believe the New York State Quality Review Law is applicable here, that there should be an environmental review, that citizens should be informed, and allowed to comment. Others who feel the same should let the Buffalo Common Council members know their feelings.

Charles Lamb, Youngstown

...imagine that the tables were turned. Imagine that through some accident of history the City of New York held title to the Outer Harbor and refused to relinquish it unless and until it was developed in an environmentally-friendly manner -- oh, let's say a big park. The economic desperation of Buffalo would mean nothing, of course, because NYC rules.

Can you imagine what David Franczyk (and the environmentalists in Buffalo) would have to say about that?

Free Perrysburg! from Perrysburg Held Hostage - Day 4496

My Current Writing...

• 12/7/05 Perrysburg Still Hostage
  
• 8/18/05 Out of Town...Out of Touch...
• 7/26/05 Driving Perrysburg Crazy
• 7/19/05 40 Miles From Elmwood or 3650 Days to Close the Barn Door
• 7/13/05 Preserver of the Status Quo
• BuffaloPundit's rather awkward response
• Craig Howard's "Perrysburg Held Hostage - Day 4496"
  

• 7/5/05 City of Good Neighbors...Not & Cindy Lauer's letter from Perrysburg
• 6/13/05 An update
• 5/9/05 Another City Park
  
• 3/17/05 Introduction and additional background
• 2/5/05 City of Good Neighbors - Early History of the Site, Part II
• 2/5/05 A New City Park?
• 1/20/05 A Match Made in Perrysburg
• 1/19/05 Killing the Forest to Save a Few Trees
• 1/18/05 Who's Running This Place?
• 1/17/05 One Flew East, One Flew West...
• 1/16/05 Blogging from Perrysburg - Early History of the Site, Part I

• Motion for Summary Judgement 6/8/05
• filed on behalf of Trathen Land Co., LLC #69906
  
• Supporting Affidavit
• Cindy Lauer, Perryburg Town Budget Manager and former Town Supervisor

• My Pictures 1/05
  
• Additional pictures Courtesy of Craig Clarke 1/05
  
• See my Flickr Slide show 1/05 with some older pics
  

• Julie Broyle's letter February 15, 2005
• Tom Trathen's response
• BN article February 22, 2005
• Dr. Beahan - Snyder, NY May 5, 2005
• BN article August 11, 2005 "City Gives Up..."

• Lexis/Nexis search results

• SpeakUp WNY - Forum Thread - JN Adam & Trathen Deal

• About the Architect John Hopper Coxhead - Designed first buildings
  
• 2001 Masters Thesis, Nancy Mingus
  
• Timeline
• Coxhead in Buffalo
• Early pics JN Adam Hospital & here

• Friends of JN Adam & a petition to save the trees from the diabolical ax wielding Tom Trathen. PLUS new pictures showing very few trees on the site, back in the day.

• 7/8/05 Last Gasp for Hospital, by Elizabeth Benjamin

In upstate New York, the Adirondack town of Saranac Lake is synonymous with tuberculosis treatment. Patients with the disease came to the picturesque waterfront community, where TB research pioneer Edward Livingston Trudeau had his laboratory, to sit on the porches of massive Victorians and take “the rest cure,” a regime based on fresh air and relaxation.

But there were other lesser known TB treatment facilities scattered around the state, including one built outside Buffalo...

The incredible shrinking city and what to do about it

This is your future, Buffalo. Here's how to change it.

By JAY REY and CHARITY VOGEL
News Staff
1/2/2005

If you plan on living the rest of your life in Western New York, you -- we -- face a daunting task of changing our fate. Take a deep breath and really notice what's going on around you.

Buffalo, you are half the city you were 50 years ago. More than a quarter-million people smaller, and counting. If the present trend continues, in another 50 years, you'll be half of what you are now. You have become the Incredible Shrinking City.

Stop right now and think about that. Think about how Buffalo's decline affects your own life. Then see the big picture, a vision of Buffalo and how its residents -- all of us -- fit into its history. Do you see what's happening?

A city built for the big time, built for the 580,000 people it boasted in its bustling 1950s heyday, is now a city with a population of 292,000. Buffalo is the smallest it's been in more than a century -- since the days of horse and buggy and grain elevators and bustles on women's dresses. And that population number is in free fall, with no end in sight. Only two other major cities -- St. Louis and Pittsburgh -- have lost a larger percentage of their population during the last five decades. Buffalo is like a man who has lost 100 pounds and looks like a boy in his old suits.

It's sad. An injustice. A city so resilient, so hearty and full of spirit, deserves better.

What can we look forward to? Watching our children, grandchildren and friends move away? Worrying about our jobs and our property values? Feeling like we're the only ones who have stayed behind, while everyone else has gone someplace better?

The realization that the best scenario out there is a resourceful way to manage the decline should outrage us. The realization that it could easily turn worse -- that we're at the tipping point of worse times -- should outrage us even more.

Is this the best we can offer ourselves and our children?

Here's the one thing everyone needs to understand from this moment on if anything is going to change: Our staggering population loss over the past 50 years is behind almost everything that's going wrong around us.

Skeptical? Keep looking, this time at the issues and events we are paying the most attention to these days:

Start with an easy one -- government. With a dwindling tax base, a city that has affixed itself like a leech to state aid over the years now finds itself facing one crisis after another: laying off police, closing fire companies, tacking on user fees, giving away assets from the zoo to Dunn Tire Park to Shea's Performing Arts Center, just to stay afloat. This is what happens when your taxpaying public is cut in half.

Our professional sports teams. The only contest that exceeds the games is the ongoing struggle to stave off pressure on the Bills and Sabres to leave town for a bigger, more lucrative market. Fewer residents here mean fewer sports fans spending money on tickets and merchandise. Do the math.

Here's one -- Children's Hospital. One of the area's most emotional stories of the year was really about a hospital struggling to escape corporate downsizing because there were not enough young women and babies to keep it busy.

Education? City schools are closing because enrollment is down. There isn't money for teachers and staff, let alone supplies. The schools have become a reason for families to leave the city.

This one hits home the hardest: Our brain drain. We watch as our friends and sons and daughters -- the region's future, our smartest and brightest, our growth potential -- move away for better opportunities in other parts of the country. What's left is a region aging in place and growing old fast. This region has one of the highest percentages of senior citizens in the nation, up there with retirement meccas like Sarasota and West Palm Beach.

Still not convinced? Keep looking.

Downtown housing, empty city lots, dilapidated homes. It's at the root of all these issues. It's always there, looming in the background, lurking behind issues ranging from taxes to job shortages to poverty. It's the reason for political battles over shrinking the number of Common Council and County Legislature districts, and it's why we're losing a long-time congressman. It's at the root of why some of the roads you're driving on are getting fixed and others aren't. It's at the root of why your corner store is closing down and why your neighborhood tavern went out of business. It's at the root of where you live -- or where you want to live.

The picture is bleak, no doubt about it. Fifty years can do a lot of damage, especially when the city's main reaction to the departure of half its citizenry has been to wave goodbye.

But can the City of Buffalo be saved?

Is there any way to turn this story around -- to give it a happy ending?

It depends on what you mean by salvation. Probably not, if being saved means recapturing the glory days of the 1950s, with a booming downtown, a growing population of 580,000 people and the status of a major urban center in the nation. Let's not hide from the truth. It is highly unlikely that Buffalo will ever be that way again, at least in our lifetimes. That was the old economy, built on concrete and steel, and baptized by the sweat of day laborers and factory hands. We can't go back to that, even if we want to. It's gone.

But if salvation for Buffalo means halting the loss of population -- if it means leveling off, preserving what we have and then growing stronger -- the answer is yes. We can maintain what we have here now: the people, the resources, the jobs, the companies. We can preserve the city's future for our children and grandchildren. We can grow proud again.

Buffalo, in that sense, can be saved.

But it won't happen as a result of piecemeal regionalism, casinos or silver bullets. Those ideas are too small in scope, and too fraught with the potential of failure. They won't work here. Silver bullets, like Adelphia's office tower, can fail or disappear. Casinos are not the answer and never have been. Bioinformatics is a coup, but it's not the magic answer to the city's population loss. Even regionalism on the minute scale as it is being promoted in the region -- a merger of services here, a purchasing agreement there -- won't effect changes dramatic enough to matter. It will only create a streamlined, beautifully managed decline. So say goodbye to all that.

Let's start with more passion and vision and commitment.

Then, we need a groundswell of public initiative -- truly, the cry of an outraged citizenry -- to make changes happen. We can't trust politicians with the future of this city. With our future.

Here are some ideas for halting Buffalo's population loss and turning the city around.

Some are small, some are proposals on a grand scale. They can work. Experts from around the country say these ideas can reverse the city's decline. Put a few of them together and we can start saving the city, right here and right now.

All it takes is a little courage.

One: Make the City Bigger

Apartments for rent: 58; Apartments wanted: 92

-- Buffalo News classified ads, June 4, 1952

Apartments for rent: 142; Apartments wanted: 0

-- Buffalo News classifieds, July 3, 2002

The biggest problem with Buffalo is that the city hasn't moved along with its residents.

After World War II, people moved from Buffalo into tiny suburban homes in Cheektowaga, Amherst and the Town of Tonawanda. Nowadays, city residents -- and people in the crowded first-ring suburbs -- move out even further, into big suburban homes in Clarence, Elma and Lancaster.

If the suburbs can't be stopped, Buffalo's boundaries should grow along with them.

Consider a city like Reno, Nev., where the population is growing by thousands of people each year. As new subdivisions and shopping malls go up, the City Council in Reno votes to extend the city boundaries to take in the area of new development. Voila: The city gets bigger, and stronger, every year. Reno won't decay as it grows, because all the new growth IS Reno.

"The city extends its size and its tax base every two weeks," says Charles Rosenow, an economic development guru for Buffalo who moved to Nevada in 1997. "Reno is allowed to grow. Buffalo is not allowed to grow."

Imagine for a minute what would happen if Buffalo's boundaries took in, at a minimum, the first-ring suburbs: Lackawanna, Cheektowaga, Depew, Amherst, Kenmore, the Town of Tonawanda, West Seneca. The City of Buffalo would instantly become a city of 646,316 people -- bigger than it ever was at the height of its 1950s glory days.

That would put Buffalo smack dab at Number 19 on the list of the nation's biggest cities. Bingo. We're in the Top 20 -- all of a sudden we're a player. And that's just by including the first-ring suburbs; if all of Erie County became Metro Buffalo, we would rank as the 11th-biggest city in the United States.

Think about that for a minute: The 11th BIGGEST CITY in the United States.

Other cities have thought of this before us, and that's why they've passed us by in size. Indianapolis (Number 12 on the Top 20 list) went to a metro government in the early 1970s. Places like Phoenix and Louisville have done it since. What it will take, for Buffalo, is a change in the state constitution, allowing the city to expand its borders. That's something we can't do on our own, without state approval. And territorialism is bound to get in the way, as it always does here; people don't want to lose their political jobs, their little fiefdoms, their geographic identities. But it IS something we can demand. And we should: Because metro government won't change the array of unique flavors that make up this region, but it will help to preserve them for the future.

Corporate Western New York should be leading the charge.

"Louisville just put itself on the international map, without gaining a person," says Bruce Katz, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., about Louisville's leap from 63rd to 16th among American cities. "The corporate leaders made a case: Do we want to be on the map? When you're the 63rd-largest city in the U.S., nobody pays a hell of a lot of attention to you. But when you're the 16th-largest city, people listen."

Why should you want to see this happen, if you're a suburban resident in Erie County?

Because that nice $250,000 mock-Tudor with the half-acre lawn and attached garage won't be worth a plug nickel in 10 years if the population of the area continues to drop. Who will be around to buy it? When that happens -- which it will, if nothing is done -- it won't matter that your address label reads "Amherst" instead of "Buffalo."

The boat will have sunk, with everybody aboard. It won't much matter what deck you were standing on when it went down.

Two: Go After Big Game

The Zoning Board of Appeals granted two applications to the metals processing division of Curtiss-Wright Corporation, which will permit the immediate start of a $10 million expansion program at its Northland-Grider plant. The press would be one of the world's largest.

-- Buffalo News, June 12, 1952

The chances of Boeing or Microsoft or Warner Brothers deciding to locate their headquarters in Buffalo are, admittedly, pretty small.

But the chances are zero if we never ask them. Think big.

We need to go after the hottest corporate game, asking major companies to come here -- offering them incentives, and selling them on what a great region we have. We need to pester these companies like fire ants until they agree to give our region a look-see. Beg them, if need be, or send chicken wing bribes. Give them what they want. Just get them here. We need to be aggressive in ways we never have before.

When Seattle-based Boeing was looking to relocate last year, cities like Chicago, Denver and Dallas were in there pitching. Chicago won. Buffalo made a bid, albeit a small-scale and unsuccessful one. It was a good start, but now we need to turn up the heat.

The University at Buffalo's bioinformatics center, when it gets built, fits in here. We can say to big companies: See? We're doing exciting things here. And we want you. So come to a place where you can make a difference.

Three: Exploit Toronto

To learn the latest highway and industrial techniques, 44 professional engineers from 30 countries began visiting the Buffalo area on the first lap of a three-week inspection tour of New York and New England.

-- Buffalo News, June 4, 1952

Which cities will do well in a 21st-century economy built on knowledge and information rather than grain and steel? The ones that are global.

New York City will do fine. So will Boston; Washington, D.C.; Atlanta; and European cities, like London, that are hard-wired into the burgeoning global economy. The new world, experts say, is one where the concept of place is simultaneously important and not important. It can work for cities or work against them. Global cities will be the ones that capitalize on location without being bound by it -- they will be linked to the world, and they will derive economic strength from doing business with everybody.

Toronto is not just poised to succeed in this new economy -- it is already succeeding. Now Buffalo needs to latch onto Toronto's success like a suckerfish on a fast-moving shark.

What can we do? Exploit every aspect of life here for its potential connections to Toronto.

Start with a rail line between Buffalo and Toronto's outer suburbs, just an hour away, says Richard Reinhardt, a former Buffalo economic development expert who now heads Central Atlanta Progress in Georgia.

After that, he says, we should: Market Buffalo-area colleges and universities heavily in Canada. Swap faculty between UB and the University of Toronto. Expand media coverage of Canada and Toronto to the point that residents on both sides of the border start to THINK of the binational region as one region. Force elected leaders here -- Mayor Masiello, County Executive Giambra, and so on -- to drive to Toronto each week, to seek out opportunities for Buffalo. Bring their officials here for the same reason. Realize that our economic future will depend on how we exploit our proximity to Toronto as it becomes a worldwide leader in the new economy.

"In Buffalo, people act as if it's 1901 just before McKinley was shot, when Buffalo was the ninth-largest city in the U.S.," says Reinhardt. "It's not anymore. The region is more important in driving the city than vice versa."

Because even if the suckerfish only gets to eat the scraps the shark leaves behind, it's still a lot more than the fish has been getting.

Four: Dismantle the Political Machine

The Common Council spent 20 minutes Tuesday respectfully participating in a "Know Your America" ceremony, and then took the next 4 hours and 25 minutes in a legislative donnybrook.-- Buffalo News, June 11, 1952

Things haven't changed much.

To see the problem that is Buffalo politics in concrete terms, take an elevator ride in City Hall. Stop at the 13th floor, get out, and walk around. You're seeing a slice of Buffalo that hasn't changed one bit in decades, except to get bigger and more bloated.

Those dark, closet-like little rooms you see sitting empty? That's where Common Council members used to work, decades ago, when their positions were part-time jobs -- the way they were meant to be. Now, check out the offices that today's Council members occupy. A far cry, isn't it?

City Hall -- a downright enormous building -- is still chock-full of staff members and offices, the same way it was when the city was at its population peak in the 1950s. The city has shrunk by half, but you'd never know it from the bureaucracy. Buffalo City Hall is a beautiful, 28-story metaphor for what is wrong with politics around here.

Who in local politics should be blamed for Buffalo's decline? The better question is, who shouldn't be?

The Common Council is at fault. Mayor Masiello, a nice guy with limited vision, is at fault. Council President James W. Pitts, in office for 25 years while the city has shriveled, is at fault. Bickering county legislators are at fault. State lawmakers who are merely useless mouthpieces are at fault. Steve Pigeon is at fault. The mindless political hacks who work for the two major parties are equally at fault, because they keep the machine well-oiled and running. It's their fault there are never any new faces, or new ideas, to elect. And you're at fault, too, for voting for the same politicians year after year, or even worse, not voting at all.

"The city has been in crisis virtually every year since 1969. That kind of wears on you after a while," says Rosenow, the former Buffalo planner now in Reno. "How can a city be in crisis for 33 years? People don't believe me when I tell them that."

The reason for the crisis is the machine that perpetuates politics in the Buffalo Niagara region. If that doesn't change, nothing else will.

Five: Fill the City With Immigrants and Refugees

Permanent residential status in this country was a step nearer to reality today for Alexander Wieczorek, 927 Fillmore Ave. Formerly a colonel in the Polish Army, Mr. Wieczorek entered the U.S. as a visitor. Permanent residence is authorized when the individual would be placed in danger if forced to return to their country of origin.

-- Buffalo News, June 6, 1952

Let's get back to our roots.

Buffalo was built by European immigrants, who flooded this country and this city in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They were eager to start anew. They made Buffalo grow. They made it strong.

Let's do it again with today's immigrants.

The cities that have grown over the past decade -- particularly those in the South and West -- are those that have seen an influx of immigrants. Tens of thousands of new immigrants added to the population in places like Phoenix and San Diego, or even up North in places like Boston and Minneapolis. Meanwhile, Buffalo's recent track record has been woeful in comparison.

Each year on their way to Canada, thousands of refugees pass through Buffalo and the Niagara Frontier -- a major port of entry into the United States. Few stay. There's not much here to keep them.

But why not make them want to stay? Why not make Buffalo the place where refugees seek asylum? Welcome them.

The cost of living is low here. Many of Buffalo's more recent arrivals are homeowners and are busy fixing up neighborhoods on the East and West sides. Sure, the winter weather may not be what most of them are used to. But the pace here is slower, and often more agreeable than life in major metropolitan areas.

That's the city's appeal to Minh Tran.

Tran and his family cast off from Vietnam in 1979 in a tiny sailboat, spending nearly two months on the South China Sea before making it to a refugee camp in Hong Kong. Now he has a house on Buffalo's West Side, helps run the family's store, and works as a case worker for the International Institute where he's helped hundreds of other Vietnamese refugees settle in Buffalo.

"For me, Buffalo is very good," Tran says. "I know many companies are moving out, but for many immigrants, they like Buffalo better than other places because Buffalo is cheap. If you get a job for $5-, $6-, $7-an-hour you can live on that."

Granted, a city struggling to keep afloat financially doesn't have the funds to lure people from overseas, much less help them get on their feet when they're here. And while an influx of new immigrants isn't going to create jobs, they do provide an energetic, hard-working labor force that companies can't ignore.

Think about it.

Six: City County Hall?

A busy summer and fall for Buffalo's commercial grain elevators was forecast today, as it became apparent that bumper wheat crops will be harvested this year in the Southwest, Midwest and Northwest.

-- Buffalo News, June 11, 1952

City Hall is too big for Buffalo the way it is now, and it's too pretty to let go. What to do? Turn it into the Metro Buffalo municipal building, and make it the home base for both city and county operations.

That would:

Force city and county officials to actually talk to each other, when they meet in the elevators and at the snack bar. How's that for radical thinking?

Broadcast loud and clear to the rest of the world that Buffalo is committed to change -- to doing things differently, and in a dramatic way.

Save money by housing our two largest government operations in one building.

Plus, Joel Giambra could auction off the Rath Building and use the money to buy Tony Masiello a really nice housewarming present -- for going along with the idea.

Seven: Invest in the Core

The Council's finance committee deferred action for a month on what the city's waterfront should be used for, and suggested a meeting of all interested parties during that time.

"We hope to inspire in someone the vision of a Buffalo harbor such as they have in Milwaukee, Chicago, and other places," said Richard H. Templeton, port division director.

-- The Buffalo News, June 3, 1952

Every public dollar spent here should be spent in the City of Buffalo, until the city is strong again. For as long as it takes.

The collective gasp you hear is the sound of cities like Tonawanda and Lackawanna recoiling in horror, and the cry of frustration among residents in far-flung suburbs like Lancaster who want to know why the state isn't expanding their commuting roads now.

That's not the way to save the city. And saving the city is the same thing as strengthening the suburbs. So, from now on, every spare public dollar -- for every pork project, capital expense or one-shot spending item -- in state, federal and, yes, even county money should go into improving Buffalo in the most basic ways possible.

That means: Fixing the city's roads and bridges. Expanding the light-rail system or getting rid of it altogether. Investing heavily in city neighborhoods, from Elmwood to Niagara Street to North Buffalo to the East Side. Making small businesses and start-ups in the city a priority, especially those run by members of minority communities. Turning the Buffalo Public Schools into the premier educational system in upstate New York. That last one is the most important, so we'll repeat it: Turning the Buffalo Public Schools into the premier educational system in upstate New York.

Doesn't sound much like the Gospel of the Silver Bullet that's been preached in Buffalo for so long, does it?

That's exactly the point. We're talking basic services, not fancy projects that never get built -- or piffle out into nothingness when they do. We're talking, plainly and simply, about making Buffalo the best place to live and work in the region.

"This is not about charity. It's not about pity. It's about hard-line economics," says Bruce Katz at the Brookings Institution, where he is director of the Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy. "These are serious interventions. This is not, 'Let's build a stadium and people will come.' Places like Buffalo should be reinvesting in the core."

Every time public money pays to widen a road in the suburbs or in rural areas, the government is subsidizing sprawl. Adding infrastructure where it wasn't before -- public water and sewer lines in outlying areas, better roads, and so on -- is the surefire way to guarantee that subdivisions will follow. And every time another subdivision springs up on farmland, Buffalo takes a body blow.

Basics like good schools, safe streets and quality services are still the best way to attract people to live in a city. It doesn't take a fancy degree to know that. A city that excels in these areas will attract new people from other places. It will attract suburban and rural residents who want to give the city a try -- who want to live in such a great, busy, lively place -- but who have been held back by fears of bad schools, bad housing, and high crime rates.

If we focus on the things that people -- just average residents -- want, the problem of declining population in the city will take care of itself.

Eight: Talk Ourselves Up

Members of the Main Street Association Inc. were urged to join with all Buffalonians in an "area thinking effort" to "publicize the greatness of the Niagara Frontier."

...efforts should be made by all Niagara Frontier residents to acquaint themselves with the economic, industrial, and commercial greatness of the Frontier, and to tell the world about it."-- Buffalo News, June 12, 1952

We couldn't agree more. Great once before; great again. It can happen.

Charity Vogel is a writer whose grandparents ran a corner tavern for many years on the East Side. Jay Rey is writer who spent his early childhood on the East Side.

Their e-mail addresses are cvogel@buffnews.com and jrey@buffnews.com.

EAST SIDE
Activists spur demolition of run-down houses near school
By PHIL FAIRBANKS
News Staff Reporter
2/9/2005

Sometimes, you can fight City Hall.

East Side activists spent weeks trying to push and prod the city into tearing down two vacant, run-down houses next to one of Buffalo's newly renovated public schools.

They wondered why City Hall would spend $9 million on improvements to Emerson Middle School but ignore dilapidated housing directly across Koons Avenue.

City Hall finally responded.

"This is happening because of the good work of the activists in that neighborhood," said Timothy E. Wanamaker, Buffalo's executive director of strategic planning.

Wanamaker, with the blessing of Mayor Anthony M. Masiello, has ordered the houses torn down, hopefully within the week.

On top of that, the city plans to look for other slum housing that may be near schools being renovated as part the 10-year, $1 billion districtwide construction project.

"We have a commitment to take down or rehabilitate homes that are near our newly renovated city schools," Wanamaker said.

For activists, the Koons demolitions came as great news. "This neighborhood has been ignored for too long," said housing activist Jamie Rozek. "Both those houses have been vandalized, one of them has been burned three times and people are squatting inside. It's very unsafe."

Rozek credited Wanamaker with realizing the danger the vacant houses posed to pupils returning to school this month.

Emerson, previously a vocational high school, was gutted and transformed into a bright, modern middle school. The school reopens in a few weeks.

"I'm glad he's working with us," activist Michele Johnson said of Wanamaker. "That's the only way we're going to bring this city back."

News of the demolitions didn't stop Rozek and a handful of other activists from spending their free time Saturday painting over graffiti on the two houses. The ultimate goal is to build a community garden where the two houses now stand.

"We want them to look the best they can until they come down," Rozek said. "And once the houses come down, it'll be a slap in the face to the vandals who did this."

Johnson, who doubles as a neighborhood liaison to Buffalo's housing court, said activists also plan to go after the California couple who bought one of the houses and allowed it to decay.

As a result, the court has issued a warrant for their arrest.

e-mail: pfairbanks@buffnews.com

WESTERN NEW YORK 'LEADERS' SET COURSE FOR REGION'S DESTRUCTION

ANALYSIS by David Staba

Erie County's government implodes in spectacularly pathetic fashion.

More than two years after the Seneca Niagara Casino opened, Niagara Falls still waits for the first shovel in the ground not paid for with state money.

An accountability-free authority that's supposed to concern itself with making sure the buses and trains run on time, and that airplanes actually land at both airports under its control, instead unveils grandiose plans for Buffalo's waterfront -- which rely entirely upon the nation's most heavily burdened taxpayers coughing up more than a quarter-billion dollars.

Back in Niagara Falls, the current occupants of City Hall can afford to create jobs for their friends and loved ones, but not fund the libraries under their control.

And voters in Buffalo and Erie County brace for an election season centered around a flawed field of mayoral candidates and an incredibly vague merger plan that not even its proponents seem able, or willing, to explain.

As a good friend and former editor at the Niagara Gazette used to ponder when such characteristic foolishness ensued -- "How did this happen?"

A better question might be, "What took so long?"

If there's any good to come from the ongoing collapse of Erie County Executive Joel Giambra's fiscal house of cards, it's that harsh light will finally shine on the rodentia infesting the halls of government and quasi-public boardrooms of Western New York.

And the latter are in even greater need of fumigating. The region's self-proclaimed "business advocacy" organization, the Buffalo Niagara Partnership, is the common thread connecting Giambra, Buffalo Mayor Tony Masiello, the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority's fantasy of building a new downtown Buffalo on the taxpayer dime while continuing to neglect Niagara Falls International Airport, and the gum-and-string governmental merger plan.

The Partnership backed Masiello in each of his first three mayoral campaigns, helping build a war chest that scared off any serious opposition in 1997 and 2001. It also gave the region Giambra, a Democrat-turned-Republican and an alleged reformer whose primary previous experience was in helping make sure business continued exactly as usual in Buffalo's City Hall for the better part of two decades.

Word has it that the self-important organization led by Andrew Rudnick plans to back state Sen. Byron Brown in this year's mayoral race, but the Partnership's prior generosity to Masiello helped him build a war chest of more than a $1 million for an increasingly likely re-election bid.

Assemblyman Sam Hoyt proved himself the most sensible mayoral hopeful last week when he pulled out of the race. In addition to the economic problems that have dogged the city for decades, the eventual survivor will have to operate under the emasculating eye of Buffalo's state-imposed control board. That body is headed by -- you guessed it -- another member of the Partnership board, Brian Lipke of Gibraltar Steel.

Not that the Partnership much cares who holds what office, as long as they go along with the program. That, of course, entails making sure members of the Partnership get as much free stuff as possible.

The breathlessly announced plans for the dormant stretch of waterfront the NFTA has squatted on for nearly half a century follow the Partnership playbook perfectly.

Former Carborundum Corp. President Luiz Kahl heads the NFTA, while also serving as president of The Vector Group, a private investment group based in Williamsville. He also serves on the Partnership's board of directors.

Other members include NOCO patriarch Reginald Newman, whom Kahl -- his longtime friend and sometime business partner -- guaranteed a monopoly on jet fuel and cargo handling at Buffalo-Niagara International Airport while making sure its poor cousin in Niagara Falls provided no competition, and Carl Montante, managing director of Uniland Development Corp.

Last month, to the surprise of absolutely no one, Uniland's $750 million vision for housing, retail, office and hotel space and, you guessed it, a convention center was chosen by Kahl's NFTA.

Uniland's sketches of its proposed mini-city look nice enough -- if you like the cookie-cutter red-brick office parks that the company has built throughout Amherst and other suburbs, sterilized cubicle farms that sucked thousands of jobs and much of the life out of Buffalo's existing downtown.

The notion that a city government that needed the imposition of a control board nearly two years ago just to remain solvent, a county government whose leader claims it can't afford to keep plowing or patrolling its streets and a state government that can't pass a budget on time somehow are going to come up with $300 million to give to Uniland isn't just laughable. It's shameful.

Then again, the Partnership's leaders had their capacity for shame surgically removed long ago. When Adelphia's financial scandal broke in 2002, the Partnership propped up one if its own, Mark Hamister, as the white knight riding in to save the Buffalo Sabres, then owned by the cable-television company.

Problem was, Hamister didn't actually want to spend much of his own money. His purchase offer hinged entirely on his demand for about $40 million in public money, and collapsed quickly after the public found out.

It's clear from the timing of both the Uniland fantasy and the cobbled-together merger plan that would combine the City of Buffalo and County of Erie, but leave the scores of surrounding towns and villages intact, that the Partnership plans to use the utter disgust its minions have already generated to its advantage.

"People are so mad right now, they'll go for anything that even sounds like reform, or something new," said one Buffalo business owner.

One of the Partnership's greatest allies, the Buffalo News, appears poised to help sell its latest schemes, just as the region's largest daily newspaper has played cheerleader to every other bill of goods sold by the exclusive group of country-clubbers and kitchen-cabineteers.

Despite the push by proponents to get the merger plan on the ballot in November, the News has yet to offer any substantive look at its merits, or flaws. Instead, the paper has channeled its resources into a self-laudatory and self-indulgent bit of navel-gazing entitled "Why Not Buffalo?"

Sporting a bizarre hood ornament of a logo and a rather desperate-sounding title, the promised year-long series blames the area's woes on the scapegoat favored by politicians and business-advocacy groups alike -- you.

"Lose the attitude," reads an introductory story in the newspaper's First Sunday insert, a bit of preachiness that embodies the blame-the-victim mentality favored by the local elite and its media mouthpiece.

"You know the one -- the we-can't-get-out-of-our-own-way, we-can't-get-anything-done, Buffalo-is-doomed attitude that feeds the beast of economic and cultural stagnation that could devour this city. If we let it.

"Lose it. Now."

Aha! So that's the problem. It's not the politicians who act as if public money and property are theirs to give -- or take -- or the backroom dealers who put them in power and keep them there. It's those of us who spend our waking hours trying to pay bills, keep a job or run a business and raise a family without the benefit of professional domestic help who brought this upon ourselves.

What a relief. And here we thought it was the people who discuss how best to divvy up our money, while they enjoy leisurely lunches at the Buffalo Club.

Thankfully, though, the News is going to save not just Buffalo, but the entire area.

"Over the next 12 months, the newspaper will make this effort a top priority, by producing a series of stories that will define our region's central problems in new and innovative ways," read yet another introductory story. "Better yet: These stories will offer real solutions for change."

Thank goodness. "Real solutions" from an institution that backed just about every development that it now pours gallons of ink into bitching about -- from building the new University at Buffalo campus in the suburbs in the 1960s to the NFTA's infamous train to nowhere to an imbecilic plan for expanding the Peace Bridge that created a seemingly endless stalemate. Oh, and let's not forget that the News has repeatedly endorsed both Giambra and Masiello.

It's a safe bet that those "real solutions" will include ideas just as bright as the Uniland proposal, which centers on building a 300,000-square-foot convention center. This, even though a study released last month by the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institute shows that demand for such facilities is steadily plunging, with even places with much more to offer conventioneers -- like New York, Chicago and Atlanta -- desperately trying to attract events by giving away space.

Such support from the region's dominant media outlet emboldens our "leaders," elected and otherwise, to advance their agendas without fear of second-guessing or accountability. In November, Giambra gambled that he could grab another sales-tax penny to hoard in the county coffers -- which he's been busy depleting for five years -- by threatening the public with a draconian "red" budget.

No snowplowing or sheriff's patrols, Giambra warned gloomily. No libraries -- a tempting target for politicos in both Niagara Falls and Buffalo -- or zoo for the kids.

Just one problem there. He couldn't even get the members of his adopted party to back his power play. Instead, he had to rely on his old party to come through with enough votes for a two-thirds majority. And with that sort of leverage there for the taking, opportunist extraordinaire Al DeBenedetti, the lone city legislator to ultimately oppose the penny increase, snatched it.

Forget that DeBenedetti used to parcel out the same patronage jobs he now rails against under former County Executive Dennis Gorski, or that the self-appointed protector of the citizenry couldn't find the time to pay his own property taxes until learning the story was about to break.

And forget that the whole "red budget-green budget" charade was meant to blame Albany for rising Medicaid costs. After weeks of repeating Giambra's finger-pointing, even the News finally pointed out that the increase in the Medicaid tab accounts for only a fraction of the money pit Giambra himself dug by doling out a 30-percent tax cut without even trying to slash spending by a similar amount.

That, of course, would have meant trimming a list of patronage hires that makes Niagara Falls Mayor Vincenzo V. Anello's Friends and Family Plan look downright austere by comparison, or saying "no" occasionally when Giambra's pals at the Partnership came around looking to dip their beaks in the government trough.

Instead, Giambra thought he could walk his political high-wire indefinitely. At least until last Friday, when DeBenedetti gave it a good twang.

The legislator's second flip-flop in less than a week triggered a rebellion among Giambra's immediate underlings, with the sheriff, comptroller, district attorney and county clerk each either filing or threatening lawsuits in an attempt to avert the thousands of layoffs promised by Giambra if he couldn't get that extra penny.

Maybe, just maybe, the self-proclaimed leaders -- in government, business and the media -- who have made Western New York what it is today will watch Giambra's self-immolation. And realize that they, and not the people they supposedly serve, are the ones in need of an attitude adjustment.

David Staba is the sports editor of the Niagara Falls Reporter. He welcomes e-mail at dstaba13@aol.com.

• School House Project - 3/25/05
• Vacancy and Decline - 10/12/05
  
• 23,000 and still counting - 10/14/05

• The National Vacant Properties Campaign
• Knowledgeplex
• Urban Futures
• What happened to Detroit?
  

Planning Board OKs project on artist lofts
By SHARON LINSTEDT
News Staff Reporter
2/6/2005

Efforts to convert a former printing plant on Main Street in Buffalo to artist lofts have cleared the first hurdle.

The Buffalo Planning Board has approved a preliminary blueprint to turn the Breitweiser Printing building at 1219 Main St. into the Sarabeth Artist Lofts.

Initially, 60 living/working units for local artists will be constructed by overhauling the industrial building and constructing a cluster of new residential buildings behind it.

Will Law of Artspace Projects of Minnesota, which is overseeing the $16 million project, said the goal is to bring the circa 1915 building back to its "original glory" with the clean-lined, modern units juxtaposed behind it.

"We plan to re-establish the main entrance, fronting Main Street, with a first-floor storefront that leads into a gallery. There'll be a lot of glass at the front and back that will let you look straight through the building to the courtyard formed by the new units," Law said.

"We think it will provide a view that reflects the past but speaks to the future."

The existing structure will house 36 units, with the remaining 24 in six new four-unit structures. The lofts will range in size from 900-square-foot efficiencies to 1,800-square-foot, three-bedroom apartments. The courtyard area between the structures will provide common space where the artists-in-residence can work, perform and garden. The first floor will offer space for a gallery, local arts organizations and arts-related businesses.

Law, whose group has overseen nearly two dozen similar projects around the country, said interest in the combination studio/residential units has been better than expected.

"We knew Buffalo has a strong, emerging arts community, but the response to this project is even stronger than we expected. So we are planning for 60 units instead of the original 50," Law said.

The expansion also bumps the expected price tag from $12 million to $16 million.

"What started off as an arts building is becoming an arts village," said Mayor Anthony M. Masiello, who invited Artspace to consider Buffalo for one of its developments. "We have so many talented and creative people in this city, and this development will give them a place to grow their art and flourish."

As the project starts to gel, work is continuing on critical funding applications. The project team has until the end of the month to submit a New York State Unified Application, which will put it into consideration for several million dollars in tax credits, grants and low interest loans.

The city has already pledged $450,000, while $250,000 in federal funds has been earmarked for the project. If the necessary funding comes through, construction will start late this year, with the first residents taking occupancy in early 2007.

Artspace has retained two Buffalo firms, Hamilton Houston Lownie Architects and Savarino Construction Services, to act as architect and construction manager for the project.

A community information session is scheduled for 6 p.m. Thursday in Belmont Shelter Corp., 1195 Main St., to provide information about Artspace and the Buffalo project.

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.

• Sold the 600+ acre parcel to Trathen and placed $350K in our pockets
• Placed the property on Perrysburg's tax role - finally
• Allowed the town of Perrysburg to move forward with a necessary water project

Instead in an apparent mix-up in prescribed medications our Common Council voted to oppose the resolution and thereby accomplished the following:

• Exposed the city of Buffalo to various unknown future liabilities including possible demolition costs - we can't even deal with our property in a responsible manner - see the subject of this blog!
  
• Prevented the town of Perrysburg from moving forward with necessary water projects
• Continue to force various state mental health agencies - designated with providing mental health services - to maintain the carrying costs of a closed facility!!!
  

When the facility was first built 90 years ago Buffalo had more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the country. Today we have more people on welfare per capita than anywhere and a lobotomized local government. This is too %#*@ -up and another textbook example of the incompetence that drives people at the rate of 15/day away from Buffalo.

Buffalo Fiscal Control Board member & treasurer H. Carl McCall in his previous life as NYS Comptroller first called attention to the necessity of selling this property in 1994 (Yes it’s the same H. Carl McCall who was Chair of the New York Stock Exchange's Compensation Committee and approved the $140 dollar retirement package for NYSE Wiz, Dick Grasso! Come on Buffalo Bloggers, get it together!!!) That debacle aside, NYS has a very transparent method of selling all sorts of things we bought and paid for and no longer need as people continue to move to other states.

Consult the DSM-IV and call your Council member to see if they are taking the proper medications. Just check in, it's the right thing to do. Save our city!

Sources tell me that the Downtown’s Art-Deco Asylum may have a new course of treatment soon and Franczyck’s insane behavior of coordinating and thwarting this opportunity may be reversed!

Who's running this place? One flew East and one flew West...

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Related Posts: JN Adam Archive

For those of you who are not familiar with this Masten neighborhood bounded by Main/Jefferson & Ferry/Utica, I would like to welcome you and introduce you to a part of Buffalo which is rapidly turning into a nascent arts and educational community. It will be stronger and more vibrant as an arts & educational community for residents and students with the completion of the new "Frank E. Merriweather Jr." library. The anticapted "permanent" move of BAVPA - Buffalo Academy for the Visual & Performing Arts to the site recently vacated by Buffalo Traditional High School and the needed preservation of the Woodlawn Row Houses will make this neighborhood that vital link between the East side and the City's West side. There are so many other Neighborhood "Assets " which will be featured here. Check back on a regular basis.

You’ll see the design work of one of our finest architects, Robert Traynham Coles, slowly emerging at the North-West corner of Jefferson and Utica Avenues. In case you don’t know where that is, here’s the map. Yesterday, while on a walk around the neighborhood I entered the job site and took a series of pics. Crews are working on a regular basis and managed to work right thru the debate surrounding the Erie County “Budget Crisis." In the background you can see a few of the new houses situated on the west side of Welker Street. They were constructed last year.

On my way home I saw this new billboard. I thought you might be interested in the strong positive message being conveyed to the young people here on the corner of Jefferson & Ferry. You probably know where that is because you can see 800 West Ferry less than a mile away…

And here's a picture of the old North Jefferson branch that is being replaced. Cool loft possibilities...

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Artspace Archive • Annals of Neglect • BAVPA • Where is Perrysburg? • Broken Promises...
Writing the City • Woodlawn Row Houses • Tour dé Neglect - 2006

While we slept our anointed leaders, Buffalo's Control Board, played musical chairs. We woke Tuesday morning and found that a seat was created for Brian Lipke, King of the Hill at Gibraltar Industries, as Chairman of the Control Board. He replaces Tom Baker who couldn't muster the intestinal fortitude to negotiate with the unions. Gibraltar is a publicly held company and their shares trade on the NASDAQ under the “ROCK” symbol. The value of a piece of the “ROCK” has tripled in value during the past five years, split last November and closed today down a few points at $22.60/share.

Bruce Jackson doesn't like Brian Lipke because he is white and rich and Kevin Gaughan's friend. Bruce didn't like him when he wasn't quite as rich in 1999 as he served on the Peace Bridge Authority. Come on Bruce, anyone who has a NYS University pension and lives on Rumsey Road is rich by any metric. Just ask 97% of your neighbors in Buffalo. Besides, I'm sure Brian Lipke pays for his own web hosting.

Lipke has demonstrated that he has a solid track record of making fiscally responsible decisons. Let's "grin and bear" it Bruce and hope that Lipke will return some rationality to a process that is mired in closed door meetings.

• Alan at BuffaloPundit....seems to think there is nothing wrong with having a Control Board and annointed officials running the roost.
• Mikey at SkiMickey....thinks is simply sucks
• And Craig Howard at Buffalog...hits it out of the park and is ready for the Bruce Jackson debate!

And you thought it couldn't get any worse...

This afternoon after shoveling snow, I called Perrysburg to speak with Myrton Sprague, the town supervisor. His wife told me that he wasn’t available as he was tending the grape field. I imagine we’ll speak tomorrow.

It occurred to me that the people of Perrysburg are probably much more sane about local government than we are here in the ‘hood. Myrton has been brokering a deal with Trathen as I mentioned last week to sell the 650+ acre JN Adam site in Perrysburg and finally return it to the tax roles. He’s the top politico in Perrysburg and has been doing this on a part-time basis. He grows grapes full time. When I first spoke to him last week he seemed to me the kind of guy who is not afraid to call a spade-a-spade. Reasonable and forward thinking, like any dedicated public servant must be.

Well let’s see if your “Bull-Shit” detector is as finally tuned as Mryton’s. Yesterday at City Hall a representative from NYS who is involved in the deal told David Franczyk:

"We urge you to attend to Buffalo instead of Perrysburg, to Forest Avenue instead of Perrysburg Forest, to Erie County instead of Cattaraugus County,"

Read the rest of the story here in today’s Buffalo News.
Read the rest of the story here in today’s Buffalo News.
Read the rest of the story here in today’s Buffalo News.

David Franzcyk's coordinated counter-punch thwarted the deal last week which would have accomplished numerous objectives – eliminating Buffalo’s future liabilities and satisfying Perrysburg’s needs.

This is just another example of Franzcyk’s counter-intuitive support for policies that negatively impact our “urban core” and city life. He supported a devastating Erie County Dept. of Social Services policy which enabled welfare recipients to receive a two-party rent check and then maybe turn it over to the landlord and he authored "landlord liscening." Support for both of these policies has resulted in negative investment in Polonia and now other parts of the city. They have contributed to allowing an entire class of tenant to destroy apartments with impunity. (Only National Fuel Gas and Niagara Mohawk are able to garnish future welfare grants! Lesson, mess-up one apartment, move on to the next!) Until Kevin Helfer just recently reversed this policy, landlords were the only class of vendor for the county that had to go door-to-door to get paid.

Drive through the Fillmore district, see the scavengers pushing shopping carts full of hot-water heaters and copper plumbing pieces towards the scrap dealers on William Street. They are there right now, taking apart another recently vacated apartment!

Please tell me why 15/day are getting on the bus and voting with their feet. Remember when Ken Kesey and his gang of literary misfits, the Merry Pranksters, left New York chanting, “Either you’re on the bus, or you’re off the bus,” in their drug induced euphoria on their way across country?

Today the logic is the same "We urge you to attend to Buffalo instead of Perrysburg, to Forest Avenue instead of Perrysburg Forest, to Erie County instead of Cattaraugus County."

Saving the trees…the JN Adam site… might be David Franczyk’s solo-trip but something tells me Brian Lipke, brand new Chairman of Buffalo’s Control Board, wants nothing to do with what Franczyk et al. have been doing or where that bus is going. Ask Myrton Sprague. On a cold blustery winter's day he was out prunning his vines.

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Artspace Archive • Annals of Neglect • BAVPA • Where is Perrysburg? • Broken Promises...
Writing the City • Woodlawn Row Houses • Tour dé Neglect - 2006 • faq

Did you miss the irony?

In today’s Buffalo News we learn that Sharon West, Executive Director of BMHA -- Buffalo Municipal Housing Agency and NY’s second largest municipal housing agency, is leaving for Tampa. She stayed just long enough here in Buffalo making $90,000/year to trigger a 54K retirement package! In Tampa she will be the new manager of housing and community development.

She said, "The one thing I wish I could take with me from Buffalo, is the people!" Sharon they are on the way. People are leaving Buffalo at the rate of 15/day! Totally flat and disappointing piece from Deidre Williams at the Buffalo News. Deidre did you miss the $80 million over at Lakeview?

• Richard Kern, local pundit and gadfly - on a bicycle in any weather, swings a double edged sword. He weighs in over at Altpress as part of an open letter to Mayor Masiello.
  

• Kern’s critique is on the mark when he laments how the civil rights movement of the 60’s has become a Civil Rights Bureaucracy and municipal housing has become a Federal Plantation system. Please help me understand why large federal programs administered by HUD should dictate what's right and approriate for our neighborhoods?

• Less than a year ago the Buffalo Preservation Board had a few choice words for the Sharon West legacy!

• James Ostrowski - Local lawyer, libertarian and writer about our shrinking city (Check this out! Ouch!!) ditto's and develops Kern's critique about BMHA's desecration of our urban landscape in this article...

It isn’t enough, apparently, that this agency destroyed many Buffalo neighborhoods, built horrendous housing projects Stalin would have loved, and is a den of waste, corruption, and patronage...

Gillian Brown, has told me on many occasions about the waste and complete lack of oversight at BMHA. He should know. He's their lead counsel. Perhaps he will help reform the agency and do something more than "remodel and demo" now that Sharon West has flown the coop. He's got a long way to go with over 1000 vacancies Sharon leaves behind.

Buffalo News misses the mark again in their continuing development of "Loserville Journalism." I'm so confused. Didn't Warren Buffet just issue a new year's resolution? Maybe we'll hear something from Bruce Jackson over at Buffalo Report. Wonder if Bruce has read James Ostrowski's book?

Excellent piece about Sam Hoyt, today Bruce.

Sharon, glad to see you go. Bloggers in Tampa.....hello!

When I think of this neighborhood and the larger Main/Jefferson -- Ferry/Utica neighborhood here in Masten I think of just how dynamic this nascent arts and educational community will be with BAVPA -- Buffalo Academy for the Visual & Performing Arts moving to this permanent location. The Apollo, African-American Cultural Center, the new Robert Coles inspired library and Artspace and Canisus College a few blocks away. Excellent synergy and opportunities for students, residents and for people of course who live in other areas. It's really cool walking over to the African-American Cultural Center three blocks away for dance and theatrical performance. A short walk to Main Street and on to the West side.

When I talk about this 25 block neighborhood of Masten many people are recommending that I read Jane Jacobs work, The Death & Life of Great American Cities (1961). Hank Bromley is the latest. He sent me a transcript of his interview with Jane Jacobs (July 2000).

In September 2000, James Howard Kunstler interviewed Jane Jacobs. The text of that interview appeard in Metropolis Magazine (May 2001). I've mentioned Metropolis Magazine already and the piece they had about Ani & Scot and the Asbury church over on Delaware a few weeks ago, here. Finally, Jane appeared in The New Yorker last May.

You won't want to miss Kunstler's Cluster Fuck Nation Chronicles.

Meanwhile, take a look at two houses on Woodlawn Avenue one block away from the now abandoned Buffalo Traditional High School site and the vacant city-owned "local-landmark" which is the primary objective of this blog and preservation initiative. Look closely at the driveway. It's the only heated driveway I know in the city! 3 degrees today and warm to the touch!

click image to enlarge

When you compare the sidewalks, would someone tell me who's shoveling the sidewalks in front of city owned property? I mowed the grass last summer.

Just google searched and ordered a "buy it now" copy of Death and Life of Great American Cities on Ebay for $3.99.

The Woodlawn Row Houses Preservation Initiative should probably best be seen with in a larger context of the many positive developments here in this Masten neighborhood. The new Robert Coles inspired library and dedicated examples of positive home ownership are only two of these developments.

Please sign the petition. It's the first step in creating awareness that will lead to action and eventually to long term positive results. and the preservation of this "local-landmark."

Your comments are welcome...

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Way off Topic...

Just returned from a snowy visit to Borders where I picked up Jonathan Lowy’s latest book, The Temple of Music. I googled Lowy and turned up this from the Randomhouse review. Click here for the full review.

• America is starkly divided between the haves and the have-nots. A Republican president seeks reelection in the afterglow of a war many view as unnecessary and imperialisttic. He is bankrolled by millionaires, with every step of his career orchestrated by a political mastermind. Religious extremists crusade against the nation’s moral collapse. Terrorists plot the assassination of leaders around the world. And a lonely, disturbed revolutionary stalks the President. . . .It all happened. One hundred years ago. It all comes to life in The Temple of Music.

If you are reading Lowy’s book and would like your review posted here, please let me know. I would encourage Buffalo based people to draw on their knowledge of the time and events especially as it relates to the unfolding history of Buffalo, NY. Let me know.

Jonathan Lowy will be speaking & signing his book
The Temple of Music
Thursday February 3^rd at 7pm.
Border’s - Galleria
685-2844

And of course the last time an Amercian president visited our temple of music, Kleinhans Music Hall, last April, there were only protests. No shots were fired.

I talked with Tom Trathen at length Friday afternoon about various issues relating to “the deal,” local government and the competitiveness of our WNY economy. Did you know the Trathen Group had a booth at the Convention Center in Buffalo during the World University Games in 1993? Reasonable guy loves Buffalo….and wonders about all the “clear-cutting” that’s gone on over in the Fillmore District. I tried to explain to him how well intended HUD and BMHA have been here in Buffalo. He didn't buy it...

Get the full story beginning with either of the part 1's...
...don't miss the pictures!

The current stuff... Part 1, 2 , 3 & 3+
The early Buffalo history...Part 1 & Part 2
cool pictures, too

Other JN Adam related items which happened Friday…

• Don Esmonde cited a Brookings Institute report in his Friday column correlating the size of city government with economic prosperity. I think the folks in Perrysburg understand this.
  

• Council member Davis – Chair of finance committee – called Friday afternoon and assured me that the matter has been placed on the agenda for next Tuesday 1/25 for reconsideration.

• And an aid to Common Council President David Franczyk called this afternoon. He told me he had just found a copy of the deed over at the historical society which he has just dusted off. It clearly shows, according to him, that the JN Adam site belongs to the city of Buffalo. He was excited and thought the whole place would make a great city park . I think he means county park.

• David Franczyk told me on the phone I should stop writing about things I don’t know anything about. I think he was referring to the Trathen deal and not the Woodlawn Row Houses, though I’m not sure as he didn’t want to go into specifics.

Something tells me that if we really are the "city of Good Neighbors" and do the right thing Tom Trathen might invite city residents to the site. Picnics, hiking or xc-skiing….

If no one really knew that the JN Adam site belonged to the city of Buffalo all these years and that it might be handed back to us – makes you wonder what how many other "surprises" might be lurking slightly off-stage ready to emerge from behind the curtains.. Does anyone really know?

I mean I can understand that the city might misplace a deed for a house here in the ‘hood and then rush to correct the matter. Small things, you know. Yet the issues here is 650+ acre site in Perrysburg and dozens of very large buildings. See the pictures.

No planning and a complete lack of focus on core issues. My Economics students at Turner-Carroll did a better job of paying attention to their interests than our elected officials have done here in Buffalo with ours.

Nice piece by Brett Lefford from the Trathen Group in today’s Buffett News.

Click to enlarge

The African-American Cultural Center is located at 350 Masten Avenue, two blocks away from the recently abandoned Buffalo Traditional High School. The center is also the home of the Paul Robeson Theatre. The center was established in 1958 and is the first black cultural institution established here in WNY.

Check out the website for the African-American Cultural Center.

Imagine the possibilities for students and residents collaborating and working with the dynamic arts and educational programs here in this corner of Masten. The neighborhood Main/Jefferson – Ferry/Utica has an emerging synergy. The Apollo Theater around the corner on Jefferson the new Robert Coles inspired public library, Artspace a few block away on Main. The school site formerly occupied by Buffalo Traditional High School will make an exciting permanent home for BAVPA – Buffalo Academy for the Visual and Performing Arts under the new school re-organization program.

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I’ve been ranting and raving about vacant houses in the neighborhood for sometime. I’ve documented and photographed all the boarded and empty houses in this 25 block Masten neighborhood. I’ve even created a special list of “soon to be vacant” houses. Not all vacant houses are demo candidates. Many of these houses appear to be in reasonably good structural condition and for many reasons are worth keeping as part of the streetscape and neighborhood.

This is what the same house looked like in July, 2004 and this is what the smaller brown cottage looked like in August, 2004.

These are two of the dozens of empty and vacant house in this 25 block neighborhood of Masten between Main/Jefferson – Ferry/Utica which would make excellent homes for a small family, artists or single folks. The combined city/county taxes here are less than $600/year. I’d assume that some of the mechanical systems need to be up-dated or replaced and then there are all costs associated with maintenance and cosmetic issues. The neighborhood is re-bounding with many recently renovated and new homes. I wrote about this recently. Here some examples of new and renovated houses in this 25 block neighborhood. (Just scroll down in the post.)

I’ve lived in this neighborhood for 8 years. If you are interested in taking a closer look at either of these houses, please let me know. I can work with you and contact the owner. I have no financial interest here other than how their prospective sale may contribute to the overall quality of life here in the ‘hood. Based on recent sale numbers you are probably looking at a sale price of 3-8K!!! Perhaps less.

Imagine either one of these houses with a three-color paint job and freshly painted detail and a little bit of landscaping. E-mail me if you are interested in a neighborhood walk around.

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• Denying a legitimate sale such as this is a clear sign that the city does not desire to cooperate with the state and that the state should strongly reconsider its future investment in Buffalo's needed turnaround. NYS Senator, Dale Volker

• The city would have solid legal ground to sue state economic development officials for improperly maintaining many buildings on the site. - Council President David Franczyk