Riding Through Buffalo

http://www.citylab.com/housing/2014/06/riding-through-poor-neighborhoods-with-new-urbanists/372399

Tour de Neglect poster
Buffalo, New York
fixbuffalo.blogspot.com

Hello Everyone:

Once again, yours truly needed to clean out the drop box folder.  Today my housekeeping efforts yielded a small treasure written by Mark Byrnes for City Lab titled "Riding Through Poor Neighborhoods With New Urbanists."  The article looks at the "Tour de Neglect," an event staged by the Congress of New Urbanism in June 2014 in Buffalo, New York.  The purpose of the tour was to "inspire feelings of civic duty and moral outrage," yet at the same time may have also exposed an inherent weakness in the New Urbanist philosophy. About seventy-five people, including Mr. Byrnes, participated in the event held in Buffalo.  The guided tour led riders through some of the city's most economically depressed areas and the predominantly African-American East Side, where census data has shown an alarming 89% drop in demographics since 1950.

Sacred Heart Church
viewsofbuffalo.blogspot.com

The first stop on the ride was a shuttered Catholic church just minutes from downtown.  At the church, the riders were handed a flier with a list of "five things to think about" during the tour.  The first bullet point declared:

The East Side is not a zoo.

-These are neighborhoods where people live their lives every day.  These residents are people just like you, with full lives and dreams of their own.
-Do not romanticize or demonize what you see
-Do not treat them as lab rats to be observed for research.

This sounds like something yours truly would write.  Kudos to the author of this flier. A mystery woman quietly circulated among the participants, passing out the two-page manifesto to self-proclaimed New Urbanists before disappearing.

Tour participants
buffalo.com

Mark Byrnes observes,

After a half-week of CNU sessions that spoke to the aesthetic values of cities (it was, after all, a large gathering of mostly planners and architects) more often than the poverty and inequality they too often host, there was reason to worry the tour would quickly unravel into an uncomfortable two hours of professionals and students marveling over the potential and authenticity of their surroundings.

Fortunately, this did not happen.

Leading the two hour tour was activist and blogger David Torke, a resident of the East Side who has been documenting it decline for decades.  Mr. Torke is currently involved with CNU NextGen, a a young professionals group who stage unsanctioned events for CNU attendees.  In a nod to the group, CNU added NextGen events to the official agenda, overriding host committee approval.  The Tour de Neglect was a rare opportunity for the participants to get an up close look at the other side of Main Street.  David Torke states, "Otherwise the East Side-the elephant in the room here in Buffalo-would have been swept under the rug."

Atlas Johnson in front of St. Ann's Church
David Torke, fixBuffalo
citylab.com

Coincidently Atlas Johnson, a local resident, was riding by the group's first stop at St. Ann's Church.  Mr. Johnson decided, the spur of the moment, to join the group nearly taking over tour guide duties.  He shared his personal experiences and memories of the church before moving on to another shuttered church. Without fanfare, the route down Emslie Street took the tour by a local celebrity, developer Rocco Termini first attempts at construction, "...a blighted, vinyl-sided apartment building built for a veterans housing non-profit before eventually sold to an overseas investor."  Before this attempt at a construction project, Mr. Termini was the face of downtown and North Buffalo's luxurious New Urbanist inspired developments.  The developer got his start building more modest sized homes on the East Side, which unfortunately have not aged well.  Earlier in 2014, Mr. Termini publicly wished Buffalo had "Manhattan Rents."

Uncle Sam's Army Supply
David Torke, fixBuffalo
thecurrentplus.com

Traveling south, the riders arrived at Larkinville, an inner-city business district filled with eclectic public spaces and high-end offices located inside former industrial buildings.  Mr. Byrnes reports, "In front of a massive old warehouse in rough shape but anchored by a popular Army Supply store, city planner Chris Hawley shared the story of old Buffalo's blue collar economic might."  The ruins of that might are not too hard to see in what was previously know as "the Hydraulics." Currently, Larkinville is a magnet for white collar jobs, most of whom have relocated from the suburbs.

Yet, as Larkinville continues to evolve, it is taking on the appearance of the kind of warehouse districts found in Seattle or Pittsburgh, while failing to add new housing.  Just as the neighborhood gained popularity, the census tract it is located on showed a demographic loss of ten percent between 2000 and 2010.  The plethora of surface parking and proximity to the highway make the area more attractive to employers than residential developers.

More riders on the Tour de Neglect
David Torke, fixBuffalo
citylab.com

The riders made their way to the stunning Central Terminal, a former train station that has been the beneficiary of slow but impressive stabilization efforts by a local non-profit group.  The group arrived at a nearby urban farm operated successfully by a husband wife team since 2009 on formerly vacant lot.  Here, Messrs Hawley and Torke took the opportunity to remind the tour group that the city's Green Code, once implemented, will make it easier to replicate similar success.

On the way to the restored Hotel Lafayette in downtown Buffalo, Mr. Termini's crowning achievement, the tour group returned to the vision of Buffalo the host committee wanted everyone to see.  It was here that Buffalo News art critic Colin Dabkowski took the opportunity to question CNU's priorities during the meeting.  In an open letter to CNU, Mr. Dabkowski suggested that "the movement often appears regressive and unwilling to shout as loudly for equality as it does for walkability."

Heading toward the Central Terminal from Larkinville
David Torke, fixBuffalo
citylab.com

Quoting Colin Dabkowski:

While there was some talk about developing mixed-income neighborhoods...neither the New Urbanist manifestos not anything I heard during the conference proposed a convincing or coherent strategy for accomplishing that on a grand scale...we don't need to rebuild a traditional city, a traditional neighborhood or a traditional way of life.  What we desperately need is to create a new one.

Agreed, too often the New Urbanist residential developments overlook the very real needs of a community in favor of (re)creating something that resembles the work of Disney imagineers.

Buffalo has expended a good deal of energy on recreating its past and has been let down by too many postwar bad planning decisions.  Thus, it is quite understandable that the New Urbanist philosophy would be appealing.  However for all of the profitability in developing neighborhoods with quaint architecture, walkability, and transit access, the end result has turned basic neighborhood amenities into selling points for luxury housing.

Rider group picture
viewsofbuffalo.blogspot.com

An economically depressed city like Buffalo there is a growing concern some neighborhoods will wind up dependent on trickle-down renewal, leaving issues of inequality and poverty unaddressed "...while each preservation effort and historically sensitive building create the illusion of a city being fixed."  The West Side's growing number of art galleries, hip restaurants, soaring rents, and construction boom-all supposed signifiers of progress in Buffalo-are readily apparent.

Mark Byrnes cites the Buffalo-Niagara Enterprise which claims. "there's over $5 billion worth of completed, underway or planned construction in and around downtown in the last decade."  This is in stark contrast to the fact that region's labor force and shrunk nearly two percent while the growth rate was only 0.7 percent-half the national pace.  An analysis of the city's racial and household income distribution data is another reminder of precisely how unequal this modest statistic looks.  The flip side of this bleak reality is, for buildings, "...it's a more promising time than usual to be in Buffalo. But for the average person, not much is different.

The factors contributing to the East Side's decline are complex.  The remedies, regardless of their source, will face numerous challenges.  Very few, including those who presented at this year's Congress for the New Urbanism have an answer or the ability to affect any meaningful result.  David Torke sums the situation best, "If the revival of distressed cities does not become the mission of the Congress for the New Urbanism...the movement will become irrelevant."