Guy, you are delusional. Most people here have been to Buffalo and we've seen the reality of a burned out post industrial rust belt city. The per capita income level of Buffalo DOES NOT support your fantasy of a beautiful city, its a hole and we know this.
I don't know what your smoking, but put this in your pipe for sober reality
Can Buffalo Ever Come Back? - October 19, 2007 - The New York Sun
As far as comparing Albany, Troy, etc., you need to be comparing an equal size area (Capital District) to Buffalo, not pieces parts.
Are we talking economics now? Did I say Buffalo was booming? No. Nor is it leaking anymore like that Economist thinks. There's been over a billion dollars of development in downtown alone the last couple years. It's easily on the upswing. Just a simple check of real estate prices here would reveal 10% year over year growth for this decade including the last few years.
I've asked everyone of you dissing Buffalo to tell me where you've been. We've been through this before. The vast majority have never even been to the Olmstead area, haven't seen Delaware Park. The view is only of driving to the Bills Stadium or through the thruway.
I lived in the Capital District for 5 years. Freakin' boring as all hell, with the highlight being Lark St. Crappy housing. Suburbs are strip mall heaven. The CD is crap compared to Buffalo.
I'm not the only one saying that, first of all, culturally, Buffalo has a lot of life, from high culture, Art, to low, football and sports, it has the best. Best Mod art gallery outside MoMa, top sport league in the NFL, and great music scene and restaurants in between. The architecture was built by the American giants, Richardson, Sullivan, Wright, etc., and the city laid out by Olmstead.
Here, I'm not the only one saying it:
"On an afternoon's walk through downtown Buffalo, New York, an architecturally minded visitor should prepare for an accelerated heart rate. For here is beautifully restored and fastidiously maintained evidence of what happened when the City Beautiful movement waltzed with industrial prosperity. The concentration of monumental structures by the likes of Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, and Carrère & Hastings-plus later twentieth-century works by Rapp & Rapp and Minoru Yamasaki-explain why historians hail the city as an architectural museum."
- Architecture Magazine
"By looking past a half-century of decline to Buffalo's gilded age, a grass-roots movement has seized on a legacy of architecture, history, and art, aiming to transform the city into a cultural destination. The restoration of a Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece, the 1905 Darwin Martin House, anchors an effort to draw affluent culture-minded tourists and rebrand the city. Enough architectural gems survive from the late 1800s and early 1900s to bolster its image, said New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger. 'It's an extraordinary and, in many ways, beautiful city,' he said."
- The Boston Globe
What They're Saying About Buffalo - Buffalo Niagara Convention and Visitors Bureau
Oh, and getting beyond architecture:
Shuffle No More (washingtonpost.com)
Compare this
A rewarding visit to America's only Arts and Crafts colony to Clifton Park.