Re: You're Typical Bills Fan
SPECIAL REPORT: ABANDONED HOMES Buffalo, New York - SkyscraperCity
10,000 abondoned houses in a city of 293,000 people. That number doesn't count the number of poorly kept houses and just plain nasty neighborhoods, nor does it count the abondoned train terminal, tunnels, factories and industrial buildings that are vacant and/or falling apart (not to mention Buffalo's pothole epidemic).
People who are fans of architecture are looking for what your talking about, ignoring the obvious sad state of a poor and delapidated city that everyone else is seeing with open eyes. I still don't see any refutation whatsoever of Glaeser, if there is anything relevant than cut/paste and post it.
btw: please stop posting "opinion" articles/editorials that are devoid of material fact or measurable metric. The only thing they prove is that you have no hard facts to refute that statistically speaking, Buffalo is the poor welfare hole most people know that it is.
Abandoned houses, and? What does that have to do with anything? The link you gave shows the vast vast majority is on the East Side. Yes, I've never been to the East Side, just like when I lived in Boston, I avoided Roxbury, just like I never ventured deep into Harlem when I lived in NYC. Look at the first map on your link. You see that white area where it says less than 5% abandoned? That's the heart of Buffalo right there.
Do you want me to give you examples of how many abandoned homes there are in Las Vegas? Phoenix? There's an epidemic of abandoned homes in the USA. Buffalo has a program in place to do something about it.
Here's a 15 minute clip on the program.
YouTube - Inside USA - Buffalo blues - 14 June 08 Part 1
Granted, it comes from Al Jazeera, but it captures the reality of Buffalo pretty well.
Lots of poverty with a tough crew of citizens reviving the place.
Both warts and bright spots are addressed.
Then again, the producer tries to play gotcha with the mayor by proving that $17 million of the $4.5 billion invested in construction projects in the city in recent years is actually demolition costs. Big deal, $17m is a drop in the bucket when we're talking $4.5 billion.
Glaeser is actually right on when it comes to these bulldozer projects:
Bulldozing America’s Shrinking Cities - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com
But note something: He's very much in favor of investment in "human capital" and this means culturals, schools, etc., and in this respect he's right there with Richard Florida. When you see Buffalo, this is the measure of its wealth. Great schools, a world renowned art base, music and other performing arts, even pro sports.
As for the earlier article by Glaeser, he's looking at an industrial model and projecting the future based on the theory that cities die when industries leave. If that's his theory, then most of America should just off itself. Glaeser said the same thing about Pittsburgh and Detroit, but Pittsburgh made a comeback on health care, banking and tech. Detroit died. Glaeser's ideas about what makes a strong city are based on a critique of investment in industry and infrastructure in these cities themselves. He blasts cities that try to entice industry through public incentives, because they are not looking at the big picture (i.e. the permanent loss of industrial jobs to globalism). This is why he's down on Buffalo. IMO, his article is not taking into account intellectual capital, and Florida is. First off, Glaeser's model looks at government subsidy as a negative thing. He makes the argument that Buffalo is a welfare case. The fact is, the Power Authority that is located in Buffalo makes energy for much of the northeast, and it makes many billions in energy a year, a billion in profits. Buffalo could do just fine on its own natural resources, and the "welfare" it receives from NY state is but a fraction of the wealth it contributes in energy. It may take a hundred million from the state each year, but all the public housing in NYC is funded by the Power Authority from one single plant that resides in Buffalo. That's $750 million worth of public housing for NYC. Glaeser is ONLY looking at what is poured into Buffalo, not at what comes out of Buffalo. Not to mention the fact that the state has poured a billion and more into Joe Bruno's district over the last decade, and anyone can see that the Capital District has come up rapidly with such investment. None of that investment is industrial, it's all based on intellectual capital. In that same period, Buffalo has only received $45 million in capital investment from the state.
Richard Florida is much more of a forward thinker than Bruno:
He writes:
"One of Toronto's assets is proximity to Buffalo. I’m a huge Buffalo fan. The city has tremendous assets. Some of them, like great universities and great art museums are self-evident. Others a bit more mundane."
Here's Florida's webpage:
about Richard Florida - Creative Class
If you click on Rise of the Mega Region, he talks about Buffalo as being part of the Toronto mega with Rochester, and he considers this one of the top regions of the world for wealth in the 21st century. Why? Because of cross-border projects that have totally tethered Buffalo to Toronto. Why? Because Buffalo is building out one of the few airports in the country with a runway long enough to handle a jumbo plane like an Antonov, which is used to carry millions of pounds in one trip from, say, China to North America. And because of the proximity to transportation systems and Canada, the Chinese are building out here quickly, as Florida points out. This makes Buffalo a transportation hub for Toronto, as well as the nearest crossing into the USA, and so many Canadian corporations have their US headquarters in the city for precisely that reason.
Here, you'll find an article that directly addresses Glaeser:
http://creativeclass.com/rfcgdb/articles/The Buffalo Mega-Region Bigger Than We Know.pdf
And this is the key snippet:
The reason so many commentators and urban experts are down on Buffalo is that they are looking at it from a highly local perspective. Looking only at Buffalo and its surrounding suburban areas, they see the loss of manufacturing and the outward movement of young and talented people.
In a recent essay in the City Journal, Harvard University professor Edward Glaeser, the brilliant young urban economist, argued that Buffalo should stop cooking up mega-projects aimed at revitalization and itself go about shrinking in the smartest way possible. In a vibrant and engaging talk to Buffalo community leaders in April, Glaeser stressed that it would be nearly impossible for Buffalo — or any region really — to counteract the
powerful economics and demographics that are shaping the globalization of
manufacturing and causing the shift of young and talented people to bigger, more vibrant cities and metro areas.
All of this sounds reasonable when you look at Buffalo as an isolated island. But the picture changes dramatically when one begins to think of Buffalo in the context of the economic powerhouse that is the mega-region. The fact of the matter is that Buffalo is a key node in one of the world’s most
economically potent mega-regions — stretching from the high-tech center of Waterloo on the west, through Toronto, Buffalo and Rochester. Tor-Buff-Chester is currently home to about 22 million people and more than $530 billion in economic output, making it the fifth-largest megaregion in North America and the 12th largest in the world.
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