Tag: Buffalo

Buffalo’s Recent Economic Boom Leaves Longtime Residents Behind

Posted on by robbie

Ordering lobster from gourmet food trucks in Buffalo, New York, might’ve been ambitious a decade ago. Now, it happens weekly.
The food trucks that line Buffalo’s Larkin Square on Tuesdays during the warm summer months attract locals from all over the city, including its suburbs. But its lack of diversity is what shocks me most: Almost half of the city’s population are people of color, yet nearly everyone in the park is white.
Even the music reflects this fact, with a boomer-aged jam band rocking covers of Jethro Tull and Chicago.
I’m being shown around the square by Kayla Zemsky, a project manager with her family’s company, Larkin Development Group. Her family is responsible for some of Buffalo’s most well-known revitalization projects, including the newly built parklet that we’re wandering around that night. But the square, along with many other Zemsky family developments, are notorious among locals, who talk about how these kinds of developments have brought about gentrification in parts of this economically depressed city.
Zemsky tells me about the importance of revitalizing old neighborhoods, where abandoned and blighted homes litter residential streets (Buffalo has one of the largest shares of abandoned homes and properties in the state).
It’s all part of an idea to make Buffalo economically viable again, which appears to be working: A newly revitalized city is bringing back tourists through its architecture and history, and the city’s nightlife and cocktail culture has been drawing in travel and leisure writers en masse.
But the money flowing into the city seems to benefit only certain people — or at least that’s what longtime locals and activists tell me.  
“We cost the same as downtown Chicago right now,” says Sage Green, a community advocate at People United for Sustainable Housing, or PUSH Buffalo, a housing rights group.“That’s unreal; $1,500 a month in Buffalo blows my fucking mind.”
That should, indeed, blow everyone’s mind, if only for the fact that despite Buffalo’s current boom, it maintains its status as one of the nation’s poorest large cities.
The increase in the city’s property values and rents have made it one of the top 10 cities with the fastest-growing rents in the nation. Much of that bump has to do with the city’s real-estate boom: developers get close to 40 percent in tax breaks to build on Buffalo’s historic building stock — some of the most well-preserved architecture in the nation. And the state has coughed up $1 billion in a stimulus spending plan to help make Buffalo more attractive for tech manufacturers, including Tesla.
Despite an increase in popularity and interest in Buffalo, by and large the city’s residents haven’t seen the same benefits. Wages have only increased marginally, and employment in the city continues to be focused on retail and service work — much of which are by and large minimum wage jobs. As a result, people who could barely afford their mortgages or property taxes before are now in dire straits and at risk of losing their homes.
But Green’s group, PUSH, is working to keep residents in their homes by doing the most basic of renovations to the city’s old homes: insulating them.

Buffalo housing 2
PUSH at the 2018 Our City coalition public meeting.

***

October in Buffalo is a tense time for thousands of local homeowners. It’s the time of year when many find out if soon they will be homeless.
Every year, the city puts on an auction of homes whose homeowners have been in arrears with their property taxes or sewage fees. If you are behind any amount above $200, your home could be foreclosed on by the city.
“It used to be even lower than that,” says Gretchen Gonzalez, deputy director for the Volunteer Lawyers Project, a group that helps homeowners who have defaulted on their taxes work out payment plans to keep their homes. “A lot of our clients are economically disadvantaged people who live paycheck to paycheck. For those people, it just takes one tragedy or one lost job to end up behind. And these are people whose homes have been in their families for generations.”
Over a third of Buffalo’s residents are homeowners, with houses willed down or bought for cheap when the city’s economy was still spiraling downward.
And until recently, it was relatively cheap to be a Buffalo homeowner.
In 2013, most of Buffalo’s housing stock was priced between $30-60,000. Now, with Buffalo’s boom, more homes are now worth $70-90,000, according to recent ACS one-year survey numbers.
And with rising property values come a rise in property taxes, which are expected to dramatically increase with property reevaluations underway. The last time Buffalo did property reevaluations was in 2010, which has translated into less taxes — about 40 percent less than expected — coming into a city that has seen an exceptional boom in home values.
But increased property taxes is an issue for a city in which almost half of its residents live paycheck to paycheck and where 51 percent of its children live in poverty. As of now, between 2006 and 2018, an average of close to 3,000 homes every year are threatened on the auction block for failure to pay taxes.  
Housing advocates worry that the number is sure to rise after the city finishes its reevaluation next year.
“We’re certainly thrilled to see Buffalo’s economic turnaround, but it’s going to affect homeowners. And if people are having a hard time making ends meet right now, it’s only going to get worse,” says Kevin Quinn, an attorney with the Center for Law and Justice who has been representing dozens of homeowners in the past few months leading up to the city’s foreclosure auctions, which happen in mid-October.
But the cost of home ownership in Buffalo goes beyond property taxes. Before the recent housing developments in Buffalo overtook the market, residential areas were made up of homes that were built at the turn of the last century.
“All of these homes are old, old, old,” says Luana DeJesus, a program assistant at PUSH. “You better believe many of them don’t have proper insulation… A lot of people don’t even know what proper insulation is. And without that, you’re looking at bills costing into the hundreds when in reality it should be a quarter of that.”
And that’s where PUSH has found a niche as a unique problem solver to impending tax foreclosures: Keep people within their homes by insulating the homes.

***

The houses on Prospect Street, on Buffalo’s West Side, are quaint. Each of the colonial-style homes are two stories tall, with green lawns, flagpoles and raised patios. They’re also very old, sometimes well over 100 years — back when it was relatively cheap to heat a home.
But that’s not the case any longer.
On a Wednesday morning in September, I’m meeting with DeJesus outside of a home on Prospect. The home, owned by a local family that I was told had a hard time paying their utility bills, didn’t have any insulation. And that’s not an uncommon story in Buffalo.
“These are old homes — so many of them don’t have the proper insulation they need to keep warm during the winter here, so the costs are way more than what you’d normally expect than from newer homes,” DeJesus says.
According to National Fuel estimates, since 2015, gas prices to heat a home for five months has gone from $500 in 2015 to an estimated $560 this year. But that’s for energy-efficient homes.
In order to make homes energy-efficient — a process that can include an inspection and attic and wall insulation — it can easily range in the thousands of dollars. And for a number of families in Buffalo, that’s just not a viable option.
The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority offers free weatherizing for families who meet income guidelines that are 60 percent below the state’s median income, but there is little outreach from the state to get families to apply and weatherize their homes.
That’s where PUSH comes in. Once a week, members of PUSH go into poor neighborhoods and talk to residents about weatherizing their homes. For families that can afford weatherizing on their own, PUSH gets them set up for the process. For families that can’t afford the initial audit or the insulation, they partner with homeowners to get the free services through the state.
The result is thousands of dollars in savings each year for each home — more than enough to help families who struggle with their tax payments.
“PUSH [has] made a world of difference for people who didn’t even know what was going on with energy issues,” says Lucy Velez, a volunteer with PUSH. “My community doesn’t think about those things, we’re trying to keep our homes and pay our bills.”
Anecdotally, the process is working. Green, the community advocate, points out that families that were formerly on the auction block are now able to stay in their homes and finance their tax bills and city usage fees.
But she recognizes that lowering bills serves only as a band-aid for a much larger problem: a lack of affordable housing in the Buffalo area.
“These are band-aids, and band-aids are really important things. But they don’t address the problem. It’s easy to say something is bad and try and quickly fix it. It’s harder to ask why,” she says. “We’re in this space now, where we can’t just yell about public infrastructure. The middle ground is building infrastructural assets that can be controlled, designed and owned by the community so that we can build long-term neighborhoods.”
Just a few miles east, that’s exactly what’s happening.
The Fruit Belt section of Buffalo has been plagued with a declining population since the ’50s. The area — named for its flowering fruit trees — dropped from 11,000 in the ’70s to just over 2,000 people currently.
The decline in population has also translated to blocks of empty and vacant lots. Until now.
As of May this year, residents of the Fruit Belt neighborhood have successfully petitioned to create a land trust that would ensure people are not being priced out of their neighborhoods.
Residents who buy properties through a land trust split the equity of the home — most of it stays within the trust — which then keeps the price low for the next homebuyer.
Denice Barr, a resident of the Fruit Belt, is one of those residents who were instrumental in advocating for the land trust.
“People just moved into our neighborhoods without any thought about us, who’ve lived there for decades,” she says. “Now, we have the ability to take a stand against people moving in and selling off our community from under us.”
This solution isn’t unique to Buffalo. Community land trusts have been created in cities including Washington D.C., New York City and throughout Florida. But with a city that has seen a tremendous amount of growth in industry and city spending to make Buffalo more attractive, it could be a helpful tool for residents who have felt left behind in the city’s self-proclaimed renaissance.

***

This is part two in a two-part series on how solutions can both help — and hurt — communities. To read part one, on how the city of Buffalo is using architecture to help fuel a tourism-boom, click here.

Beyond Hot Wings: How Architecture Is Helping Buffalo Make Its Comeback

Posted on by robbie

I’m drinking in a brothel. Or, at least, what used to be a brothel, or so the bartender tells me. It’s now the Hydraulic Hearth, a pizza and cocktail joint on Larkin Square, in the east end of Buffalo, a neighborhood of warehouses and abandoned homes that have morphed into restaurants and distilleries.
I check my phone to see if I can confirm that the Hydraulic Hearth was indeed a brothel at one point in its history. But by 5 p.m. it ceases to matter: I’m drunk enough off of charanda and falernum to believe anything the bartender tells me.
I’ve been in Buffalo, New York, for only a few hours, and this is not the first time someone is acquainting me with the history of the exact place I happen to be standing, sitting or drinking. This might be common in Brooklyn or Silverlake, but in Buffalo, pride of place hasn’t been part of the cultural lexicon for generations — outside of it being the birthplace of Buffalo Wings.
So what’s happening here? Why is Buffalo suddenly…so cool?
For one, shifting demographics. Locals joke that Buffalo’s biggest export in the ’90s was 20-somethings. A stale local economy that hadn’t recovered since the decline of the Rust Belt in the ’50s drove the young and educated to live elsewhere.
But with substantial support from the state, the city has been able to reposition itself as an attractive option for developers and foreign buyers looking to invest in secondary and tertiary cities. Blue-collar workers employed by Buffalo’s myriad manufacturing outlets have been replaced, in part, by well-educated and ambitious millennials looking for more bang for their buck than they’d get in New York or San Francisco.
So over the past five years or so, establishments like the Hydraulic Hearth have been throwing open their doors in neighborhoods where, a decade ago, you’d have done best to lock them, especially at night.
Over the course of a single evening, young locals urged me to visit a variety of bars and restaurants throughout the city, and were eager to share stories about why they moved back to Buffalo.
“I couldn’t have been more excited to get the hell out of here after high school,” says Sarah Santiago, my bartender at the Indochine-esque Angelica Tearoom. She left Buffalo for college, but returned a few years ago, delightfully surprised by how cool the city had become in her absence.
And Santiago is hardly alone. Many millennials are forsaking the biggest metropolitan areas for small or mid-size cities like Buffalo.
Between 2010 and 2015, Buffalo experienced a six percent increase in millennial residents — a big deal for a city with a declining population. Likewise, the number of college graduates between 25 and 34 jumped 34 percent, a greater increase percentage-wise than in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Downtown Buffalo, as seen from Lake Erie.

And with those young urbanites came urban tastes: cafe culture, street art and fast-casual dining.
Case in point: Jon Karel and Harry Zemsky’s Angelica Tearoom. (Harry Zemsky is the son of Howard Zemsky, a local developer who is also the president and CEO of Empire State Development Corporation.)
“We’re not a place for a beer and a shot anymore,” Karel says, as the bartender pours me a mezcal-based drink that is described on the menu as “sexy, but boozy AF.” “People here have elevated tastes and have a refined culture, despite what you read.”
It’s this “elevation” of tastes that caught the attention of The New York Times back in June, a year after they deemed Buffalo 37th on its list of the best places to visit — in the world.
But it’s not just affordability that’s attracting millennials and helping to revive this city — it’s also the city’s architecture that was built by some of America’s most revered architects.

***

By the mid-1890s, Buffalo was being hailed as the most inventive city in the U.S.
The end of the industrial revolution had been good to the city, as the Erie Canal made Buffalo a major port to transport goods from the heartland. It was also during that period of time that Buffalo became known for its grain elevators — it boasted the first steam-powered one in the world, a major innovation in storing bulk produce. As America shifted from a nation of agriculture to one of automation and invention, Buffalo led the pack.
The Pan-American Exposition, which was held in Buffalo in 1901, created an electricity race, and Buffalo’s proximity to Niagara Falls made hydropower possible for the opening nights of the fair. It was the first time a city had been fully electrified in the U.S.
Buffalo’s impressive profile was noted by the nation’s most influential architects, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan and Henry Hobson Richardson.
At the time, America was seeking a unique construction style that would separate it from European designers, and Buffalo became the testing ground for many of these architects.
It was in Buffalo where Wright’s prairie-house style was perfected, and where Sullivan used pillars — instead of walls — to test the stability of 20-plus-story buildings. It was also where America’s first urban park system was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who went on to create Chicago’s Jackson Park and New York City’s Central Park.
But despite Buffalo’s newfound and expanding popularity, it soon suffered the same fate as other Rust Belt cities.
Automation and the push for work out west led to the city’s collapse. In 1900, Buffalo was the eighth-largest city in the nation, boasting a population of over 570,000. By 1960, it had dropped to the 20th largest in the country. In 1996, it was 54th. Now, it’s the 81st, behind Toledo, Ohio, and Laredo, Texas. In 2016, the census found that more than one third of Buffalo’s residents live at or below the federal poverty level, while more than 50 percent of Buffalo children currently live in poverty.
In an effort to improve the local economy, Gov. Andrew Cuomo pledged $1 billion in a program called Buffalo Billion, to help position the Buffalo-Niagara metropolitan area as a destination in its own right. As part of the program, Buffalo would house the region’s largest solar panel factory, SolarCity, owned in part by Tesla’s Elon Musk, and create an estimated 5,000 jobs for locals. But Buffalo Billion has been fraught with inefficiencies (SolarCity, for example, is far from hiring the 5,000 it anticipated) and lawsuits over corruption of the bidding process. Nonetheless, real-estate developers have invested heavily in Buffalo, in anticipation that the billion-dollar stimulus will bring more jobs and more people.
“Buffalo feels like a more dynamic city now than it was when I was growing up here,” says Kayla Zemsky, Harry Zemsky’s sister and a project manager at Larkin Development Group. “And it’s coming back in a real way.”

***

The Hotel at the Lafayette feels old, with its marbled mosaic tile floors and crystal chandeliers. It feels like stepping into history. 
The hotel, originally called the Hotel Lafayette, was built in 1902, and was designed by Louise Blanchard Bethune, the first American woman known to have worked as a professional architect. It was one of the first hotels in the region to have bathrooms en suite — a true luxury for the time.
But the hotel fell into ruin and, as the Toronto Star described it, “devolved into a fleabag hostelry, home to vagrants, crack addicts and assorted pigeons, its once grand public spaces and guest suites literally rotting.”
In 2013, the hotel was bought by Wyndham Group, which poured around $40 million into the property, turning it from fleabag to fabulous.
It’s there I met with Chris Hawley, a well-known local urbanist, who tells me that without places like the Lafayette, Buffalo wouldn’t be seeing such interest from developers.
“Buffalo, unlike many Sun Belt cities, possesses a huge landscape of historic buildings that are available for reuse,” Hawley says.
And that’s been a win for developers, who have the opportunity to receive 40 percent of their expenses back in tax credits if they remodel and renovate historic buildings — a result of a 1978 federal bill giving 20 percent of tax credits and a state bill matching them.
“We can keep building for a very long time, and developers can keep getting their money back, because we have so many buildings that can be used for those tax credits,” he says. “The historic tax credit program has been perhaps the most successful economic development program ever introduced in upstate New York. Without historic tax credits, it’s likely — in fact I can guarantee you — that Buffalo would not be witnessing this current renaissance.”
The Zemsky family has certainly capitalized on this, turning abandoned historic buildings into multi-use properties. All of Larkin Square is a Zemsky-run operation, with the original Larkin Soap Company Warehouse — built at the turn of the 20th century — at the center, retrofitted with new glass and interiors for office suites.
“People thought my father was crazy for taking a chance on this place and renovating it,” Kayla Zemsky tell me. “But there is a strong history in this neighborhood, and he wanted to maintain it and give it a more vibrant future.”
The Zemsky family has introduced a food truck night, with local artisanal food trucks parked alongside the square’s greenbelt, serving cupcakes, burritos and lobster.
“We’re keeping the history of this city alive and, as a result, we’re helping make Buffalo a place not just for tourists, but also for locals in the area,” she says.
This is one aspect of the city’s plans — alongside the Buffalo Billion deal — to remake Buffalo into a destination city through “archi-tourism.” The idea is to attract international visitors to Buffalo with historic architecture as its selling point.
And there’s good reason for that. Buffalo is the only city in America where the nation’s three greatest architects still have buildings standing: Sullivan’s Guaranty building (now a bank and office building), Richardson’s mental asylum (now a hotel and restaurant) and Wright’s Martin house (now a museum).
Though not rebuilt using the tax credits, the Frank Lloyd Wright Martin House — Wright’s largest home ever built and considered the opus for his famed prairie-style homes — was gutted and demolished in the ’50s, and has been rebuilt to academic standards within the past few years with $13 million in donations and grants.

The Darwin D. Martin House Complex, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
The Darwin D. Martin House Complex, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

The house employs nearly 200 people and has an economic impact of $17 million annually, according to Mary Roberts, executive director of the Martin House. Almost $9 million of that, she says, comes from new visitors.
“I can absolutely say that the ‘archi-tourism’ model has been working to bring money into Buffalo,” Roberts says after one of their nighttime tours of the house, where virtually everyone in attendance was visiting from another state or country. “That’s a big deal, considering there were virtually no tourists visiting this house when we started the restoration effort. We are now welcoming approximately 40,000 guests annually, and the number is growing.”
Such development has helped push Buffalo’s property values higher and higher. In 2013, median home values were between $40,000 and $50,000. By 2016, it was $83,500.
But whereas the local economy has consistently grown year over year, to the benefit of developers and retailers, the median wage in Buffalo still hovers around $25,000 below the national average and is among the lowest in the region.
And for a city whose residents have seen their property taxes rise year after year without any extra income, tax foreclosures are now an imminent threat. This month, 3,000 homeowners are expecting to see their houses auctioned off for failure to pay tax bills owed to the city.
And though boozing in former brothels might be helping Buffalo reinvent itself as a tourist city with urban flair, the city’s economic plans appear to be leaving many of its residents — the ones who’ve stuck it out despite the city’s economic troubles — behind.
But there is hope for them, as well.

***

This is part one of a two-part series. Read part two, about how one group is casting light on the city’s housing problems and helping people stay in their homes, here.

All It Took Was One Judge and Two Veterans to Provide Another Chance to Countless Soldiers

Posted on by robbie

In 1986, one in every five inmates in state prison was a former member of the military.
Today, many post-9/11 veterans are still running into trouble with the law. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) affects at least 167,500 veterans (that’s just the number diagnosed by VA doctors) who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan — and it could afflict as many as 620,000. The disorder has given soldiers their toughest mission yet: successfully reintegrating into civilian life. The nightmares and flashbacks, anxiety, hyper-vigilance and other unresolved mental health issues caused by PTSD often translate into drug and alcohol abuse, homelessness, domestic violence and lawbreaking.
In a society that’s appears increasingly disconnected from the experience of war, there’s one civic institution that’s taking strides to accommodate veterans’ unique situation. Courtrooms across the country are now adopting veterans treatment courts — at least 180 established locations and many more are in development, according to the nonprofit Justice for Vets. It’s a model that tailors the criminal justice system’s response to the circumstances: Similar to drug and mental health treatment courts, judges are less inclined to mete out punishment to troubled vets, connecting them with help, particularly from the VA and local military members. If a former warrior successfully completes the program (which can include counseling, substance abuse treatment and job training), all the charges against him are dropped; if he fails to finish, the original jail sentence goes into effect.
“Many veterans will say, ‘I’m okay, I don’t need any help,’ but sometimes it takes another veteran to say, ‘You know, things are starting to spiral out of control,’” says Judge Robert Russell, who convened the first court in Buffalo in early 2008. “It could be traumatic brain injury. It could be PTSD. It could be any number of things that are left untreated. They’re not only debilitating, they’re what’s placing the person in the criminal court system and will continue to keep them in the criminal justice system.”
Russell says the “impetus of the court” began with a single case that came before him in 2006. A former Vietnam vet who’d appeared in his drug treatment court didn’t seem to be responding to the program. Group sessions didn’t work; neither did one-on-ones. “He wasn’t really engaged,” Russell recalls. “When he appeared in court, his posture was slumped. When I asked him what was going on with counseling, I didn’t get much of a response, just sort of like, ‘Huh?’” Russell pointed to two men in the room — Hank Pirowski, a former Marine, and Jack O’Connor, an Army vet — and asked them to talk to the downcast man out in the hallway.
Twenty minutes later, the three reentered. The defendant strutted to the front of the room and stretched to his full height, a tall 6’4”. He stood with his legs slightly apart and held his hands clasped behind his back — a military posture known as “parade rest.”
“He looked directly at me and said, ‘Judge, I’m going to try harder,’” Russell says. Afterwards, Russell met with Pirowski and O’Connor to find out what they said to the guy and how they got a response from him.
The two veterans had discussed their service, and after they’d established a common background, they told the man they cared about him and explained how important counseling would be for him to move forward. As simple as it sounds, the man needed to hear it from someone who’d struggled like he had, someone who could reassure him a future existed.
From that day forward, the trio collaborated on setting up a treatment court for veterans. Their goal? To “afford the best opportunities for the men and women who have served,” Russell says, setting aside one day each week to dedicate entirely to members of the military. The time was used to assemble a team of outside services, so referrals could begin immediately. If a vet hadn’t signed up for VA care, for example, a health official could immediately engage him that day, scheduling appointments and enrolling him for benefits right there in court.
An essential aspect of the treatment court is the volunteer veteran mentors, who function as a coach, sponsor and supporter, providing help with bus passes, rent, furniture or just talking through any crisis. “If they need something, Marines talk to Marines more than they do their own lawyer,” O’Connor says. Many are Vietnam vets who want soldiers just returning home from the Middle East to receive a different welcome than they did. “We never tell anyone about stuff we dealt with because no one liked us. People really hated our guts. Now a lot of Vietnam vets are in positions of authority. They’re in their 60s, they’re on boards of corporations, they own their own companies,” O’Connor adds.
As so many restorative justice programs have shown, rehabilitation like veteran courts reduces crime over the long haul by addressing the problems that initially led to criminal behavior. As O’Connor, who now coordinates the volunteer mentors, says, “You treat the illness, you stop the addiction.”
There’s stories like Gary Pettengill, a 23-year-old Buffalo resident arrested in a drug sweep. In 2006, while serving in the Army in Iraq, he injured his back and was forced to take a medical discharge. Nights were intolerable, alternating between sleepless pain and nightmares, so Pettengill began smoking marijuana to cope. Unemployed (in part because of his injury), he began selling weed to make ends meet and was eventually diagnosed with PTSD. Pettengill never did any jail time, and he credits the program with saving him from suicide, an option that had once looked inevitable.
Pettengill’s just one of the program’s 150 graduates in Buffalo. Another is the man whose appearance before Russell sparked the court’s conception. The man’s case manager at the local VA hospital said he had never seen the man smile before, but after the court was established, he became one of the cheeriest men at the facility.
O’Connor gives each of these men a special coin at graduation. It harkens back to “challenge coins,” small medallions that are unique to each unit of the military, only these have the scales of justice on one side and the phrase “Leave no veteran behind” on the other. He tells the grads to carry it with them, so if they ever run into trouble, they’ll remember how far they’ve come.
Data coming in from across the country backs up these stories. A three-year pilot in San Diego (home to multiple Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard facilities) found that recidivism dropped for those in the program, most of whom had been booked on DUIs or domestic violence charges. Of the 74 enrolled, only three reoffended — a rate of 4.1 percent, far below the 65 percent figure for state prisons. Even better, among the 27 who graduated the program, not a single person committed another crime. The county estimated the program’s savings at $3.985 million in jail and treatment costs.
“Once you’re seen the success rate, you can’t hide it,” O’Connor says. “Something’s working, and it’s working all over the country.”
That’s not to say there’s not criticisms of the concept. Although most are quick to thank veterans for their service, some wonder if the military is receiving special treatment that should be more widely available. After all, why do former service members receive a get-out-of-jail-free card while others are locked up? Russell says this is partly a matter of logistics. Veterans need specialized care, so scheduling their cases on the same day creates an easy one-stop shop for both client and service provider. The alternative sentencing is not a free pass, either. Former soldiers are expected to make regular court appearances and are subject to randomized drug testing.
Russell says he can’t believe how quickly the courts have taken off. “When we started it, we thought it was the right thing to do for the community in which we were serving,” he says. “But it was something that touched the heart and spirit of many around the country. They’ve embraced the concept. They’re affording veterans some of opportunities inside their justice system to help them get back on track in their own community.”
[ph]

The Bison are Back. Here’s How These Roaming Beasts Are Restoring America’s Prairies

Posted on by robbie

Out on the range, the buffalo are roaming once again.
After a nearly 200-year absence, a small herd of bison have been reintroduced to the Nachusa Grasslands in north-central Illinois, two hours outside of Chicago. This marks the first time since the 1830s that the shaggy beasts have set their hooves east of the Mississippi River. The bison were trucked in last October to graze, spread seeds and churn the soil — all essential to restore Illinois’s tallgrass prairies.
“The word that keeps coming up is surreal,” says Jeff Walk, director of science for The Nature Conservancy’s Illinois chapter, which is heading up the Nachusa preservation efforts. Walk rode with the animals during their eight-hour truck ride from Sioux City, Iowa, and stuck around late into the night to see them unloaded from their trailers.
It was a moment The Nature Conservatory staff had been anticipating for a quarter-century.
[ph]
Although it’s known as the Prairie State, Illinois alone has lost more than 99 percent of its grasslands — from 22 million acres to just 2,500 acres, according to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. Starting in 1986, The Nature Conservancy, considered the country’s largest environmental nonprofit, began buying up neighboring farms in an effort to return a portion of the land to its original state. Today, it now owns or has conservation easements for 3,500 acres. Over an estimated 450,000 hours, volunteers and employees have been weeding out invasive species, regenerating the preserved land through controlled burns and sowing and harvesting seeds for wild petunias, hazelnuts and hawthorne berries. But the bison’s return — at a price of $6 million — is the final stage in the landscape’s restoration.
“We can go around and do the small prairie restorations, but a true native prairie ecosystem has to have bison in it,” Brook McDonald, president of the Conservation Foundation, a nonprofit preserving untouched land in northeast Illinois, tells the Tribune. “Bison were such a significant part of the prairie that whole ecosystems depended on them. Without them, those species go too.”
Aside from a roundup every fall when they are vaccinated, the bison run wild on 500 acres of land hemmed in by a wire fence. (This year, the project will expand to another 1,000 acres.) Standing six feet tall at their shoulders and weighing close to 1 ton, the animals chomp down grasses and avoid flowering plants, increasing biodiversity by creating more light and root space. “The other thing is poop,” Kirk Hallowell, a volunteer steward, tells onEarth, the magazine of the Natural Resources Defense Council. The manure fertilizes the soil and attracts insects, which in turn will hopefully bring back the prairie’s native birds, including the upland sandpiper.
[ph]
Like the grassland itself, the bison struggle to reemerge from the devastation that came with settling the West. When the first colonists arrived, up to 60 million roamed the continent; by the beginning of the 20th century, however, excessive hunting had decimated the population and only a few hundred remained, the Wildlife Conservation Society says. In tandem, two symbols of the American pastoral are slowly being restored.
“We know that bison will be good for the prairie,” Walk says. “This is a unique opportunity to understand exactly how they influence the natural habitat. It’s a chance to study and learn, and from there, we can share those results with grassland restoration projects around the world.”
[ph]

Which Northern City is Selling Homes for $1?

Posted on by robbie

A pack of gum. A candy bar. Something off of a fast-food menu. That’s about all you can purchase with a dollar.
And although it sounds absurd, in Buffalo, N.Y., you can now get a house for $1. (Yes, you read that right.)
It’s all part of the Urban Homestead program, which is dedicated to preserving houses in Buffalo. Across the city, old homes are being demolished, and this program is working to save them by selling them for a single. All the buyer has to do is prove they have the resources to repair the residence and promise to live in it for at least three years.
Currently, Buffalo has about 4,600 vacant homes and another 1,600 vacant lots. It costs $15,000 to tear down a home – valuable money that could be put back into the house for repairs. On average per year, eight to 10 homes are bought for a dollar, while hundreds remain on the demolition list.
Buffalo isn’t the only community with this type of initiative. Last year, Gary, Ind. launched their Dollar Home with the sale of six houses. In addition, other cities such as Philadelphia and Detroit have similar programs where people can buy homes for very little money.
The downside? Even though a house may only have a price tag of a dollar, the renovations can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
For Creighton Randall who bought a dollar home back in 2008, it’s been a struggle. He’s been working on it off and on for the past six years and doubts that it’s worth the investment he’s put in.
“If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t,” Randall tells Governing. “I should have just bought one of the houses on sale for $13,000 and saved myself a lot of time.”
However, for others, the investment has been worth the hassle. David Torke and Mike Puma have been leading this movement, and their work showcases the positives that arise from it.
Torke bought his first house back in 2006, and since then, has rejuvenated many homes. Where old, falling down homes used to stand on Coe Street, a freshly painted orange Queen Anne and a brown Victorian with a deck and garden have taken their place.
Similar sights can be found around the city where old homes in high crime areas are getting a second life thanks to some fresh paint, gardens and a few jungle gyms.
“We’re reintroducing new life into these properties,” Puma tells Governing. “Not only are you taking a stand against demolition, but you’re taking a stand on what happens in this city.”
And his neighbors can’t help but agree. Kevin Harris lives across the street from the house Puma is currently working on. For him, it’s a welcome sight.
“At one point, I thought they were going to tear that house down,” Harris says. “But they’re really working their butts off over there, and it’s a beautiful thing. I’d rather see that home than an empty lot any day.”
So, the next time you pull that dollar out of your wallet, pause for a moment. It can go a long way in the world. How will you spend it?
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New York State Wants to Invest $225 Million in This Emerging Industry

Posted on by robbie

Silevo, a high-tech solar panel start up, recently announced plans to build a 200-megawatt solar cell factory in Buffalo. New York state plans to invest $225 million in the facilities, which would house Silevo and LED firm Soraa, and employ 475 people at the site by 2015. The solar industry is still young and competitive, but New York is apparently ready to take the plunge.