Buffalo’s Recent Economic Boom Leaves Longtime Residents Behind

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

How Do You Fight Blight? This Man Has an Answer

It’s been 30 years since John George turned around his first crack house.
While living in the Old Redford neighborhood of Detroit — which, like almost every major city in the 1980s, was decaying in large part due to the crack epidemic — he decided one day he was going to give a blighted home a facelift. George repainted the house, repaired the broken windows and tended to the lawn.
From there, fixing up derelict houses became a weekly thing.
“I’m half Lebanese, half Italian and 100 percent Detroit stubborn. Once we get something in our heart and in our head, it’s almost autopilot,” George tells NationSwell, adding that he never considered simply moving away. “I didn’t think leaving the city was the proper thing to do.”
At first George’s goal was to stop property values in his neighborhood from diminishing any further. But as he started fixing up the houses that surrounded his own, he discovered his efforts could have a much larger impact in helping his hometown recover. It’s an idea that has caught on in other cities battling blight: Clean up the streets and empty lots, and you have a recipe for lowering crime and encouraging community engagement and business development.
As multiple studies in different cities have shown, vacant lots and dilapidated homes are key indicators of poverty and crime.
In Detroit, the problem was particularly pronounced. The mortgage crisis of the 1990s, when property ownership began to dramatically decline, was soon followed by the 2008 housing crisis. The city declared bankruptcy, resulting in illegal trash dumping in the streets and plenty of burnt-out and abandoned homes.
“Things started to deteriorate. Problems started to escalate. We had serious problems with our mayors, and the biggest question people had was how did Detroit get to where it is,” says George, who founded the nonprofit Detroit Blight Busters in 1988. “There’s a lot of blame to go around. But blaming people and things weren’t going to fix anything. So instead of blaming, I thought we should do something.”
Every Saturday, George and his Blight Busters cofounder would meet and then go fix something up. A park. A home. A street corner. No project was too small.
“We weren’t naive enough to think we would stop crime or anything, but we wanted to at least minimize the decrease of property values,” he says. It was an antidote to the city’s response, which was to simply board up the houses or demolish them completely. “We didn’t want to be part of the problem of tearing down houses, but be part of the solution to make them nice.”
With thousands of blighted buildings in the Motor City still standing, George and his crew of volunteers, who so far have more than 1,500 renovations under their belts, remain committed to revitalizing as many of them as they can.

A SCALABLE MODEL CATCHES ON

Other cities have taken up similar initiatives. Durham, North Carolina, was one of the first to ban plywood on abandoned homes, instead covering them up with clear polycarbonate. Officials there claim that the change has helped sell the vacant buildings.
In Philadelphia, workers are dispatched to clean up vacant lots and property owners who don’t take care of their land are fined. The city also works with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society through the Philadelphia LandCare program, which has “cleaned and greened” thousands of abandoned properties since 1999.
The result has been a noticeable decrease in crime and an upswing in economic mobility for the neighborhoods.
“Just by the changing the neighborhoods, people’s attitudes toward their community has changed,” says Thomas Conway, deputy managing director of the city’s Community Life Improvements Programs. “Its given them hope.”
Revitalization of the lots include clearing debris, grading the land, planting trees and erecting post-and-rail fencing, essentially transforming the land into de facto parks. In 2010, the city passed an ordinance that mandates private owners of abandoned buildings to install working doors and windows, or face steep fines.
“We’ve cleaned and gleamed about 8,000 properties and 23,000 vacant lots with the Horticultural Society, and at the cost of only a few million dollars,” Conway says. “Compare that to incarceration costs per person, or the cost of poverty, and the benefits far outweigh everything else.”
A decade-long study of the greening program in Philadelphia looked at lots in four areas that were revitalized. It found a direct association between blighted vacant lots and gun assaults; after those lots were cleaned up, there were statistically significant decreases in firearm violence and an uptick in residents’ overall health.
Another study, published in The American Journal of Public Health, backed up those findings. That study examined the results of Philadelphia’s blight-remediation programs on 5,112 vacant lots and buildings, and found that gun violence decreased by 39 percent when buildings were renovated and by almost 5 percent around vacant lots that were beautified. The researches concluded that “there is something unique to firearm violence that makes it especially treatable with programs that transform blighted urban environments.”
For every dollar spent on Philadelphia’s blight program, as much as $26 in net benefits were made.

AHEAD OF THE CURVE

Back in Detroit, George has seen similar returns through his work with Blight Busters. The organization has raised over $20 million from local businesses, sports teams and philanthropists to finance their continued revitalization efforts. He says there’s been a noticeable return on that investment.
An abandoned high school George helped clean up was eventually turned into a shopping center, a $33 million investment. And two blocks of now-prime retail space that Blight Busters renovated were recently snapped up for $3.5 million.
“Because of that $20 million investment, we’ve been able to attract millions of dollars more, [which goes] right back into our community,” George says.
The Blight Busters’ success didn’t just raise property values and make Detroit’s streets prettier and safer. It also became a model for other cities.
“Our investment, our time and energy, was worthwhile, because it not only saved our neighborhood but the whole city. When everyone left, we were holding down the fort till the calvary returned,” he says. “I know it’s because of our work that Detroit is on the right path to recovery. We were just a little ahead of the curve.”

From Blight to Beauty in the Motor City

In 1988, John George moved his family into a house five blocks north of the Old Redford neighborhood in Detroit. Shortly there after, a crew of drug dealers took up residence in a derelict property behind his home.
“My instinct as a father was to flee,” says George. Instead, he grabbed some nails, a hammer and plywood from a hardware store and boarded up the house.
Almost 30 years later, George is still fixing up deserted properties. Watch the video above to see how his organization, Detroit Blight Busters, is revitalizing the Motor City — one building at a time.
“If you never quit, you can’t lose ’cause you’re still in the game,” says George. “And Detroit is still in the game.”

Baltimore Youth Work Together for an Important Cause


Blue Water Baltimore is a non-profit organization that works with youth to provide leadership, education, and programs to help restore the quality of Baltimore’s rivers, streams and harbor. The initiative began as five separate Baltimore organizations working to improve their neighborhood water. Through a combined effort they realized they could have a larger impact and work to provide a model for collaborating on a shared vision, not only for the city of Baltimore, but on a national level. Perhaps the greater impact of the organization is that they inspire city residents to become advocates for positive action in their lives, neighborhoods, and the city as a whole. Read more about their mission.