Buffalo's Tale of Two Cities

Bill de Blasio deployed the imagery of a Tale of Two Cities in his campaign for mayor, but his is not the only city of haves and have-nots in the Empire State. 

Buffalo is also a city of stark contrasts. 

Politicians looking to take credit portray Buffalo as a comeback city. It is … maybe, sort of. 

There is, of course, the Buffalo Billion, which is seeding three clusters of business activity in and around downtown involving clean-energy manufacturing, software development, and drug research and production. 

It will be years before we know whether Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s high-risk, high-rewards approach will pay off, but in the interim it has provided the community with a psychological boost. 

Elsewhere around town, the state-financed Canalside project is slowly taking shape at the foot of Main Street on the waterfront. Next door a twin hockey rink, hotel and retail complex is under construction, underwritten by the Buffalo Sabres’ billionaire owner, Terry Pegula. With taxpayer assistance, of course. 

Move up Main Street to the other end of downtown and you’ll find the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, with its 85 businesses and institutions and 12,000 employees. Many have relocated from within the region at, again, considerable taxpayer expense. 

In between, Delaware North Companies, owned by billionaire power broker Jeremy Jacobs Sr., is building a shiny new headquarters. At the risk of repeating myself, I’ll report that that project too is being subsidized by taxpayers. 

So, it’s good to be a billionaire in Buffalo. Or a recipient of the governor’s billion. 

It’s also not too bad if you’re living in tony Elmwood Village on the city’s West Side or off Hertel Avenue on the North Side. Property values are climbing, and the commercial districts are thriving in these predominantly white neighborhoods. 

Then there is the rest of Buffalo. 

Poverty is pervasive. New U.S. Census numbers show that 26.4 percent of families in Buffalo live in poverty, and that overall the city is the fourth poorest in the country. Any way you cut the numbers—poverty rate, unemployment rate, actual number of city residents working—they lag behind where things stood prior to the Great Recession of 2008–09. 

Buffalo’s public schools, which are 78 percent minority, have resegregated to levels not seen since a landmark lawsuit targeting separate but unequal schools was initiated in the 1970s. The high school on-time graduation rate hovers around 54 percent. The state has declared 44 of 56 schools as failing; only about 12 percent of students across the district are deemed proficient in reading, and 10 percent in math. 

While either end of Main Street is booming, the rest of downtown struggles with an estimated 22 percent office vacancy rate. One Seneca Tower, the former HSBC Center and tallest building in Buffalo, is 95 percent vacant and on the cusp of bankruptcy. 

Little is happening along neighborhood commercial stripes aside from Elmwood or Hertel. Block after block after block of main arteries on the East Side are lined with abandoned buildings and vacant lots. Many inner city neighborhoods struggle as well, contributing to the Buffalo-Niagara region’s 8.7 percent residential vacancy rate, which amounts to around 45,475 empty dwellings, more than three times the number in 1970. 

This state of affairs is ironic given that Buffalo elected its first black mayor nearly nine years ago. But unlike de Blasio, Byron Brown did not embark on a mission to help the have-nots, even though they comprise his political base. 

He has shied away from tackling the schools’ problems, shown an unwillingness to address poverty, and has been content to follow the lead of other politicians and the downtown business establishment. Like the Greyhound Bus commercial, he’s left the driving to others. 

You could say his strategy has worked—for him, anyway—given that Brown has been re-elected twice. 

But when you look at his city, you see a great and growing divide between the haves and have-nots. 

Buffalo’s recovery is indeed a Tale of Two Cities.

Jim Heaney is the founder, editor and executive editor of Investigative Post, a nonprofit investigative reporting center focused on Buffalo and Western New York.