Surprise! It’s a great place!

Back in March, at the invitation of my wonderful colleague, Dave Stebbins, the Vice President of the Buffalo Urban Development Corporation, I spent a couple of days poking around in Buffalo. It was my first trip there. Dave not only graciously showed me the city, but also invited me to sit in on a board meeting of BUDC. I was tremendously impressed by the BUDC, what it has accomplished, what the public and private sectors are doing apart and together and by the incredible urban legacy that the city embodies

The reason for the title is that for years we down-staters have been told that the upstate New York region – and particularly Buffalo – was a devastated economic disaster area. Senators and Governors (including Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton) have in their public remarks emphasized the problems upstate and worked to direct funding and programs there – including Governor Andrew Cuomo’s “Buffalo Billion.” Whatever has been the past in Buffalo, the future looks incredibly promising. I don’t mean by this to suggest that Buffalo and the rest of upstate New York are no longer in need of Federal and State support – but rather, that the efforts of public and private partners appears to be paying off.

Here is another place, like Cincinnati and Jamaica, where a local development agency appears to be the catalyst for downtown revitalization, economic development and public space improvement. As Dave took me around Buffalo he was able to point out, on block-after-block, properties improved by the work of BUDC and projects initiated by BUDC. What particularly impressed me was the organization’s board meeting – where it was clear from both who was in the room, what was on the agenda and what was said by the participants that both city government and major local businesses (mostly from outside the real estate sector) were working together to move projects forward – and were all in on bringing their resources to bear on bringing positive social and economic change – and from the bottom-up.

The importance of the support of City Hall for the work of a local development entity just can’t be overstated. It was clear from the way in which the representative from City Hall chaired the BUDC board meeting that the Mayor and his staff were comfortable letting the BUDC professionals do their work, without being second guessed or micro-managed. It is a tribute to the relationship built by Mayor Bryon Brown and BUDC president Peter Cammarata that the City and BUDC appear to work so well together. In my experience, this, along with a bottom-up, small step, place-making approach to economic development is the essential element to successful urban revitalization.

What Makes Buffalo Great

Buffalo’s civic “bones” are amazing. The quality of the art deco era and earlier structures is incredibly high – not the least of which is the beautiful City Hall (Dietel, Wade & Jones), from the observation deck of which one can get a clear sense of the city’s many assets. I stayed in the beautifully restored art moderne Hotel @ the Lafayette (Bethune, Bethune & Fuchs –Louise Blanchard Bethune, the principal designer, one of country’s first woman architects). The density of these well-preserved structures – many well-restored, allows for a real sense of scale and place in the Downtown.

But the Downtown, isn’t all there is to Buffalo. North of the Downtown are neighborhoods laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted. The result is not only an extensive system of grand public spaces and institutions, but a number of lovely, wide residential boulevards, with planted medians, carriageways and wide sidewalks surrounded by gracious homes in a wide range of styles. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House is justly famous, but there are other Wright houses along with others designed by Richard Upjohn, Stanford White, Lord & Burnham and Charles Atwood which are still in private use and, from a review of local broker’s website are incredibly affordable.

Buffalo has as an asset a base of a significant number of successful businesses on which to build – in addition to large educational and medical institutions. M & T Bank and Delaware North (which operates and owns entertainment venues) are both based in the city. HSBC Bank has operations facilities in Buffalo and by some measures is the city’s largest employer. The State University of New York has an enrollment of almost 30,000 students. Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, Kaleida Health, Buffalo General Hospital are among the large health care providers based in town. Several of them are engaged in major construction projects. The massive new Solar City project (manufacture of solar panels by a company associated with Elon Musk), while not yet in operation is also worthy of mention as a major new investment.

Some High Points

I particularly enjoyed seeing Larkin Square – a project developed by Howard Zemsky (the current president of the New York State Economic Development Corporation) and his associates at Larkin Development Group. The project is the adaptive reuse of a portion of a massive industrial property originally built for the Larkin Company – which started out selling soap and ultimately became a gigantic mail-order business selling household products that closed in the 1940’s. Larkin Square is an ambitious undertaking, in a challenging location. A former warehouse building converted into high quality office space with over 2000 tenants, the developers are employing placemaking tactics to activate the neighborhood. Developer, Leslie Zemsky, has been hugely creative in programming both public spaces and available retail space in order to draw people to the project.

Sullivan and Adler’s Guaranty Building (1896) is now the Buffalo home of law firm HodgsonRuss. It has been beautifully restored and the exterior and public areas are striking. The firm purchased the building 1998 and has clearly taken exacting care of it. It speaks to the spirit of the city that the partners in this firm have not only located their business in this lovely, historic structure, but have invested the resources required to appropriately maintain it. It is very impressive.

Dave took me to lunch at the Buffalo Arcade (E.B. Green and William S. Wicks) which has been carefully restored by BUDC and is now owned and operated by Sinatra & Co. Realty. The Arcade is a classic glassed retail arcade, modeled on London’s Burlington Arcade and much like Cleveland’s Arcade, with an adjacent food hall. The Market is located on Main Street, which in the 80’s was was converted to an unsuccessful (for all the usual reasons) pedestrian/transit mall. Cars have been re-introduced and the area has a local BID, Buffalo Place. The street still appears not to have much foot traffic. The area has great potential, though, and needs more dynamic programming – given the climate, a skating rink in a nearby public space could go a long way to animating the area – particularly at night.

Dave also introduced me to Aaron Bartley, the executive director of PUSH (People United for Sustainable Housing) Buffalo, a Buffalo native, community organizer and Harvard Law graduate, who is doing impressive work in rehabbing small, multi-unit housing structures and producing affordable units. PUSH is a remarkable organization that epitomizes an inclusive, bottom-up development philosophy with a focus on assisting low-income individuals and communities. Because of the real estate development orientation of most BIDs and economic development organizations, this kind of work is generally not part of their agenda – but in many, if not most places it should be. I would argue/predict that PUSH’s development entity, Buffalo Neighborhood Stabilization Company, which engages in careful, quality housing renovation, and includes retail space on the ground floor of its projects, where appropriate, is going to create a virtuous cycle of improvement in the neighborhoods in which it is working. This won’t be the much-reviled “gentrification;” but that is a topic for another post.

Excelsior

The political and private sector leadership of Buffalo have recognized what works in urban revitalization and have obviously put their collective shoulders to the wheel. What has been successful in Cincinnati and Buffalo is transferable to other cities and Downtowns. Someone needs to tell this to the folks in St. Louis and Newark.