In the 6 previous segments of this series I've expounded on the benefits of my city childhood. I also recognize that I've been afforded access to those benefits by way of my relative privilege. I had great parents who provided grounded guidance, quality educational opportunities, and a comfortable, carefree living. These things allowed me to take advantage of the city's assets that have enriched my life. As we know, there are many others to whom the city can be a crushing weight. In parts of the city where society has become unwound the institutions of civilized human existence can be weak or nonexistent. Growing up in these impoverished parts of the city is a world removed from my experience.
The second installment in this series described my early upbringing in Lackawanna where poverty was rare, and black people were nonexistent. I use the word nonexistent on purpose because the idea of a black person walking the streets in the eastern part of Lackawanna in the 1960's or 70's was about as feasible as seeing a Martian walking those streets. Fast forward several years, and I find myself working on the black East Side with my father in his property management business. In this last installment of my personal experiences "growing up city" I thought I should add balance by adding some insights gained from a more troubled part of Buffalo.
The East Side is like Lackawanna in reverse. On the East Side, poverty is the norm and white people are nonexistent -- non-existent, that is, except for the landlords. Many would describe those landlords as slumlords. My father was a landlord, but he was not a slumlord. He worked very hard to manage his property in a way that produced good apartments, while providing us a living. He owned property on the West Side, in Elmwood Village and on the East Side. Each of these neighborhoods had a very different tenant base, requiring their own management techniques. I worked with my father in his business on various weekends and in summer, doing minor repairs, cleaning, hauling and painting. Some of his tenants became good friends and remain so to this day. Along with the good, came the bad. Our days could also be filled with the horror stories of the residential rental business. In each of these three neighborhoods tenants could be good or bad but the East Side was a very different place in which to do business. It was a place that took special knowledge and the shrewd streetwise attitude of my father in order to succeed.
Over the years, he purchased somewhere between 15 and 20 buildings at city auction. I don't think he ever paid more than $7000, even though some of them had up to 8 apartments. He would put a few thousand dollars into the buildings to make them livable and comfortable and instantly rent them out making his money back in a very short period of time. Many of his acquaintances would see what he was doing and started doing the same thing only to find that the money did not roll in as easily as it looked. What they did not see was that my father had to pretty much follow the mailman around on welfare day, the day the government check arrived. If he did not do this, rent would go unpaid more often than not.
Fires were common in his East Side properties. Central heating in many parts of the East Side is rare, which means space heaters are common. Space heaters are dangerous devices, especially when combined with a lackluster appreciation for their hazards. More than one fire was started by people drying their clothes by completely covering the heater unit with socks, shirts, and pants. Renting out an apartment on the east side is not the same as in other places. The idea of a lease or a contract is foreign in this part of the city. My father would often drive by a property to find the front door wide open. Upon inspection he would find that his tenant had moved out without notice and without paying rent. Often, when tenants moved out, an apartment needed to be completely renovated. Destruction and vandalism was common. Sometimes fixtures and doors would be stripped. On one occurrence a tenant waked him in the middle of the night. She was screaming that the boyfriend of an upstairs tenant was breaking windows in the building. He arrived the next day to find every window in the building broken! Needless to say you need a certain will and perseverance to deal with these kinds of things.
If you have never seen poverty up close and first hand (not just in pictures and movies and documentaries) the problems of places like the East Side can seem distant and abstract. By benefit of working with my father on his properties, I have seen real poverty up close. I have seen real people living their lives in a world that was nothing like the United States of America that I was growing up in. On the East Side, I saw ignorance that I could have never previously imagined. I have seen trash-filled apartments. I have seen apartments with the sole piece of furniture being a mattress in the corner. The people I met were people who had no concept of how to apply for or keep a job, people who had never held a job, people who had no concept of what it took to get into a college or even what college was.
The art of the scam was the most common skill on the East Side, and I saw up close the way my father understood this and mitigated its effects to the extent possible. On the East Side, children are taught at an early age how to scam the system. Many residents of the East Side see "The system" as the reason for every problem, and the white man is seen as the system's benefactor. Getting an education, going to college and starting a career was a natural path for me. To a kid my age on the East Side, getting on "the welfare" was a career choice. Not because of laziness but because that was what you did as a natural course of things.
As I write this, I can hear the predictable comments. "Get a job! Welfare cheats! Lazy! No good! Why should I care! Why should I pay!" along with at least one racist rant. Having seen the poverty of the East Side from the inside up close, I felt and understood the reality and complexity of the problem. It is a sickening sight to see a baby playing on the floor of a roach filled apartment because her parents never take out the trash. It is hard to feel compassion for people who do everything to guarantee failure. But, the children of the East Side are locked into a downward spiral that destines them in most cases to continue the failure of their parents and our society. These are problems set in motion by centuries of American racism that are now perpetuated by a community with limited means to break the negative cycle and reinforced by an outside society with means that refuses to take responsibility for creating the problem in the first place. I think of the babies I came in contact with 30 years ago and wonder what life brought to them. Most likely nothing good. In one case I know one of them was gunned down as a teen. Those babies are not responsible for the life that is being prescribed for them.
The images included here show the only remaining house from my
father's former buildings. He sold them as he retired and one by one they
went into neglect or burned or simply became vacant because the tenant moved
out and no one ever moved back in. The once densely built neighborhood
has been wiped away. The city tears down the houses and sometimes
replaces them with new suburban style units, and its former residents
have mostly moved on to some other part of the city and increasingly parts of
the inner ring suburbs. The cycle goes on and on and on, with no real
proposal for ending it.
Great article! I'm an avid follower of David Torke's Saturday morning East Side walks, and know the neighborhoods you're talking about. I don't know about other people, but I grew up with the idea that "the suburbs" are always cleaner, safer, and white, and "the city" is just dangerous, dirty, and old; but whenever I'm there I take the time to get that precept out of my mind and just really LOOK AROUND at what's there. And I'm disgusted.
EVERYONE deserves a clean, safe place to live, EVERYONE. Each neighborhood deserves the same basic attention and respect, and that some prosper and are lavished upon while others have unmown baseball fields, deplorable sidewalks and totally open city-owned property is astounding.
Go read David Sucher, who penned the idea that "everyone deserves places with civic dignity." Why are those giant granite flowerpots only on Elmwood Ave, and not Fillmore Ave? Why are flower baskets only maintained in Buffalo Place, and not North or South Parade? Why don't cops walk a beat anymore? How long was the wading pool in MLK park cracked and empty? I would be mad too, if my house overlooked a highway that allowed people workers downtown to speed out to the suburbs, leaving me with nothing but their exhaust.
Obviously there's other issues here; I don't know what it is to grow up black, on Welfare, or on the East side (white guy from Kenmore here). Social changes are necessary too, but it's sort of moot to push that until there is a commitment there to protect new homeowners and incubate new businesses. Social changes are also the bigger problem (it will take at least a generation to change the current mindset), but they need to occur IN CONJUNCTION with conspicuous investment (OTHER than Welfare).
Yes/no?