Now that Mayor Brown is here to stay for another 4 years, with a promise of finishing things he's only just begun as mayor of Buffalo, we thought it might be good to look at a proactive wish list of those things started, and others yet to be implemented, for the benefit of the city.
Planning
One of the most prevalent campaign issues brought up by mayoral challenger Mickey Kearns is a lack of planning within the city, including zoning changes. To be fair, it's not as if this issue wasn't recognized by Brown, but implementing a plan has been illusive, especially when one considers that our great hopes for a city planner were dashed when the new recruit barely (never?) warmed his chair before he bolted back to Seattle.
The city has
done well with brownfield remediation and availability of shovel ready sites,
but there is a whole grid to be considered in upcoming comprehensive planning.
The Urban Design Project of the UB School of Architecture and Planning
wrote such a plan, under the direction of Robert Shibley, and this year it won
a national award from the Congress for the New Urbanism
(CNU). Who/where is the person who will help to implement it?
Demolition Strategy
In March of '08, PUSH's Aminah Johnson was quoted as saying, "If City Hall can't come up with a plan for rehabilitating [property it has taken title to] on the West Side, we as residents will have to do it. The Mayor's 5 in 5 demolition plan will not bring back our neighborhood without real investment in rehabilitation and strategic planning."
West Side and everywhere, but especially around schools. We've talked about landbanking and right-sizing neighborhoods for years, and lauded Joy McDuffie for her work "Neighborhoods of Choice". Taking houses down in fringe areas destroys the possibility of density and discourages amenities such as grocery stores and various retail, making these neighborhoods of circumstance, not of choice. There has to be a strategic plan for building up and shifting neighborhoods, rather than simply weeding out the abandoned houses by leveling them. One person's green space may be another's big, gaping hole.
Giving special attention to the neighborhoods around newly renovated schools as called for in the Joint Schools Construction Board project would help greatly. The city plan calls for neighborhood revitalization and housing rehabilitation along with school reconstruction.
Permits
Permitting needs to be clear, easy, explainable and good for business. The idea of applying and paying for a permit that isn't going to help business will do harm; either people will try to skirt the permit process, or they'll take business elsewhere. In cases other than selling ice cream or holding a concert, certain permitting problems, hold-ups and miscommunications can and do drive business away.
Absent from a BR story this past year about a new business owner (who wishes to remain anonymous), is his reaction to the question, "So, was the city cooperative with your renovation?" The previously mild-tempered person answered that it was a "****ing nightmare in hold-ups and arbitrary trips back and forth." The city needs to understand that not every business owner is a developer. Also to be considered is that a lot of business owners are sinking their capital into the business, with a lot of DIY involved; not everyone has a contractor.
Another wish
today is that the city would hire one person, right now, outside of the permit
department, who would simply act as a new business advocate between permits and inspections and the business owner.
Something New
Superintendent of Schools Dr. James Williams has started the wheels in motion for better students, but we hear the same thing over and over from teachers, administrators and commenters here on BRO: it's the parents. Look at this model for a Promise Neighborhood that Geoffrey Canada implemented in Harlem. He started across the board in his outreach, but he captured the attention of expectant parents. Imagine, Canada found the resources to begin child-rearing at its earliest stages, and it worked. Think of what this would mean for our schools.
What else should we hope for in the next 4 years?
Sadly, plannig has and always will remain a politically motivated process in Buffalo, done either to help political election cycles or as a guise for false progress.
Elena, sorry but your outside the loop on planning. First, the city undertook and adopted a major comprehensive plan in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Is anyone even sure it was adopted, or like so many other things, is the process of planning more important than the implementation.
Shibley and his cast of graduate students put together your standard pie-in-the-sky, academic plan based on best pratcies, not what can be accomplished given political (see above), economic or social capital. And CNU a heaven for awarded plans with great ideas and graphics and slow to then recognize them as utter failures when then in fact bomb, as this one will. CNU is the new method of gentrification and segregation, Shibley should be proud of that award. Take at look at CNU projects in terms of wh lives their, the affordibility and cultural impacts. It's a joke and frankly lacks and credibility to address the issues it's supposed to remediate.
So long as the planning department remains in fear of their jobs and unwilling to buck the mayor's office and his list of preferred consultants, developers and lawyers, nothing will change in the planning arena.
How long ago, regardless of the city planner position, were proposals submitted for a new city zoning code? Is there no one in the planning department capable of reviewing and selecting a consultant? If so, that's a sad indictment of the skills on the 9th floor. I tend to believe that't not the case, but rather, the process was done as everything with the Mayor, motion in place of action.
Four more years huh. Lucky Buffalo.