3 Times the Stuff - Fewer People

Are there differences between sprawl centers like Raleigh-Durham, Indianapolis, Atlanta and Buffalo?

None except they keep adding people to partially pay for it. Buffalo has fewer people to pay for more stuff. What's more the population of Buffalo has become less affluent which means people with less are asked to pay to upkeep more.

It is madness and one of the reasons for high taxes in WNY.

Most metropolitan areas in the US have grown, many have even doubled/tripled/quadrupled since 1950. Ours has remained the same for the past 60 years. It's tough to think of no growth in two thirds of a century as good news. Buffalo has shrunk. The towns around Buffalo have grown. Where's the news here?

Agreed. How much money was spent reconstructing and widening Transit Road between Main and the Thruway to accommodate people who didn't live there 50 years ago? How many existing roads and sidewalks could have been repaved elsewhere in the region had we not had to do that?

"It is time for WNY to wake up to the sprawl disaster and start leading the country to a better way"

I know you like to cry about this when you have the opportunity but the fact that someone who left the region feels they have the right to shake their finger at those who stayed but moved outside of the core is a bit ironic.

While you are correct in saying the metro population has essentially remained the same, you fail to make one other conclusion. That being the COB has one of THE densest populations in the US.

Buffalo has a population density of 7,206.4 people per sq mi. While places like Boston, New York, Chicago and San Francisco all have a higher density...places like Atlanta (3,921/sq mi), Charlotte (2,515.7/sq mi) and Indianapolis (2,152/sq mi) and have considerably less.

Added to this, there has been population loss because while Metro Buffalo has remained the same, the US population has doubled. Standing still should be considered growth opportunity lost for the purpose of a rational discussion.

Point being, the COB has a lot things it can do to help solve the problem and make the city a better place for all. Which in turn would prevent future sprawl and attract people back to the core.

The US population is expected to double, again, in the next 50 years to have an estimated 616M in 2060. Those people have to live somewhere. That right there is the ballgame to be played.

Some examples you ask?

1- When building subsidized housing, which Buffalo LOVES to do, build for density instead of trying to give the less fortunate a slice of suburbia on the taxpayers dime.

2- Remove the BS wage laws, which are common in the city, that prevent great organizations like ReUse from demolishing home after home in a green and productive manor that also allows for job training.

2b- Once organizations like ReUse remove the blight, landbank everything possible to remove the burden of infrastructure.

3- Once landbanked, create zoning that makes sense for a city. This means no single family homes anymore. No matter how much City Hall like to line the pockets of developers and show up at the ribbon cutting.

Yes..sprawl is an issue. We all get it. But sprawl needs solutions. For the record, *****ing at those in the burbs who stayed is not a solution. It is many things, two of which being childish and ignorant to reality, but they are not solutions.

The COB needs to plan for growth outside of the existing population while keeping the current set happy. The solution is making the region attractive for outsiders not shifting those who already live in the region around.

But the real question is how does sprawl get financed? You cannot have sprawl without the construction of roads, bridges, sewars, water mains, sidewalks, street lights, curbs, power lines, highways, etc.

How do they get financed? Federal Gas Tax? State Gas Tax?
Who decides what roads get repaired and what new roads get built?

Until the taxes are apportioned with priorities given for existing infrastructure then sprawl cannot be controlled.

Already the federal highways and roads which were financed from a federal gas tax is now insufficient to maintain the existing roads.

Already the state roads financed from the gas tax cannot maintain existing roads.

And thats just roads...its not other infrastructure.

If we cannot afford to maintain what we have then why are we allowing the road and infrastructure network to be expanded?

I share Steel's distaste for sprawl and have a, well I guess conspiracy, theory:

Low interest rates since the early 80's...
Ownership culture - mortgage deduction - pursuit of property...

[You know as an aside the original draft of the Declaration of Independence read: life, liberty, and the pursuit of property, He didn't really give a rats ahs about happiness, that was put in version 2 to politik the poor]

Public land development for private industries..
Jobs "creation" rhetoric of gov't folk for roads and sewers...
Family farm loss to industrial agribiotech, enables sprawl....

Well in short I'm saying people make boat, yacht loads of money off sprawl. Sprawl was "multicolinear" as I say in my field with the economy bust of this past decade.

People don't leave cities because of crime and trash, they leave because the economic development leaves the city and lures them away in concert.

Buffalo is righting its wrongs, it's just gonna take more time than desired. Buy a house now (and rent it out, then move back when you want to).

So Buffalo has spread out over the past 60 years. Are you saying that without sprawl we would be a thriving metropolis on par with Boston, Chicago, Raleigh, or Atlanta? I wonder if the situation with our area might be worse if we had more density and fewer choices for residents. Would we be better off, given our "bigger is better" culture that most Americans have been fostering since the 70s? Would most WNYers, currently living in the 1800 - 2800 square foot house in the 'burbs want to live in a 800 square foot duplex or a 1,200 square foot house in Buffalo?

Would our schools be better, would our politicians be more responsive and less corrupt? Would we be better off having residents subjected to factory pollution and untreated contaminated sites for decades? Would the social issues that we face, namely crime, gangs, welfare culture, etc be any different?

It is my understanding that there are many reasons that people have left for the suburbs, not just issues with the city, but the desire to have a larger house, a larger yard, an inground pool, shag carpeting, and a microwave. This is part of the American culture since the 'me' generation. Let's keep history in perspective as we attempt to armchair quarterback development for the past 60 years.

Why did Geico and Citi choose Crosspoint over the City of Buffalo?

and before someone tells me Roswell has been there for years - it's a hospital, with patients, who pay large sums of money to be serviced there. Yes, great research, with very little $$$$$$ to show for it.

To "Really?"

I enjoy reading your posts. I've been a follower of this site for a while, I just haven't been posting. It's nice to read people stepping back and being objective as opposed to using their emotions. I agree sprawl is wrong and wastefull, but you can't vilify people for choosing that life, either. It's more complicated than, 'sprawl is evil.'

-Tim in North Buffalo

What is "stuff"? That's the question well worth asking here. The obvious bete noire of sprawl opponents are roads and utilities which do cost a lot to build and maintain but The problem goes much deeper than that. Ask yourselves, where is the investment of a metro of 1 million people? Is it all going to fund the physical manifestattions of sprawl, which while it creeps outward, certainly hasn't creeped by very much in the last 30 years? Why not put up an urban boundary map from 1980? 1970? 1960? probably most of this odious 'Post War sprawl'occurred between 1950 and 1980. But the latter thirty years of money wasted went where? Where did it all go? Look around you. What is new and shiny and expensive? Not the houses, nor the malls and businesses many of which haven't been refreshed in decades. Look at the hospitals and schools. Look at the matrix of institutions and their bloated salarys, pricey new buildings and ever-increasing staffs. Follow the money and you WON'T find it in a sewer in Clarence but less comfortable places where values intersect with lavish spending.

Fix the B.S. going on in the city and focus on FORCING commerce to return to the Buffalo area and I bet the rapid sprawl slows and people start thinking that an investment inward might actually be worth it. An investment in Cheektowaga say 20-30 years ago was probably a good one. Nowadays as the east side has been burned out, abandoned and crime ravaged for decades and now spreads to the city-line I wonder who feels the city line in Cheek-ta-Vegas is a good investment? Don't believe me? Follow the crime trends and the movement of criminal activity and property degradation over time from downtown to Cheektowaga since the 1950's and 60's. Law abiding citizens and those who dont want to worry about the B.S. day in and out who have the financial resources are gonna go...you got it...further out and there you have the sprawl.

Sprawl has been driven by racism, materialism, and the desire to seek isolation from our fellow man. I get tired of hearing the same old myth of the "bigger house", "bigger yard", or "better schools". Buffalo has large homes, decent yards, and once had decent schools. In the older suburbs the houses are smaller, the yards average, and the schools fair. The newer suburbs are more about ostentatious display of wealth (good taste not included) and living among only those of equal affluence.
It is all about I got mine and the hell with everybody else.

Just wait until the red expands even more with this upcoming census... THIS IS 10 YEAR OLD DATA!

People have been saying this for 10 years. No one listens as long as they can keep running away guilt free.

One thing that's almost never mentioned in stats about sprawl and population decline: household size. The median household size in Erie County shrank from 3.2 in 1950 to 2.4 in 2000. The same number of people are occupying more housing units. The county had 261,297 total housing units in 1950, and 415,868 in 2000.

That doesn't excuse the disproportionately large expansion of the urbanized area relative to population, but it explains one reason why cities and town have shrinking populations, and why the footprint of the urbanized area continues to expand.

Remember, too, that you can't force suburbanites to move back to the East Side.

Not everyone who lives outside the city lives in a subdivision or wants better schools, etc. I live in a 110 year old house with no close neighbors, no sidewalks, and would never dream of living in the city. Some people just don't want to live in an urban environment (or don't want to anymore). I like living in a more rural setting. A lot of new builds are not in developments either-in my area there are 10+ houses that were built in the last few years and no new roads, major sewer systems, etc. were built for them. People act like everyone "back in the day" lived in cities-well, no they didn't. People have always had a choice to live in cities, small villages, or in a rural setting.

There is a difference between people deciding to live where they want and Sprawl. Sprawl is subsidized development for the sake of development, for the perceived need to build more houses and Rite Aides. Did a grass roots organization petition Marrano homes to build a bunch of developments in Lancaster? I don't think so. Was there a market or was a market made? People here choose to live in Marin or La Honda, and it's not Sprawl. I think Steele is saying something else. Live where you want, but don't spend your tas based economic development money building new East West Senecas because it's the path of least resistance and the way to do it has been illustrated for you.

Before my Steele love is misconstrued I will just say that I'd gladly knock down the Statler to build something even better (as veiwed in 100yrs because it will likely be aggregate and glass in materials...oh well).

When we criticize sprawl it isn't about the older areas built in traditional neighborhood design. These areas are much like the city in that they are densely built with central commercial areas.
The problem is the newer subdivisions built in the past 40 years or so. These are the inefficient land hogs that require more of everything to enable this lifestyle. This type of developement is not sustainable or responsible and reveals arrogance as well as denial by its defenders.

A lot of the comments look like reruns of the sprawl agrument last time here. So I'll pile on with mentioning this anti-sprawl organization ranks Buffalo in the 20% least-sprawled of the biggest U.S. metro areas (17th least sprawled out of 83):
http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/sprawlindex/MeasuringSprawl.PDF

So decreasing it much here sounds pretty unlikely if it's already very low compared to most American metro areas.

As Dan and others said, there's many reasons for it. At a basic level, in decades after 1950 average people's incomes grew and they became able to afford cars, bigger houses, bigger yards, etc. Back in the decades previous they didn't have the option for anything other than urban living. Because it isn't everyone's preference, the effect shown by the red-orange map shouldn't be surprising.

Has anyone read the blog that this post is based on?

http://joeplanner.blogspot.com/2010/02/sprawl-and-r-word-buffalo-niagara-case.html

Do you know about the subdivision process in most cities, towns and villages? In most cases, developers pay for improvements; roads, curbs, sidewalks, and utilities. The municipalities don't pay to build the roads or utilities in new subdivisions. However, after the road is dedicated to the public, maintenance becomes the municipality's responsibility, unless there are problems with substandard construction, and the municipality required a performance bond. It's something of a local urban legend that the suburbian towns pay for construction of new subdividion roads.

Yes, it costs more per household in the post-WWII 'burbs to maintain a suburban residential street, because the same distance of roadway will service fewer residences, and the roads are often unnecessarily wide. However, a similar situation is also arising in the city, in areas of the city where the urban prairie is expanding, and housing density is decreasing. Thus, the shrinking city movement.

Frontage residential and commercial development along long-established roads is actually the most "subsidized" form of development, because the developer doesn't have to pay for the infrastructure. Such development makes backlot development difficult in the future, and destroys rural and agricultural landscapes to a much greater extent than conventional subdivisions. Frontage development in Grand Island, Pendleton, Clarence, Newstead, Boston, Aurora, Orchard Park, Elma and Wales has done far more to harm rural character, prevent future densification, and blur the boundary between city and countryside than any subdivision in the first ring towns.

Another "I hate the suburbs" article from Steel. Surprise, surprise. The same tired old responses from Ilubpitbulls, Steel, Blackrocklifer, and others. Lather, rinse, repeat! Blame the suburbs for the failure that we call Buffalo. Blame poverty on the rich. Blame everyone except those who are actually responsible.

There is nothing like hearing a guy who moved to Chicago criticize someone for moving to Amherst.

There is more to the story of the city of Buffalo losing people to the suburbs. It also has to do with Buffalo losing people, period. Most of these people have moved south because, as everyone knows, Buffalo has lost a lot of it's industry since about 1970. People need to live where they can make a living and often Buffalo is not that place. Also, younger people tend to like living in the city where the "action" is. Later, when they start families, many prefer to move to the suburbs and the country because it is a better environment (in many ways, but not all) to raise children. (I, as a matter of fact, vastly preferred growing up in the country rather than the city). But if you can't find work in your field in the entire WNY area, then it doesn't matter where you WANT to live, you have to move to a place where there are some jobs. So hence you the population decline of the city of Buffalo. Sprawl is not a bad thing, it's just a reality in most every city in the US. I don't even mind population loss because I think a smaller Buffalo is a better Buffalo. Some of the bigger cities (i.e., Detroit, LA) have so many problems it's redonculous (know what I mean, huh?). Let's work with what we have and not worry about things that we can not change. It's probably more important to plan ways to get the people living in the suburbs to come downtown on the weekends and spend some money. (fyi: I have mentioned in previous comments the idea that a really nice world class Science and Technology Museum built right downtown could attract a lot of families to the downtown).
There are a lot of pessimistic naysayers writing in these comment sections but pay no attention to them. If you compare downtown Buffalo to even 10 years ago you can see all the improvements that have been made. And if you look back to about 1980, there's been a really huge change to the downtown. Back in 80's the only reason I ever went downtown was to go to the Continental.

This guy's got a f'ed up idea of "urbanized"...

I guess you anti-sprawl guys would just hate people like me: I have ZERO desire to be packed in like a farm animal, thanks. When you see silly declarations like "This means no single family homes anymore", I hope you continue to fail miserably.

Some people just want to live in a brand new house--you can't fault them for that. Where are the new houses?? In the suburbs. In other cities, developers are tearing down old homes in populated, in-demand neighborhoods and replacing them with new, in-demand designs, amenities, etc. There are actually a lot of areas in Buffalo where this could work--think of the vast wasteland of East Side. Instead of putting up low-income, subsidized, pre-fab homes, why not take a swath and get some creative people to build a modern, amenity filled, neighborhood with homes styles and sizes that are in demand. Not everyone one wants a 75 yr. old cape cod. Give the public what they want in areas that could use a resurgence and in-fill.

Honestly, everything mentioned in all the above comments boils down to the complete and utter lack of organized planning in the region. The City barely has a Planning Department, the suburbs are hit an miss, and the County barely has a department as well. No one, other than UB and Buff State is even looking at the "Growth without Population Increase" problem. The City has no plan for housing development, very little neighborhood planning, and a 60 year old zoning code. The suburbs take almost any development reguardless of the impact or the design. Apathy by the population has allowed this to go on for far too long. STEEL is right, this isn't City vs. Suburbs, its a regional issue that needs regional planning.

One more thing people don't seem to realize about suburbanization: the households leaving the city for the suburbs were usually replaced, typically with smaller households. It wasn't where Joe Blow and his family left their Riverside bungalow for a shiny new Pierce & Pierce ranch in Tonawanda in 1956, nobody took their place, and the old Blow house has been sitting empty since.

Buffalo's urban prairie and resulting widespread decrease of housing units got its start in earnest in the 1980s. In the neighborhoods that lost the most housing units, the last residents of a housing typically didn't head for the 'burbs, but rather an outlying city neighborhood. They left Cold Spring and the Fruit Belt not for Amherst or Clarance, but for Kensington and Delavan-Bailey.

In Broadway-Fillmore, little old Polish ladies that went to Cheektowaga, a nursing home or a casket at Orlowski-Suchocki were usually replaced by low-income African-American families before their former houses were abandoned. Very seldom did an abandonment result from flight to the suburbs, but rather neglect of the house by later property owners, most often exploitative absentee landlords.