Um, if the population grew, we could then offord to HIRE MORE police and fireman and fix up the water system and more. More people living here, equals MORE MONEY. Why do you think most of the city was left to rot away for so long? Because people moved away. Something to think about. ChocolateShake

1) We'd need a lot of new people to create traffic a traffic mess.

2) With new people come the new ideas, new start ups and new jobs. But we seem content waiting for some established companies to just plop down here and bring us 25,000 jobs.

3) New people bring new money and purchasing power. Want more successes on Elmwood, Hertel, etc? You need more people and money. Want infill? Need more people and money.

Our infrastructure is very underused, our arts underfunded, etc. A slow decline will not help this. New residents will. I don't think we need to worry about becoming Atlanta at this point in time.

I keep vacillating about if I personally want to increase our population just for the sake of increasing our population. I would love to see a discussion about the pros and cons of this initiative.

On the one hand I like the affirmation that other people think I am living in a great city.

But on the other hand, I don't need their affirmation because I already know that.

Will more people moving here hinder the slow paced quality of life that we enjoy here? I suppose it’s a great thing when demand for our vacant housing is increased. What about traffic? We love having low traffic here. Will more taxpayers mean lower taxes or higher taxes?

On one hand, our popularity excites me but on the other hand I like being America's best-kept secret.

Good the link worked. Ok, Bloviator, you now know as much as I do so give it a try and after a few times you'll get the idea.

The rest of you - isn't this population growth pro vs con all moot? There's no real sign of growth except in boosters' imaginations. Trends are still for more shrinking to come. I don't say that as doom and gloom, but it's happening and that's life. I'm on the side that says growth would be good for a city like Buffalo if it happened, but what difference does it make if people think it'd be good or bad if it's nowhere in sight?

Graph is from wikipedia's Buffalo page, btw. Tried to post the link, but BR continues to be overly rejecting of using multiple links at once.

Almost every northern US city is losing population, including Chicago and Philadelphia.

I agree with MJ (as usual it seems) that bringing new people would bring in fresh ideas and perspectives about us. Not only for jobs and money but self esteem. How many people around here still think there is absolutely no reason to go into the city unless for a Sabres game or a prostitute. Sad truth is it is our own culture of self pity that drives a lot of people away and businesses out. We have such an underutilized system of infrastructure that it makes sense to get more users of it to help pay for it. Everyone likes to complain about the taxes around here. Well when we have a city proper that has enough power, sewers, roads, school etc (obviously need repairs but mostly still there) which could handle 200,000+ more people (500,000) and the money we spent to build ALL of the suburban infrastructure for only another 400,000 people you see how over built we are as a region. Sure this leads to the 20 minute commute. But it also is why our taxes are so high.

So overall the more people in this system the more people that pay into it and the cheaper it becomes for everyone. Does that means more cars on the road. Sure. But there is a long way to go before we can consider ourselves with having a traffic problem.

Very cool pic...

WRONG STUDY. Buffalo ranked 5 in the "Best Cities for Relocating Families" list. It is a completely different list and not based on people voting on a website. The 2008 list for this study is a joke. Tulsa was like number 3 and Fairport the Rochester suburb made the top 50.

Bloviator - You're a smart person so it's hard for me to believe you consider that a serious worry. I'll be more blunt about what MJ hinted at. This is 2008, not 1908. There's no need for any worry about Buffalo starting to grow in population size any time soon due to winning obscure Internet polls or any other reason. For reassurance, see trend since 1950 and steady linear shrink rate from 1980 through 2006. The last time Buffalo grew much was between 1920 and 1930. There's no real evidence that the shrinkage rate has even bottomed out yet. It's been over 50 years since Buffalo has had even one report of growth. Until some day when at least two consecutive Census updates show growth, it's just not an issue. To the contrary, the opposite continues to be an issue - how best to deal with continued shrinkage.

Feel free to vote early and often in the Best Place To Live poll without vacillating.

sorry for the mis spelling , was writing in a hurry.

MJWorthington,

Your comments are always well thought out and I enjoy reading them.

Do you think we should intentionally target people with certain work skills and professions? And or, perhaps we should target certain types of job creating businessmen? Maybe certain types of people can bring something specific to the table that we need. Or do you think that 98.6 is really the only criteria that we should be concerned about?

Bloviator - Thanks. I'm not a tech expert so I mess up a lot trying to use html and won't be the best at explaining what you asked about images and links. But I'll try a little, and hope not to confuse things. A few simpler html tag types people use on here are for italic, bold, and blockquote which does this:

Please teach me how to post pictures and links in BRO. I've never been able to figure out how to do that.

Those are easy - just learn tag format tag names which for those are: i, b, and blockquote

Images and links are a little harder but not much. First suggestion is it's always easy to find html how-to and examples on line. Try Googling 'img tag', or if you don't know 'img' is the tag name, you can Google: html image tag.

Another is to open someone else's html source in browser and copy/paste what they did then edit how you want. To see the image tag html I used above, use browser menu bar to open View -> Source. Then use editor window's Edit -> Find menu to look for Atwater which should lead you to see the image link of population graph, surrounded by the tag. It starts with a left pointed bracket and ends with a slash followed y right pointed bracket.

Links are blocked a lot by BR when I try using them. Their comment spam filtering is very sensitive. But other than that, it's as easy to make links. Its name is A or a (upper/lower case doesn't matter), and again to get explanation and example - just Google something like this, including quotes: "html a tag"

AtwaterLouse,

No, you are the smart one as proven by your HTML wizardry. Please teach me how to post pictures and links in BRO. I've never been able to figure out how to do that.

Thanks, Howard

Why do you think 100,000 new residents would all be new students? What makes you think that I said that would happen overnight? I am not talking about refugees. City services would grow with the population.

As for the infrastructure of the city it is very commonly cited that the city could handle growth of that magnitude. As Atwater's graph indicates the city, in fact, has had that many more residents in the past. As recently as 1970 the city had 492,000 people. Clearly the infrastructure was able to manage then.

Buffalo is 52.5 Square miles. In 2000 Buffalo, by contrast had 292,000 people in the city but 1,130,000 people in Erie and Niagara counties. By contrast the largest city in the lower 48 is Jacksonville which is 874 square miles. The population of Jacksonville is 794,555. The entire metro area is 1,300,000.

The city of Buffalo is less than a tenth of the size of Jacksonville yet has more than 1/10th its population. None of this is to suggest that Buffalo isn't shrinking, just that numbers can be manipulated to tell a particular story.

AtwaterLouse,

No, you are the smart one as proven by your HTML wizardry. Please teach me how to post pictures and links in BRO. I've never been able to figure out how to do that.

Thanks, Howard

As a link example, I'll try putting a link here and if BR lets it through you can see that also by viewing html source:

Erie County population details

If the above link works, it shows a table agreeing with what Texpat said that the metro polulation hasn't fallen as fast as the city's. But it shows Erie Co population fell a lot since 1970 - around 20% which is near the biggest drop of any large county in the U.S. over that time. In 1970 it had 1.11 million, and census estimate in 2007 is 0.91 million

The city and infrastructure can handle another anothe couple of hundred thousand people easily.

One thing that I do want to point out is that using city specific population numbers is misleading. The entire metro has lost population, to be sure, but not in the same proportion as the city. Buffalo as a city, covers the smallest land area of any of the top 50 cities. It also doesn't have the power of annexation which many other cities have so it can't grow by annexing adjacent developed areas. Annexation is a little trick used in Texas for cities to add revenue and grow faster than their organic growth rate would allow.

Just yesterday on www.buffalo.bizjournals.com/buffalo it was reported that the Buffalo Metro area has GAINED over 4,000 NEW JOBS this year and it beat out the rest of Upstate New York. Just something to add in case anyone was wondering.

Quality of life, distance to Toronto, Nigara falls, NYC, Niagara Wine trail both american side and canadian side, cheap housing, great sports, great casinos, outdoor trails, Lake Erie, Niagara River, fishing, boating etc...........

Compare the Relocate-America top 100 cities and the top 100 foreclosure cities and you'll quite a few the same, including number 1, Charlotte.

Quality of life, distance to Toronto, Niagara falls, NYC, Niagara Wine trail both american side and canadian side, cheap housing, great sports, great casinos, outdoor trails, Lake Erie, Niagara River, fishing, boating etc...........

Much like the "Top Arts Destination" this survey is to pick the Top cities by "YOUR CHOICE". Sometimes the over surveys (with out a public input) may over look the obvisious reasons for picking a city because they never been too and only go by computer input and diagrams. This is "YOUR" chance to make Buffalo #1 as the Greatest Place to Relocate and Live. It's a simple survey and if we can make it to number 1 as an Arts Destination, we can make it to number 1 in this one too.

TexPat, that is very interesting and I would like to know Buffalo's population when you add square miles to be equivalent to some of their closest counterparts... I dont believe it wil make a huge difference, but may have a enough gain to make a questionable difference

I think it's not as bad as the graph indicates. Buffalo is largely a Catholic city. In the 1950's and 1960's there were probably tons of familes that had four or more kids. How many families have four kids today? I would like to see a chart that breaks down the population decline by age ranges.