Buffalo Rising Online

I would love to see a building take up this space. Fill in with office, residential and first floor Retail and or restaurant.

I work downtown and play downtown, but I am concerned that if I actually lived downtown, the noise from all the clubs and concerts and general hubbub of the bars would be a detriment to rest. I can hear that one rooftop club blocks away...

It's one thing to have a hip address, it's another to get up early in the morning for a job that can pay for that hip address. How do these new residential projects deal with the noise downtown?

Good opportunity for redevelopment. I wonder if the reassessments of parking lots downtown had some impact on the decision to sell. The block between Chippewa and Tupper is very, very long, so perhaps there will room in that 84 feet of frontage for an 8-foot-wide pedestrian path connecting Main to Pearl.

Did anyone notice the vast amount of valuable space the Washington Street post office consumes?

ugh yeah that post office is an anti-urban, unsightly spacehog.

NoDo hosts far too many poor land uses...it's gonna take alot of new construction to really spiff it up.

Hope that lot mentioned in the article won't just continue to be another dumb parking lot.

With the new assessments for downtown parking lots, it's not a surprise to see one for sale.

A modern post office really can't help being a "space-hog". They need: loading docks for the large trucks, enough room to maneuver those trucks, parking for the small deliver trucks, parking for employees, and parking for customers. Only the parking for customers is expendable, unless you ask the customers if they want to schlep their packages from/to distant parking spots.

ps, about a walkway from Main to Pearl: Is "Curtain-Up Alley" closed? That's close to the center of the block.

They should raise the assessments on downtown parking even more, especially within 2 blocks of the light rail, unless their designated park&ride!

If the increased taxation on parking lots pushed this one that much closer towards new construction, then maybe we can all drop our assumptions about the inherently harmful effects of taxation.

Even though we did not change the underlying premise of our tax code, this outcome has been predicted by James Howard Kunstler and others who advocate land value (or site value) tax rather than taxes on buildings. Taxing buildings rewards neglect instead of maintenance and demolition instead of new construction.

Here's how land value tax could push more of these dead zones back to life:

http://www.earthrights.net/docs/kunstler.html

I can't think of where else to post this:

WNY Heritage Press has MANY "new" old pics, lately!

see and enjoy them at: http://wnyheritagepress.org/photographs/photographs.htm

hipster, as downtowns go, buffalo's is relatively quiet, even on the busiest of nights. many of the people who choose to live downtown, do so because of this activivty, because of their desire to be close to it. buffalo has plenty of quiet neighborhoods, but i don't think downtown should be one of them.

veryprotourism

Hipster is correct, people that live in the city still get up for work. The noise from patio's till 4am is one of Buffalo's detriments. Most city's have a "designated" club area such as the "chipstrip". A developer or homeowner would be a fool to build or live close to that. To date this is the only city I have lived in where the bar scene seems to control any given neighborhood. Pure stupidity for a city that is trying to get more city residents. I fully understand "urban" living and that is why I live in the city, but really, noise should be pulled indoors after 11pm

Believe it or not, increased noise downtown from increased street life will actually help with the issue of noise downtown. Having slept in an apartment on Broadway in Greenwich Village, the high level of noise actually creates sort of a constant buzz of street activity, which is very easy to get used to.

In our downtown, however, all the noise comes from one street, or where I live in the University Heights, its quiet except for when a loud group of people walks by. If loud people where walking by 24/7, just like if my bedroom window overlooked the I-90, I would adapt to the noise and not even notice it after a while. This is part of city living, at least city living downtown. (Understandably there are and should be quiet neighborhoods in the city as well; downtown however should not be one of them)

I live downtown, and although I prefer a quiet environment, I think a lively, late-night downtown is what Buffalo needs... despite the fact that it may eventually send me to a quieter neighborhood nearer to Elmwood. Someone who likes late nights will take my place and the downtown community will grow. Jim is right... you start to get used to the constant drone of activity from the nearby bars and clubs, with only the sudden roar of motorcycles coming from the Square to disrupt the relative "quiet".

you are either alive and thriving which makes noise or you can shoot the proverbial cannon ball down main street and not hit anyone. I think for downtown we have been empty and quiet way too long.

Could someone explain to me how taxing land rather than buildings would help downtown? I've previously read about this "Georgist" scheme to tax the value of land, but I have never been able to wrap my head around this problem: if land downtown is taxed a lot (due to its inherent value), why wouldn't developers just offload it and head for the suburbs or exurbs or, hell, Genesee County, where land would presumably be taxed less? Am I missing something?