Buffalo Rising Online

Nice to see values holding. I'm in real estate and this article makes me feel lucky (because thirteen is my lucky number: shoe size is 13, name has 13 letters, born on the 13th. . .). Maybe I'll get lucky with a real estate post: anyone want a killer deal on Grant Street?

Saw a lot of discussion a few blogs ago regarding Grant Street. Here's a killer opportunity for someone with vision, time and perseverance: former D&K building, on Grant (almost at the corner of Ferry). Three story turn of the (20th) century brick building, 30,000 square feet (10k'/floor), usable retail on the first floor (was in use until last year; electricity and heat still on; sprinklered, too): Asking sale price REDUCED to $85,000!! (founder of D&K died, estate wants out of all real estate).

Feel like you were born too late to get a good deal on something for the future? Here's your chance!

reflip: that's good.

I was shocked at the sudden level of interest in Buffalo real estate from outside Buffalo two years ago. I sold an apartment building I owned personally. At least a dozen seriously interested parties hailed from NYC. Three more, including the eventual buyer, lived in California (the buyer had four other apartment buildings in Buffalo, all acquired in the past few years. She sold them all a year after she bought mine because her restaurant in Mammoth, Ca. was foundering for lack of snow and skiers. She sold my building for $55k more than she paid, to another of the prospects (from Long Island) who wanted it when I sold). I had people from Phoenix and Tucson and Washington state.

One interested party was a trio (two in-laws and a friend) from San Jose. They'd just purchased a four unit together on Walden near Transit (brick apartments on the north side, west of Transit). Reason? They could afford to. Back home $1m bought a beat up four unit in the ghetto. Here they could grow some equity. they hoped.

One looker was a screen writer whose income was feast or famine. He'd sell a script and get a big chunk and then would have nothing for a year or so. So he'd buy an apartment building somewhere affordable instead of investing in LA. He owned one in Baltimore, one in Rochester.

The level of interest in Buffalo three years earlier was nil. It's explosion coincided directly with skyrocketing real estate values on the coasts.

The shame twofold: too few locals step up to the plate when good investments are cheap (see d&k above); and second: there are lots of bad investments to be had (too many housing units exist for the population, reducing the market and therefor the value of many to virtually nothing).

Not to mention winter being longer than any of us want. Lower tax and labor costs are the biggest reasons corporations relocate. Nicer weather and jobs are the lures for workers. I like Buffalo and I'm staying here. I can afford to live decently. I like it better than lots of places I've been. But the winters are long and gray. That doesn't bother me so much. But it does bother a lot of people.

Even with our weather, we could attract jobs and people if our taxes only matched those of our neighbors (matching Ohio and Pa. would be a start, I'm not even talking about trying to match the Nevadas and the Carolinas of the tax world).

TjR: Re: Grant Street: the listing info (it's another agents' listing in our office, who in turn relies on the Seller's description) gives wrong square footage. Eyeballing it, it didn't look 10k/floor. I measured this morning. It's a little over 6k' on the first floor, a little over 5k' each floors 2+3, so call it 16,000 square feet. apologies. That said, it's a steal. Address: 62 Grant Street, across from the HSBC. It's one building north of Grant on the west side (southwest corner of Ferguson).

the taxes are prohibitive.

Teachers need good pay. But teachers discount the cushy schedule of summers off and every holiday off. My wife's parents were NYS union teachers, her sister is a teacher in Charlotte. It's not a bad life. There are many worse. Many people with similar education make less, particularly when one considers benefits.

It's certainly not always easy. My sister in law (Charlotte, NC), for example, is in a particularly troubled school. She teaches elementary, first grade. Some of her students don't know their colors. Don't know basic shapes like triangles and squares, much less letters, just like the Snews article about Buffalo a week or so ago. These kids are completely unprepared for schooling. Because nobody cares at home enough to even TALK to these particular kids, evidently. How can a child reach the age of five or six, be a native English speaker, and not know colors?? How do you possibly turn that kid's life around? Still, as frustrating as teaching can be, it's not a bad life. I've known teachers whose spouses worked in the private sector and they tended to better appreciate the value of the schedule.

I don't know why schooling needs to be as expensive as it is. If it were my money, I'd cut out all athletics entirely except for phys ed for all students. I'd bus a lot less (focus on neighborhood schools). I'd encourage charters and vouchers to spark competition. You could forget seniority determining all qualification, if I were king of the schools. And I'd certainly outsource my custodial work, at least in the City of Buffalo. You ever hear of such a contract? "Give us [x] dollars and we'll keep the school open and clean from opening to about 3pm. We won't show you how we spend the money, it's none of your business. And we get to keep any leftover money at the end of the year for ourselves, no questions asked. It's been like that for a century, so go along or we go on strike." I'd outsource that task the first five minutes somebody made me king.

And if teachers in the City want more respect, they should pick someone other than Phil Rumore to represent them. He sure does not make them look good. That guy alone is worth twenty percentage points of negative public opinion regarding teacher unions. Just Phil being Phil is enough to get taxpayers riled against teachers.

But teachers aren't the reason NYS is out of control. There's lots of more appropriate blame to throw around: government duplication, inefficiency, uinionism and workmans comp, not to mention the Great Society aftershocks and attitudes.

I once heard Len Lennihan speak (I was a member of Young Democrats when I was young enough to qualify; the 8th cent sales tax was a controversy and Len was schooling us about NYS taxes). He explained that when Medicare came along, there were a total of 29 optional coverages available to any state which wanted them. They weren't really all optional because a minimum of ten were required. All states had to cover at least ten of the twenty nine scenarios. All states were welcome to choose as many as they liked in addition to the ten which were required. The deal was that the feds would pay 50% of all costs, regardless of how expensive a program the state opted for. New York State was the ONLY state that opted for all 29 options. The result was that the NYS medicaid program was more comprehensive than the state legislators. And it's the most expensive in the nation. That's just an example of the NYS legislator's state of mind: Only the best and most expensive will do. And heaven forbid we step on any union's toe.

Teachers deserve good pay. But taxpayers deserve a state government competitive with our competition. We see jobs leave, decade upon decade. The reason? Taxes, first and foremost.

My in laws, the pro union retired school teachers? They refused to retire in NYS. Know why? The taxes are too high! Swear to god. They built a new house in Charlottesville, Va.

zen: I mean that whenever I hear of teacher salaries being inadequate (like every contract negotiation), I hear of comparisons to private sector pay, which is implied to be higher. At the same time, the schedules for the work are not simultaneously compared. Most jobs don't provide nearly the time off that teaching does.

I once taught violin (this is not to say I have teaching experience; it's not the same thing. I bring it up for this story): one of my students had a mother who was a teacher in a suburban district (junior high, I'm pretty sure). Her husband worked in the private sector. It was this teacher's impression that most teachers had no clue how well they had it. Every day she saw how much work her husband brought home; she witnessed the hours he put in at and after the office. She saw his pay and hers. In her experience, she said, teachers bitch and bitch about how unfair their conditions and pay are, but in comparison to her husband she thought teachers had it made. Her judgment made an impression on me (in fact, her husband ended up leaving the private sector and going back to grad school for his teaching certificate).

Teachers deserve good pay. All I'm saying is that there is more to compensation than an annual salary. Time off is part of that equation.