Reasons to Rightsize a City
Economy Shift, Population Decline, Aging and the Housing Stock That's Left Behind
We began dialogue with Michael Clarke and Anthony Armstrong of LISC concerning abandoned houses on the East Side of Buffalo this past May.
Yesterday, Clarke sent us this NPR story about the land bank in Flint Michigan. According to Clarke, Dan Kildee's landbank is the best example out there. "We hope to bring Dan here early next year as part as a 1-2 day session on vacant land reclamation. If we're lucky we'd also get the mayor of Youngstown, Ohio," Clarke said. Youngstown went through a similar land banking and rightsizing process.
Considering the shifting economy of this post-industrial town, it's no surprise that our population has dwindled. Moved out, carried out, aging, our population can't make use of the housing stock that's left behind.
At a city auction last week, houses that were in foreclosure were bought up after a stern warning about pre-existing code violations from Judge Nowak and under the watchful eye of the FBI, the state attorney general’s office and the Buffalo's Anti-Flipping Task Force. That's all well and good for houses that are still on the fringe of densely populated neighborhoods, but where the residents have gone, very often there are few amenities left, and the desirability of living in these areas has evaporated as well.
On the LISC tour, senior-owned homes often stood out as obvious on an otherwise blighted block, cared for by elderly owners who are living on social security, pension, disability, etc. Owned through the neighborhood's heyday and now otherwise unsalable for what they're worth, these homes would fetch a fortune picked up and set down in a dense and gentrified portion of the city...but not where they are, in close proximity to boarded up houses.
The houses are aging, and so are their residents. At $16 or more per hour for in-home care, these homeowners can try to age right where they are, or move into a group home. If the latter is chosen, and the house is undesirable due to the neighborhood it's in, it gets boarded up, adding one more to the list of abandoned houses.
And then today, this report from the Federal Reserve:
Senior homeowners likely to find it difficult to “age-in-place”
BUFFALO, NY – The Buffalo Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York today released “Aging in Place in Upstate New York,” the latest issue of the Branch’s Upstate New York Regional Review.
According to author Jane Humphreys, Branch regional analyst, senior homeowners may find it hard to remain in their homes as they grow older, or “age in place,” because of a growing disparity between the features of the houses they own and the housing they need.
The author concludes that demand for housing services and products that enable aging in place will likely create opportunities as well as challenges for both the private and public sectors.
This change in demand is likely to be of particular significance in upstate New York, where the majority of seniors are homeowners living in older, single-family homes that they have owned for a long time.
“The senior share of the population in upstate New York is larger than in most other parts of the country and seniors’ homes are often ill-suited to aging in place,” explains Humphreys. “This suggests that as the population ages, the region will experience a growing demand for supportive services such as health care, transportation and accessible housing, which may pose significant challenges to local governments and community-based organizations but also create new business opportunities.”
More from Humphrey's six-page report:
City of Buffalo About one-quarter of the seniors in Erie County, roughly 40,000 people, live in homes within the city of Buffalo. Structural and maintenance characteristics make the city’s private housing stock among the least suitable for aging in place.
For example, only 6 percent of the owned homes in the city are single-story dwellings. The remaining 94 percent—nearly all two- or three-story homes—contain one or more flights of stairs and are unlikely to be outfitted with elevators, creating problems for senior homeowners with mobility constraints. Moreover, the old age and poor condition of many of these homes make for high maintenance demands. In Buffalo, the median year in which homes were built is 1925, and more than 70 percent of seniors live in homes that were built before 1940.
As for the relative ease or difficulty of meeting the needs of aging in place, seniors in the city have fewer resources on average than seniors in other parts of the county: they are more likely to live alone and to have a lower income and a lower home value, and they are less likely to have access to a car. Some characteristics of city homes, however, are more favorable for seniors. City homes tend to have smaller lots to maintain, and they are more likely to be located near hospitals and other services and to have ready access to public transportation.
This report lends credibility to what Clarke and Armstrong at LISC have been telling us about rightsizing. Consider the woman from Flint who compared her changing neighborhood to a rural landscape. There is a certain eerie quality about a city resident saying she feels as if she's in the country, but we’re sure to follow suit; our aging population will leave yet more houses vacant in this community. If it can't be dense, shouldn't it be green rather than mean?
What Others Have To Say
What Do You Think?
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Denizen
Right-sizing the city is the right way to go. I know there will be some stubborn folks who will disagree with this; they can't seem accept the fact that Buffalo is a much smaller city that's lost most of its former significance.
Shrinking a city is a hard concept for most to accept in a super-sized society where limitless growth and general "bigness" is hard-wired into our collective consciousness. It's a tough decision to swallow, but let's face facts here.
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RonR
I have to disagree with you Denizen. Right sizing the city is not the right move. I am all for land banking on the East Side but I do not think Buffalo should do anything to shrink. For me landing banking is more about making land ready to build then anything else.
With the way the City of Buffalo is built, it is going to be virtually impossible to right size the government and the cost of the government. THAT IS THE REAL PROBLEM.
The cost of city workers and their contracts are not going to go down. The size of departments is not going to shrink. The city needs to grow its tax base not shrink it. Additional to the cost of the public sector we have the welfare system.
The sad truth is there is a high percentage of people who live in the city but do not contribute to the city in a positive way. The welfare machine is so big that it is never going to shrink. I read somewhere that 1-4 in the city live below the poverty line. Now some people are willing to work out of their situation but the reality is there are generations of family's that are simply accustomed to living on the public dole. Shrinking the city is only going to make this concentration higher, when in reality we need to dilute this percentage to 1 in 6 or 1 in 8. This means growing Buffalo in population. Growing the tax base.
I am not saying that Buffalo should strive to become Chicago. That is unreal. But Buffalo growing to 500k residents is not that hard....provided the circumstances are right.
Put it this way, Buffalo is an awesome place to live. We all would agree on this. But finding a good job is hard. Buffalo consistently produces some of the strongest workers only to see them leave and contribute to other areas. Most do not want to go...they have to go. Stop the bleeding. Become pro business! Companies are bled dry by failed policy and taxation in the area. If this changes, companies will come. Buffalo is an awesome location to draw offices from other more expensive areas. All that has to be done is make it cost effective for these companies to move here.
Buffalo needs NEW HOUSING. All of the great neighborhood in the city, outside of downtown, is full of wonderful but OLD housing stock. While I am someone who appreciated a 100 year old Victorian, a lot of people do not. Buffalo needs to create a new core neighborhood where everything is new. Look in the Cobblestone or the Outer Harbor. Find a way to incentives developers to build massive amounts of mid and high rise condos downtown.
I could go on but at the end of the day Buffalo needs to grow or die.
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Ike
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2007/10/woe_woe_buffalo.cfm
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2007/10/shrinking_buffalo.cfm
Just saw these two blog entries from the Economist commenting on Ed Glaeser's article from last week...have these been discussed here yet?
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AtwaterLouse
Ron - that sounds great and yes it be tried as much as we can, but there's just no realistic chance politically to make that happen in a big way any time soon.
Although a pro-business percent of voters exists around here, it's much smaller than the anti-business percent, not just in Buffalo but across NYS. Collins might be a rare exception to that in next week's county exec race, but the county legislature majority leadership is relatively anti-business and guaranteed re-election by landslides. At the state level last year, pro-business John Faso lost to anti-business Spitzer by what, 70-30 or something like that. The State Assembly Democrats are mostly solidly anti-business, and State Senate Republicans are almost as much that way. I'm not trying to start any partisan debate here. Republican Pataki was no better than Spitzer. The point is that serious changes toward a more pro-business philosophy is nowhere in sight. Maybe a generation or two down the road this might change - who knows.
In the here and now, right sizing is continuing no matter what people hope for or what politics they advocate.
The only question is whether or not Buffalo should try to deal with right sizing more smartly.
Subsidising overbuild of high rise condos would back fire. There's some market for those, and some are being built (Gates and waterfront towers, plus some in the refurbished Statler, and some in 200 Delaware, etc.). But realistic demand for those is a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands of vacancies and departures when people die or move. And without much population inflow, some people filling those condos are leaving behind residences elsewhere in the city which has a ripple effect. I'm not saying don't allow them to be built, but big tax subsidies for a bunch more doesn't make sense either.
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AtwaterLouse
Ike - no, those links to The Economist haven't been mentioned here but they're interesting. Many people here won't agree with the praise for Glaeser's article in both of those posts.
The first of those ends with thoughts/questions relevant to specifics of this right-sizing topic:
The other one it worth a read too. Here's how it starts, then it gets into comparisons with the southwest.
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urbanesque
In 25 years we will look at landbanking in the same way that we currently look at Urban Renewal programs of 25 years ago. It is a myopic vision that lacks a true basis for improvement, it is basically cutting bait and hoping that a bigger fish will come along to take the empty line.
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ktl340
The one positive about building a project like the Gates circle condo, or waterfront place is that even if every single person who moves into these condos is from Buffalo it is still a positive because they probably sold ( quite easily) a very desirable house to someone else with means so the net positive is still more wealth for the city. A lot of the east side was poor 50 years ago and is still poor today, and because of
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bfloBR
urbanesque...i would not go as far as to say what you have so definitively, but i have often wondered why urban enthusiasts gush over the idea of landbanking but cry foul whenever demolition or slum clearance are discussed. Landbanking is one of those concepts that is often thrown around whenever we talk about urban blight, but rarely is it fully underrstood.
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Denizen
Urban renewal(removal) in the 50s-60s and contemporary landbanking planning are two entirely different things. The former obliterated densely populated, fully-functional neighborhoods and reduced them to rubble for the sake of myopic planning dogma of the day. The latter involves tearing down deeply devastated areas where population densities are very low and much of blocks now consist of empty lots or abandoned homes instead of occupied houses.
Economically, it makes zero sense to provide full municipal services to a geographical area that once supported more than double the population that's now remaining.
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urbanesque
Denizen - The differences are minor at the macro-level. We are still obliterating fully functioning neighborhoods due to lack of residents. We are focusing on the symptom instead of the cause. Urban Renewal looked like a 'no-brainer' at the time, if only we had 20/20 hindsight to look at Land Banking in the same lens that we view urban renewal.
I don't believe that we have explored and exhausted all options in this matter. We are looking at this from a very local perspective, instead of from a national or international level.
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sbrof
how about the right size the suburban sprawl that is really fragmenting and dragging the regional economy down. Imagine the spending power we would have if we didn't spend all our money on Cars, McMansions, Gas, Transportation time etc.. That money, almost none of which stays locally for long goes right out of state to oil companies, car companies, foreign made hardware. Lumber from Canada... the list goes on.
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Hoss
Stop the sprawl. Resize the city. Put in a greenbelt. A well defined buffer.
When there is a limit to what can actually be developed, the value of these properties go up. Both real and perceived. This leads to increased revenue.
Consolidation of services due to a smaller geographic responsibility, be it cops, firefighters, roads, sewer maintenance, schools, public transportation, politicians, etc... will also increase the coffers. We can have the same, or an increased population. Just consolidate. Make it denser. Build it up not out.
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Denizen
urbanesque, I'd like you to live in one of those neighborhoods for 6 months. Then you can report back and tell me if it's really "fully functioning".
sbrof and hoss, the "stop sprawl" slogan sounds nice, but it doesn't go anything beyond ideological dreaming. In the meantime, we should be thinking of workable solutions instead of impossible pipe dreams.
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RisingDamp666
The "rightsize" for Buffalo is 580,000 people. There are a lot of watershed trends out there that can make this a reality. We can't dwell on the Past, it's true, but why assume a never-ending Present?
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chris69
there is no such thing as right sizing a city....the problem is to public service unions that are to powerful, to much patronage and buracracy, to much control by albany over our local institutions and to much low income and municipal housing competing with private property owners looking for tenants for their duplexes.
The eastside is in desperate need of another eastside park to replace the fairgrounds (which is now hamlin park/canisius)
The broadway market area is in desperate need for atleast the exterior redevelopment back to its original Calvert Veaux designed market.
The entire city of Buffalo is desperate for urban office parks...that take of an entire city block, built to the sidewalk, underground and off street parking...to bring jobs back to inner city neighborhoods
The Central Terminal is desperate to be rethought as a Center for Excellence inLogistics, Supply Chain Management, Intenational trade, etc
South Buffalo is desperate to be rethought of as a center for excellence in Material Science and Nanotechnology, as well as Communication (Data and Voice).
The answer lies not with demolition but rethinking neighborhoods and communities....something which Buffalo and Erie County and the BNE/BNP seem utterly brain dead. Rochester adds one Center for Excellence per year and Buffalo still only has 1.....there is something extremely wrong with this thinking!
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