According to Forbes, Buffalo/Niagara Falls comes in at the #10 best place to raise a family. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that Forbes is a list-monger and that a lot of the stuff that it pumps out is BS, but this one is worth the mention because Buffalo really is a great place to raise a family. You hear it all the time: “I’m going away to school.” “I’m gonna travel for a while.” “I’m heading to a bigger city.” At the same time, more now than ever, you also hear people stating, “But then I’m going to come back home to raise a family.”
As we work harder to retain our young people (thanks to people like Erin Habes who help to market the right message), we can be thankful that there is a slightly older demographic that is interested in calling Buffalo “HOME”. In the future, we will be depending on UB to continue on with its urban investments, and hopefully it will give up on its mission of creating a faux Main Street on what was once swampland (reverse the curse). Inexpensive lofts would be nice to retain our young people, as would an extended public transit system. Of course, the best way to grow Buffalo’s population of young people is to continue to make it a family-friendly city where raising kids is fun and safe with plenty of educational opportunities to choose from.