By One Region Forward:
Vacancy is often thought of as a city problem. However, as new development has sprawled over the last several decades, population has declined, and new home construction has vastly outstripped household formation, vacancy has followed close behind – steadily affecting more suburban and exurban areas and eroding the sustainability of our entire region.
This is one of the issues being considered as part of the creation of a regional plan for sustainable development under the banner of One Region Forward – and one of the topics to be discussed as part of an occasional series of “data stories” in Buffalo Rising.
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What the data says
Vacant housing units include those that are for rent, for sale or otherwise unoccupied for a number of reasons including abandonment. Currently 8.7% of all housing units in Buffalo Niagara are vacant. This amounts to 45,475 vacant dwellings in total, or more than three times the number of vacant units that existed in 1970. Today, while urban areas still have the highest vacancy rates, the rates of vacancy have ballooned in most first-ring suburbs and several outlying areas.
Meanwhile, despite a 16% decline in population and the growing abundance of vacant properties, we have continued to build new houses, adding over 151,000 units over these last forty years1. This pattern creates an alarming strain on our region’s economy, our environment and our social well-being.
Why this is important to moving One Region Forward?
The vast majority of buildings in our region are homes. How much land they use, how much energy they consume, how they are related to transportation facilities, and where they are in relation to employment and services of all types determine, not only whether Buffalo Niagara is good place to live, but also whether we can be sustainable throughout the 21st century and beyond.
It is also important that the value of an individual home or other residential building is determined, not just by the quality of the unit, but also by the characteristics of the street, the neighborhood, and the community. Proximity to parks, schools, shopping, entertainment, health care, cultural amenities, and access to transit as well as a sense of security, all contribute to the value of a home.
Unfortunately, the combination of new investment in second ring suburbs and beyond and disinvestment in central city neighborhoods have led to high vacancy rates in the latter and in some cases pervasive housing abandonment, demolition, and resultant vacant lots. In areas of Buffalo, Niagara Falls and Lackawanna some neighborhoods have effectively collapsed, ceasing to provide even the minimum level of support for daily life.
Now we see rising levels of housing vacancy in places like Cheektowaga and Tonawanda. This suggests that our older suburbs are not immune to the downward cycle of disinvestment, deteriorating property values, declining tax revenues, degraded public services, outmigration, and further disinvestment.
What strategies can we adopt to stop the spread of vacancy in our region?
Addressing the imbalance between housing vacancy and abandonment in the center city and housing construction on the periphery will require a wide range of responses, starting with those aimed at protecting rural land for agriculture, limiting the extension of basic infrastructure, and focusing redevelopment on already developed areas.
But more will be required. We need some combination of improved enforcement of building codes, better sharing of information about the status of housing, new relationships between neighborhood organizations and lenders to untangle the foreclosure mess that holds many homes in limbo, and initiatives to coordinate neighborhood revitalization efforts across municipal boundaries.
Where neighborhoods are mostly vacant homes and vacant lots, the newly created land bank can help us stabilize things until neighborhoods can be brought back into the market. For neighborhoods that retain their basic fabric, a combination of infill housing construction with housing rehabilitation can restore their appeal. In older suburban neighborhoods where vacancy is a more recent phenomenon, we might think about how to retrofit homes for new lifestyles, new household types, and for energy efficiency.
Get involved
There are many ways to stay engaged and actively participate with the initiative. Help One Region Forward chart a course for our region’s future by weighing in on our Regional Vision & Values and becoming a Working Team Contributor. Let us know where we want to go as a region and share your knowledge and expertise with our Working Team Members to inform the decision making process.
Data Sources
Brown University, Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences. (2010). US2010 Project, Longitudinal Tract Data Base. Retrieved November 6, 2012 from http://www.s4.brown.edu/us2010/Researcher/Bridging.htm
Erie County Department of Environment & Planning. (2012). Parcel Boundary Data.
Niagara County Department of Economic Development. (2011). Parcel Boundary Data.
Social Explorer Tables (SE). Count 4 – Original Tables – With Stratifiers, Census 1970, U.S. Census Bureau.
Social Explorer Tables (SE), Census 2010, U.S. Census Bureau; Social Explorer.
Social Explorer Tables: American Community Survey 2011 (1-Year Estimates) (SE), ACS 2011 (1-Year Estimates), Social Explorer; U.S. Census Bureau.
U.S. Census Bureau. (2010). TIGER/Line Shapefile, New York, 2010 Census Tract State-based.