Arrested Development The Key to Buffalo’s Stagnation By Anna Geronimo Hausmann All photographs in this article © Jim Bush. We all know the issues when discussing development in Buffalo. The Waterfront— the whole Inner Harbor as well as the Erie Canal and Cobblestone district. The medical corridor from High Street up to UB’s South Campus. The brownfields in South Buffalo and the Peace Bridge plaza area. There are the big questions, like when or whether we’ll get a new bridge, where to put a new convention center, whether to build new or rehab. It’s all so much “paper or plastic.” The real question, the real issue, as anyone can tell you, is downtown. As in, how to get people living there, how to create a twenty-four hour environment, how—as our mayor is so fond of saying—to make it a great place to live, work, and play. And what to do about those empty storefronts that give the whole place a bruised look. It doesn’t matter that the IT industry is going full blast, or that the City Center is leased up, that new buildings are going up, that the rattle and hum have returned. When you walk south on Main Street between Allen and Virginia or from where the Metro Rail comes above ground, the stark, blank stares of those vacant and decaying buildings make one look away and hurry on, like so many guilty commuters fleeing panhandlers. As lawyer and regionalism guru Kevin Gaughan notes, “every region needs a thriving, beating heart. For us, that’s the city of Buffalo.” And the thriving center of Buffalo must be its downtown. In a way, this is the perfect time to ask the question—whither development in Buffalo—because it’s gold rush time. The real estate market is rebounding. The momentum is shifting toward businesses locating downtown. Thursdays in the Square are rocking; Adelphia’s coming. It’s a happening place to be. So now is definitely the time to step back and ask ourselves who will call these shots. Will it be the developers? The business people? The city? The citizens? We’ve already had a taste of stepping back from hastily made decisions on issues vital to the city with the public outcry and debates over the Peace Bridge project and the Inner Harbor/Erie Canal project. Kevin Gaughan notes that if the Peace Bridge decision were being made twenty years ago, “It would have been decided by ten white guys in the Buffalo Club.” Not anymore. You’ve come a long way, baby. Or, maybe not. Because although there have been some impressive successes and some daring initiatives, there are still areas so blighted that one block club is thinking of suing the city for neglect of its buildings. There are the high profile areas, new buildings downtown, new housing at Main and Lasalle. But there are also the untouchables, the almost unmentionables, the east side and the lower west side, abandoned by retailers save for those ubiquitous tyrants, the rent-to-own stores and Rite Aid. There are success stories, but for every Tri-Main Center, there’s a Taylor’s. Everyone talks about critical mass, about creating market demands. Everyone talks about the need for a clear plan for downtown. Everyone talks about the need for strong leadership to envision and enact that plan. But maybe that’s the problem—everyone’s talking, but is anyone listening? Is anyone planning? Is anyone leading? Leading by Example The rehabilitation of the enormous old Trico plant on Main Street near Amherst Street is a success story that illustrates the elusive crucial ingredient for development in Buffalo: critical mass. It is also an instance of leading by example. In 1990, Toronto developers Elgin Wolfe and his partner Wayne Purdon bought the Trico plant, unsure what they would do with it. “It was a dirty, old, run-down factory,” says Wolfe The 650,000 square foot building had always been a factory, so after cleaning it up Wolfe continued leasing it as light industrial. But the building didn’t begin to thrive until several years later. That’s when Wolfe leased space to Joanna Angie for Buffalo Arts Studio to create a communal studio for working artists. “The artists were a major influence on the building,” explains Wolfe. “They created an activity level that helped us overcome the perception related to our location and we set about subdividing floor by floor and leasing space with a bit different market in mind.” Now the building is truly mixed use—a mixture of gallery space, art studios, light industrial, education, and office. There is still some manufacturing—the entire sixth floor is in use manufacturing the renowned Kittinger furniture—but the building is also home to Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, just buffalo literary center, an occupational training center for the Buffalo Board of Education, and dozens of small businesses, artist’s studios, and offices. Today the building is 98% leased and the main entrance on Halbert reveals a bustling, thriving center of activity. Which Comes First Wolfe’s point about activity level is crucial to the question of development. Right now, the official response to any questions regarding development is that the marketplace will be the guide. When there is market demand for housing downtown, we are told, the developers will build it. When there are people living downtown and demanding stores and goods and services, the entrepreneurs will open them. But how do you sow that activity, how do you reach critical mass? For Elgin Wolfe, it came about by letting his building find its niche, its identity. But that view is rare among developers. Paul Ciminelli of Ciminelli Development calls that the “field of dreams approach,” as in, build it and they will come. For that, he says, you need “patient money.” Most developers prefer to identify a need and fill it—preferably with tenants already signed on. Uniland Development Company, for instance, has a plan for a fabulous new building they’d love to build downtown on Genesee where the Kensington ends—on the so-called “block 21 site.” It is a ravishing, visionary plan for a five-story structure, very high-tech, lots of glass, with an exterior video board. But they won’t build it unless they have tenants signed to occupy it. This question, more than any other, sums up the state of development downtown. It’s a “chicken or egg” question—which comes first, the apartments or the people to live in them? The stores or the people to shop in them? The offices or the people to work in them? In the words of Richard Taylor, erstwhile proprietor of the late, lamented, albeit visionary, Taylor’s department store (and now owner of one of the largest vacant buildings downtown), “No one in Buffalo has the vision or money to do what has to be done.” Now if that isn’t throwing down the gauntlet, I don’t know what is. There are difficult and important questions lying ahead and they must be answered if Buffalo is to move forward. Everyone agrees, it all hinges on a coherent plan. The Vision Thing One crucial thing to understand right up front is that blaming developers is like faulting a crocodile for biting you—you knew it was a crocodile, you stuck your hand in the water, what did you expect? The fact is, developers exist to make money; to expect them to have a plan for growth is totally unreasonable. Kevin Gaughan makes this point: “It’s a false framework to pit developers against everyone else. Developers respond to the market and there are huge market forces that drive their decisions. Our government policies should make investment viable and doable. The purpose of planning is not to thwart growth but to organize it.” This view is echoed by many developers. Paul Ciminelli says that planning is the most crucial element for downtown’s continued revival: “What we need is to adopt a true master plan for downtown; everyone has to have a clear vision for downtown.” Carl Montante, Jr. of Uniland agrees: “The best and fastest way to turn around the city is to get everyone on the same page. It would be helpful if the city hired a firm to master plan certain parts of the city, if we could have a better idea of what the city wants.” The question, however, seems to be whether the city knows what it wants. “We are real estate neutral,” explains Alan De Lisle, president of the Buffalo Economic Renaissance Corporation (BERC), the economic development agency for the city. “We are focused on getting the company,” De Lisle goes on. “We’ll go to the marketplace and try to find them existing space, but when companies come in and want a suburban place in the city, or, like Adelphia, when they say ‘we want to build our own building,’ that’s the company’s choice. We take our lead from the business. It’s our preference to try to utilize existing space, but that doesn’t always coincide with the market.” This value-neutral stance is anathema to urban planners such as Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., director of UB’s Center for Urban Studies. “My biggest concern,” explains Dr. Taylor, “is that development in Buffalo is not connected to a broader vision of the city and, as a consequence, downtown is being developed as an island, separated from the adjacent neighborhoods such as Allentown, the medical corridor, the Fruit Belt.” Dr. Taylor notes that there have been recently “a bunch of discrete, excellent projects,” but that these remain isolated without any coherent plan connecting them to an overall vision for the city. Adds Dr. Taylor, “People in Buffalo haven’t embraced bold, innovative, and creative thinking as a way of doing business. I mean, look at the Peace Bridge decision—the choice was between narrow, basic functionality versus making a statement about who you are. For most communities, that would be a no-brainer.” If a master plan is created and no one pays attention, does it exist? But if it’s just planning standing between us and greatness, why don’t we just start planning? For one thing, apparently we are planning. “To say that the city is just sitting around waiting for developers to come to us with their projects is just plain wrong,” objects Bonnie Lockwood of the city’s Office of Strategic Planning. Lockwood cites the Downtown Buffalo 2002! initiative which is “a strategic plan implementation campaign to facilitate the advancement and implementation of high priority projects in downtown Buffalo.” The group, made up of staff from the city, from Buffalo Place, and from the Urban Design Project of the School of Architecture and Planning at UB, works on implementing the Mayor’s master plan. Master plan? You say there’s a master plan? Lockwood explains that the Mayor has had consultants working on a master plan, the downtown portion of which was released in September of 1999. It underwent widespread public review and was presented and discussed at a summit at Erie Community College, attended by 300 people, in December 1999. The Downtown Buffalo 2002! group meets every week and sends out newsletter updates on the projects it is advancing to 5000 individuals. Lockwood lists the projects currently being shepherded by the Group: renovation of the Watkins building, of the L.L. Berger building, and of the downtown Trico plant into housing; renovation of the Jackson building into a Hampton Inn and of the M .Wile plant for commercial use; and several “access” initiatives, including revisions to parking, meter zoning, and street circulation, and other infrastructure improvements. For such an ambitious plan with such wide public input, you would think it would spring readily to the minds of the people I’ve asked about the future of development downtown, particularly when many of then have been personally involved in devising the plan. But in the month I have been researching this article, no one of the dozens of people I have spoken to, aside from Bonnie Lockwood, has mentioned the Downtown Buffalo 2002! group or the fact that a master plan exists for the city. Bob Shibley, the director of Downtown Buffalo 2002! and director of the Urban Design Project at UB’s School of Architecture and Planning, is distressed by what seems like a serious lacuna in communications. Shibley says that the plan has been reviewed by hundreds of people in the public and private sector—developers, planners—that they all know what the group is working on, that they are all receiving newsletters, that he has made his presentation dozens of times, that it’s been widely covered in the media, but he has no explanation for the seeming collective memory loss. The Planning Thing According to Kevin Gaughan, creating a master plan for the city is only one part of creating a master plan for the region, and, in some sense, acknowledging their inter-dependence. Gaughan points to Portland, Oregon as a model of urban planning. Twenty-five or thirty towns and suburbs surrounding Portland collaborated through citizen planning boards to create an “urban growth blockade” which protects farmland and towns and redirects growth toward the city. Gaughan explains that without such regional planning in our area, planning decisions “stop at the town boundaries, encouraging developers to play towns off one another. That borders on lunacy; that has caused us to grow by chance rather than by choice.” Gaughan notes that the ubiquitous incentives game, played by every town and village and county development agency in the area, has been revealed as a failure. “That myth has finally been debunked,” he says, citing the town of Amherst and its impending twenty seven percent tax hike. “(Amherst) has given away the store to attract those large companies,” Gaughan says, and now they’re stuck with providing the infrastructure to support them—the roads, sewer lines, schools, and recreation facilities. But it’s more than just working collaboratively. It’s also dealing with governmental, regulatory impediments to development. Gaughan and others cite state zoning and safety codes as a major obstacle to developing the crumbling inner city. Reform seems to be on its way. George Grasser, of Phillips Lytle, is a member of an ad hoc committee working on developing incentives for downtown housing. He says that after working on it for six years, the state legislature finally agreed to adopt a national building code and that our old code will expire in January 2002. But Grasser also cites the lack of financial incentives to developers to encourage downtown housing as a huge obstacle. “It’s no secret that every other city has incentives for downtown housing,” he says, noting the examples of New York City and Philadelphia where if you convert an existing building to residential use you pay no increased tax assessment for ten years. Grasser faults the city for not developing a plan for offering housing incentives. “The city must ask for (state) legislation to offer incentives, to help people make these things work, and they aren’t asking for it. We developed some ideas in our committee and we got no feedback at all from the city that what we were doing was wanted—in fact, people from the city stopped coming to the meetings.” Charles Thomas of the city’s Office of Strategic Planning responds that housing projects are high on the Downtown Buffalo 2002! Agenda. “(Grasser) is referring to legislation to raise the city’s capital bonding ability for private development. It’s true they did this in New York City. It’s not that we’re not interested in doing that, it’s that there’s only so much bonding we can do,” Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it So the developers blame the government for lack of vision; the government blames the developers for lack of leadership. Tim Tielman, of the Buffalo Preservation Coalition, points to bad development models as the major problem. He explains that taking down a block of small, individual, diverse buildings and replacing them with one huge building with tiny entrances threatens the community’s survival. “It’s the architectural equivalent of what happens when you chop down a rainforest,” he says. “You had a complex ecosystem and it was simplified drastically and replaced by a mono-culture. It appears to be vigorous until a new disease comes out. In a complex environment, that’s not so bad but when you only have one or two big things, if they go down it’s terrible.” Tielman suggests the consolidation of the banking industry in the 1980’s as a “new disease” unforeseen by developers which had disastrous consequences for downtown. “You never know what’s going to happen,” argues Tielman, noting the fluidity of the telecommunications industry, “we don’t know if Adelphia will even exist in two years.” A Missed Opportunity Tielman points to the block of Main Street between Allen and Virginia as illustrative of the problem of slash-and-burn type. Tielman notes that the two sides of the street demonstrate his point precisely. On the east side, everything has been demolished and a nearly block-long, two-story brick and concrete block building has been put up. Facing this on the west side is a series of formerly elegant, genteelly decaying three-and four-story buildings, most with “for sale” signs, most empty, some boarded up, with the notable exception of the bright and attractive Hyatt’s art supply store in the middle of the block. The difference, of course, is that the west side is in the Allentown Historic District and the historic designation makes the land-clearing that has occurred on the east side more difficult. There is a lovely but crumbling little building in the middle of this block that librarian Cynthia Van Ness and her husband tried to buy a few years ago. From Van Ness’ account, a citizen advisory panel recommended against her bid because they thought the buildings were ripe for development related to the Roswell Park expansion. According to Tim Tielman, it was the Allentown Association who objected—they thought selling the building, with its adjacent parking lot, would make it harder to develop the other buildings on the block, and that the city should find someone willing to take three or four of the buildings. “I’m not casting blame,” he explains, “I’m just saying that because they were thinking of the big thing, the building now languishes. The Allentown Association is a great association, but because one person at one time wrote one letter, the beginning of revitalization for that block has been put off.” Says Van Ness, “We wanted to live and work in the building. Now, I bike by on my way to work everyday and watch the granite erode. It’s demolition by neglect.” “A Sense of Place” The developers, the preservationists, planners, and the city all have a different explanation for why downtown is in its present bleak condition. But they all agree on how to pull out of it: we need to look back to the past to discover what we should become; we need to look inside ourselves to discover our connections to the rest of the world. And we desperately need an energetic, charismatic, articulate, and visionary leader to inspire and marshal the disparate forces yearning for change. In other words, Buffalo needs to lose what Dr. Taylor calls the “wide right mentality.” We need to look at what we already have that makes us unique—our heritage, our stunning architecture, our history, and our love for the region—and make use of it to fashion a sense of place and a sense of self. Gaughan cites the highly regarded piece by R. H. Apple, Jr. in the New York Times a few years ago that began by saying that Buffalo has “a sense of place cast in stone.” “We need to sustain that atmosphere and sense of place,” he says. “Buffalo will become the place where Americans will come to see the original idea of an American city.” Preservationists like Cynthia Van Ness couldn’t agree more. “You know, people will drive long, long distances for a quality pedestrian experience. That’s exactly what downtowns are good for.” Van Ness believes Buffalo should start from a position of valuing itself, rather than letting the market run roughshod over its heritage and uniqueness. “We should be asking ourselves, ‘what is Buffalo’s bargaining power?’ We should value what we have or no one else will.” This is Kevin Gaughan’s view as well. “Before we can reverse flight, we need to give businesses and their employees a reason to come to Buffalo. People yearn for a sense of place, for the public amenities and public schools, for neighborhoods that make them feel 'this is where I want my children to grow up.’ So the very first thing we need to do is to make development decisions based on everything that renders us unique. We need to think big, whether it’s a national park centered on the Erie Canal or a soaring signature bridge, Buffalo deserves it.” Anna Geronimo Hausmann is a writer and teacher living in Buffalo. Back to the Table of Contents Back to Top