The Buffalo Paradox:
So much good, so much bad...
how to reconcile the two Buffalos.
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Illustration by Jean-Pierre Thimot.
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But we can’t pretend that all is as it should be here. Over the past year, the City of Buffalo has experienced a major fiscal crisis. City police and firemen have been laid off. Our public schools are barely able to fund basic academic programming, much less the “extras” like arts and athletics.
The waterfront development we’ve been waiting for for decades has still not even begun. The cultural institutions that make our region unique—indeed, our arts scene was just nationally recognized—are now not receiving funding from the City. And much of downtown and Main Street still looks like a recently evacuated urban battlefield.
In thinking about this, it almost seems like there are two cities, the one that has all the great stuff we love and the one that really looks like it’s on the brink of falling into an economic abyss. This is a major dilemma and, at Spree, we wouldn’t pretend for an instant that we had any kind of formula ready to solve it. However, we do have the resources offered by our writers, their ideas, and their sources. We asked our writers to talk to some people with opinions and ideas about what Buffalo should do and shape these interviews into a series of articles. We also invited Spree columnist Bruce Eaton to give his opinion on a current Buffalo controversy.
So here are SOME thoughts on how the Buffalo we love can be stabilized.
-Elizabeth Licata, Editor
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“I think the size of the Council should be doubled, but that they should be part-time, they should meet at night, and their salaries should be one quarter the size they are right now.”
-Preservation activist Tim Tielman, quoted in Anna Geronimo
Hausmann, “Stand and Deliver”
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“They don’t see that the old boy’s network is bad, to them it’s just the way it’s always been,” Rehak says. “So we have to go to them. They aren’t going to come to us.”
-Donna Evans, “A Business Development Veteran’s Two Cents”
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Buffalo has been exporting brains and business for years. How about exporting the losers who back gambling? Give them all a bucket of change and a one-way bus ticket to Atlantic City.
-Bruce Eaton, “Casinos Are for Losers”
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