Fixing Buffalo:
The View from the Suburbs
By Bruce Eaton
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Downtown architectural landmarks like Sullivan's Guaranty Building and Upjohn's St. Paul's are often cited by city-living boosters.
Photo by Jim Bush. |
For starters, I’m culturally bereft. I only like the Buffalo Philharmonic when they play something I know, like Pink Floyd or maybe some Zep. I’d rather drink an espresso made by a faceless evil corporate coffee conglomerate than one brewed up just for me by some guy who just happens to play bass in a local band that could be the next Goo Goo Dolls. In other words, I’m totally plastic.
I’ve found out that I’m selfish and stingy. I’ll trample over the environment and my already downtrodden fellow man just to get my hands on as much money as I possibly can. And once I get it, don’t you come asking for it! I need a new super deluxe SUV way more than any inner-city school needs money for an arts program.
And here’s the shocker: I could even be a racist. There’s no other way to explain why I live in a neighborhood where most of the people look like me. Any other possible explanation is just self-delusion.
How do I know all of this? I live in a suburb. I am that barrier to all the good that could be in Western New York: The Suburbanite. At least that’s what I’d believe if I took to heart much of the commentary on what’s wrong with Buffalo and how to fix it.
Now I haven’t always been a suburb dweller. In my prior, hipper, life I lived in North Buffalo for extended periods. In between, I lived in a very non-suburban place called Brooklyn. But eight years ago, my wife and I bought a house in an area where the suburbs turn into farm country—the exburbs— and ever since then I’ve become keenly aware that to many people, I’m not only a big part of the problem, my tax dollars are a big part of the solution.
If one were to summarize the accumulated commentary on the state of the region over recent years, you’d end up with something like this:
• People who live in Buffalo are smarter, cooler, and more sophisticated than suburbanites.
• If the selfish people who live in the suburbs gave more money to Buffalo, all of Buffalo’s problems could be fixed.
• People must be stopped from moving to the suburbs. Those who have already escaped to the suburbs must be forced to get with the program.
I believe that this attitude is one of the great unspoken stumbling blocks to greater progress in this area. The people I talk to in my town at school events, church gatherings, or on the soccer sidelines are sick and tired of this arrogant and condescending view. Consciously or not, it has fostered a mindset among suburbanites towards Buffalo somewhat akin to Gerald Ford’s infamous directive to New York City. In other words: drop dead.
Now the thing is, no one out here really wishes the city ill. In fact, quite to the contrary, suburbanites have not only great interest in the revival of the city proper—and indeed are some of Buffalo’s biggest boosters—but also put much time and energy into making Buffalo a better place for all. As a lay leader of a suburban church, I see people of all ages active in programs ranging from Habitat For Humanity and Journey’s End to ministering to the hungry and families of prisoners. In fact, I believe that there is a tremendous amount of goodwill towards the city—and especially its less fortunate residents—waiting to be unleashed. But not much is going to happen until some things change in both the attitude and behavior of those who demand that we Suburbanites change our evil ways.
So here’s my advice to those Buffalonians who are prone to lecturing and hectoring those who live beyond the city limits:
Get the chip off your shoulder.
People who live in the suburbs do so based on their careful assessment of their family’s needs and personal desires. In other words, however irrational you believe my choice to be, I find it completely rational that I (or anyone else) would want to live in a house with a good-sized yard and great local schools. You are right if you think that it’s wonderful that you can walk to the Theater of Youth or the Albright-Knox, and I’m right if I think that it’s nice to have your windows open on a hot summer night and not hear everything your neighbors are up to across the driveway. You like Delaware Park. I like the wide-open countryside and the fact that the volleyball net in my local park survives the summer intact. Sure, there are many times when I’d like to live where you do. And, if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that the reverse is also true.
Forget about demanding more money for a moment and make better use of your most potent resource: the vote.
If you don’t like the ditch you’re in, don’t vote for the ditch-diggers. Suburbanites have increasingly diminished sympathy for a city that insists on electing pretty much the same old faces and expecting a different result. Jimmy for four terms. Tony for three terms. Even granting each mayor a generous two terms, that represents a good twelve years of wasted leadership opportunity right there. Unhappy with your schools? You’d hardly know it from the negligible turnout in school board elections. Nobody from Amherst has pulled the levers in a Buffalo election as far as I know. Capitalize on democracy and the capital will flow.
Understand that money doesn’t solve problems when it’s handed to a bloated unresponsive bureaucracy.
The Soviet Union taught us that one. Talk to anyone who attempts to do business in the city and you’ll learn that City Hall is one big BPU: Business Prevention Unit. It is an insult to one’s intelligence to insist that the only cuts in city government can come from essential services like firemen, policemen, school programs, and teachers. Start cutting out administration—entire departments even—and we’ll know you’re serious about solving problems. The Common Council reduction, as laborious and controversial as it was, is merely an initial step.
Suburbanites like local, small government.
Something they can get their hands around and control, in other words. East Aurora voters like being able to bar the door on commercialization. Orchard Park voters like being able to vote down grandiose school plans. Clarence voters like being able to remove officials who act as rubber stamps for developers. My guess is the voters in Amherst are getting geared up to change administrations.
How did Buffalo’s schools become substandard? Because the voters ceded what control wasn’t grabbed by Judge Curtin, and accountability went out the window. True, there’s much streamlining to be done (does anyone need a separate town and village government for the same few square miles?) but regionalizing Buffalo’s dysfunction will most benefit real estate prices in Niagara County.
Make an attempt to distinguish between those things that might be improved with regionalization and those that won’t. There’s much merit in regionalizing basic services, and we don’t need countless—and competing—business development agencies. But regionalizing the public schools? It’s never going to happen. So drop it and get to work on those things that have a chance to work.
Don’t play the race card every other hand.
I have no doubt that racism plays a very real and ugly role in city affairs. But blaming everything that goes wrong on racism has just about as negative an impact as racism itself. You don’t want to know how damaging the entire fiasco surrounding the resignation of former-School Superintendent James Harris was to the attitudes of many suburbanites towards the city.
Get out of your box and I’ll get out of mine.
Want to provide disadvantaged children with a better education right now? Get behind a school voucher program. Want to encourage industrial development (i.e. jobs) in urban areas? How about relaxing some of the ridiculously stringent environmental regulations that make the reutilization of prime property virtually impossible in some cases. Want to see a more efficient and effective government? How about buying into the concept that a job with the government doesn’t come with a lifetime guarantee?
If these suggestions automatically got your blood pressure cranked up and your mouth is foaming at the corners, maybe we’re not ready to meet halfway, let alone work together. But I’m hoping that those who blame the suburbs for the city’s problems soon come to realize that there’s a way to turn all of us selfish, vacuous suburbanites into potent partners in the revitalization of Buffalo. A little change of attitude might work more miracles than all the money in the world.
Bruce Eaton is the author of Conquering Your Financial Stress (Times Business / Random House).
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