Will the plan work?
By Anna Geronimo Hausmann and Elizabeth Licata
Beauty, brains, and culture. They sound like desirable attributes for a debutante on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. But according to the architects of Queen City in the 21st Century, Buffalo’s newly-drafted master plan, these are the attributes that will make it possible for Buffalo to pull itself out of its economic decline and become—once again—a thriving urban center.
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Illustration: Jean-Pierre Thimot
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How the plan will fix Buffalo
It’s impossible to condense a 116-page document into a few paragraphs, but the bulk of the plan first outlines where Buffalo is now and why it got there, and then highlights city strengths that could lead to recovery. Most of the long-term goals any city would have on its wish list. The plan is still in its draft stage, so many revisions, additions, and deletions are expected. All that said, the following strategies seem prominent.
1.) For the city’s population to actually grow to over 300,000 by the year 2025, the Queen City plan stresses that basic city services—i.e., “quality of life” functions like maintaining parks and streets; providing adequate policing; and ensuring efficiency in all basic services—must be improved with innovative methods and the most recent technology. Part of this imperative is restoring the Olmsted Parks (nine parks, seven parkways, and seven circles) and as much as possible of the original Joseph Ellicott street plan.
2.) Transformation of the city’s economy would—according to the plan—take place through the development of three strategic investment corridors: waterfront/Tonawanda, Main St/Downtown, and South Park/East Rail. These areas (rich in brownfield potential and near transportation hubs) would be the subject of a combined effort through various development agencies, who would try to work together, rather than in ignorance of (or in competition with) each other’s efforts. This “one-stop shopping,” using a county-wide IDA, is central to the philosophy of the plan. According to new planning head Tim Wanamaker, “one of the key things is a general understanding that if we don’t start using smart growth initiatives, we’ll all suffer together.”
Downtown development would fall under the already existing Queen City Hub plan, which calls for Buffalo to achieve a 24/7 work/live/play downtown.
Transportation improvements are a big part of this, and may include removing the Skyway, adding the Southtowns Connector, removing downtown toll barriers, and reducing surface parking lots.
The financial section of the plan also stresses that heritage and culture are part of the economic picture and proposes a “gateway” system, which would have welcome centers at strategic locations outside and in the city.
3.) As for schools, the plan mentions the school construction project already in progress and states that there will be more choice for parents, with an emphasis on neighborhood schools, around which community rehabilitation would be focused.
4.) Community preservation is a large part of the plan. A moratorium on demolitions and new surface parking lots, pedestrian-oriented development, and better public access to the waterfront are all proposed. Neighborhoods would be rebuilt through their own participation. Part of the planning process is an initiative called the Good Neighbors Planning Alliance, through which twelve neighborhood groups have been meeting for the past year. These groups are expected to submit their plans, which would then become part of the Queen City plan.
The rehabilitation of Main St. is a big part of community development and the plan notes the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus as a prime example of how East and West side neighborhoods (the Fruit Belt and Allentown) can be linked through development. Although a moratorium on demolitions is proposed, the plan also proposes to demolish 500 un-repairable residential buildings per year until the city’s housing inventory comes into balance with its smaller population. In the meantime, 300 new apartment units and 200 rehabilitated units would be added per year, near reconstructed schools, parks, and the waterfront.
A new emphasis on culture And heritage
As the plan admits, Buffalo’s assets in the arts, architecture, and history have rarely been acknowledged at a serious level by city planners or—even less—by politicians. That has changed over the past five years or so. Promotions built around major summer exhibitions at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery have followed the example of other cities in using the arts to bring tourism dollars to smaller cities.
The Queen City plan discussed the importance of arts and heritage tourism and speaks of building a comprehensive cultural tourism plan for Erie and Niagara county. At the same time it proposes Buffalo as a “cultural utopia,” the plan ruefully admits that the city has not been able to provide financial support for its culturals since 2001-2002.
Spree spoke to Julie Penman, candidate for the Delaware District council seat about cultural funding—Penman is one of the few candidates who actually make supporting culture part of their platform. She feels funding can be reinstated under a different structure. She suggests using federal community development block grant money from the city, but keeping the disbursement process under the Erie County beaurocracy, which has a Cultural Advisory Board. “County taxpayers have had to take on the entire burden...to help sustain the arts and culture community that is headquartered in the City of Buffalo,” Penman comments, continuing “Every year, City government receives significant amounts of Federal Community Development Block Grant funds that are mis-invested—and that should be re-directed to support and sustain arts and culture.”
Federal dollars will continue to be important in financing Buffalo’s future beyond its cultural assets.
Who will pay for the plan?
There is a heavy reliance on state and federal funds—including using a lot of the HUD money that regularly flows through City Hall. There will be borrowing, largely from the same sources, and there is also the hope that private investment will be leveraged from these public sector investments.
Community responses
Spree talked to several well-known community planning experts to get their reactions to the Queen City plan. We also looked at existing neighborhood plans in Buffalo and at what nearby cities like Cleveland and Pittsburgh had done. (See the accompanying sidebars for fuller version of the interviews.) In general, the plan has been met in many quarters with the skepticism any savvy Buffalonian should expect. Everyone we talked to was glad that there was a plan and thought there were a lot of great ideas in the plan. In fact, maybe too many great ideas. Others found contradictions.
According to UB planner Henry Louis Taylor, “The most thought, the clearest thinking, the most sophisticated part of the plan has to do with downtown and downtown housing—which is really about downtown and economic development....What they say—their themes, all these right ideas—doesn’t really match up with the meat of the document, which has to do with discrete projects.”
Another successful planner, Jessie Schnell, says, “The plan came out on Thursday and on Friday the Mid-City Office building on Main Street was demolished over the objections of the neighborhood groups and without a full hearing from the preservation board. So how can that pledge of no more demolitions mean anything when the next day it’s ignored?”
Like Taylor, Schnell applauds the city for writing this desperately-needed document, but feels its inclusiveness may please everybody but will wind up helping no one. She finds a lack of a defined vision.
“It’s basically a collection of projects and that runs counter to the basic rule of planning. In planning, you move from goals to objectives to strategies to projects. The project is the implementing tool of the plan; it can’t take the place of a vision.” Schnell underlines her point by criticizing the Queen City’s emphasis on “fixing the basics,” stating “that’s not a vision, that is most people’s expectations of the city. Of course people want their basic needs to be met, and they will say that in community meetings, ‘just pick up my trash, just do something about the vacant houses,’ but that’s not anyone’s vision for what their community can be.”
Both Taylor and Schnell have worked on several strategic plans for key Buffalo neighborhoods. In every case, they worked closely with tightly organized groups of dedicated area residents. Taylor’s plan for the Fruit Belt identifies a new shopping area, proposes historically-appropriate infill for the area’s many vacant lots, and would provide a senior housing area between Maple and Michigan. Schnell’s ideas for Delaware Ave between Edward and City Hall adds green space, places a moratorium on demolitions and new surface parking, and suggests ways to make the area friendly to both residents and businesses.
On the West Side, planner Jill Lemke has been working with the West Side Community Collaborative for the past two years. Their group has identified forty goals and has almost as many member organizations working to implement the goals. Lemke used to work in the City of Buffalo Strategic Planning office and was instrumental in setting up the Good Neighbors Planing Alliance. She is disappointed, though, that the city has not sent qualified planners to work with the neighborhoods. As a result of this lack of professional leadership, many GNPA groups have had very spotty attendance (and by spotty, we mean 2 or 3 people at the monthly meetings). Lemke says, “[I] knew the GNPA would never go anywhere until people could see that a plan could be implemented. I wanted to be part of implementing a plan to show that it could work.”
Like Taylor and Schnell, she feels that the Queen City plan is a start, adding, “I think it’s miraculous that Tim Wanamaker was hired [as the city’s new director of Strategic Planning], because he’s young and clearly qualified and I think he really understands the idea of neighborhood planning. Also, I think he’s open to criticism. I think he sees the flaws in the structure of the planning department.”
Buffalo’s new planning head responds to the critics
Spree talked to new Strategic Planning head Tim Wanamaker, who came to City Hall after the draft plan was released, and now must work with it. To the charge that the plan does not really integrate downtown hub development with neighborhood investment, Wanamaker says, “The comprehensive plan is not a detailed neighborhood plan. We are not the owners of a process that includes neighborhood involvement. We want to incorporate their process into the comprehensive plan.”
Wanamaker admits that previous responses (or lack of response) from the Office of Strategic Planning has led to the proliferation of community-based grass-roots planning efforts. “One of the things we understand is that we’ll have to do a better job of planning. A city without a comprehensive plan is a city that doesn’t know where it’s going.” Wanamaker also stresses that “if a plan is done and it’s a good plan and it fits in with overall plan, it will be adopted into the comprehensive plan. I’d love to have every community do that kind of community planning, but we know there are neighborhoods that haven’t started this process yet and we want to work with them.”
On the plan’s stated goals of a moratorium on demolitions and on surface parking lots, Wanamaker says “the concept of ‘no more demolitions’ is a drastic approach to getting at the issue of having a plan for what we do, but it doesn’t solve the larger issue of having a plan in place. That part of the plan [the call for no more demolitions] will probably change in that regard, but it [the plan] will say we need to be smarter about how we do demolitions, about our focus on housing. Having a preservation plan will help address this.” That said, Wanamaker concedes that there will always be those who aren’t pleased with the city’s decisions. “We’re saying we know where we’re going, but we’ll never have everyone on board.”
On the criticism that the plan’s goal to “fix the basics” is a basic expectation, not a vision for what the city can become, Wanamaker explains, “because we have to focus our limited dollars, ‘fix the basics’ really is an understanding that the quality of life is vital in every neighborhood.”
Indeed, taken individually, issues like trash pickup, sidewalk repair, lighting, and community police presence may not seem like issues around which to construct a community vision. Yes, anyone who has ever attended a community meeting knows how essential well-functioning basic services are. If Western New Yorkers were convinced that these basic needs were being efficiently met within the city, chances are good far fewer residents would flee for the suburbs—particularly since suburban life has begun to lose its glitter. A larger population within the city limits would eventually lead to enhancing the larger economic picture and making other, more visionary developments possible.
Finally, Wanamaker issues a call for more community input: “We’re not afraid of criticism, but I just ask that people come to the table with more than criticism.”
Anna Geronimo Hausmann and Elizabeth Licata are Associate Editor and Editor of Buffalo Spree.
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