I won’t be voting in Buffalo’s upcoming Mayoral election — I can’t. See, I left Buffalo around 2010 to take an out-of-state job. But, as someone who studies “shrinking cities” for a living, I’ve never been able to fully separate myself from the Queen City. I still vividly remember meeting a friend for coffee one morning more than ten winters ago to tell him of my plans to move. His reply? “You’ll be back. Everyone who leaves wants to come back.”
He was right. Eventually, over a decade later, opportunity in the City of Good Neighbors called — and I answered. Once back in Western New York (WNY), I breathed in the familiarity as if I’d just surfaced from the bottom of Lake Erie. Among the first activities I undertook upon returning was to guide my then-five-year-old son through my former North Buffalo neighborhood, whose streets I could still navigate with perfect recall.
It felt right being back there, save for two observations. One, housing prices — including the estimated market price of my onetime home — had doubled in most of the neighborhood, making it a much less affordable place to live. And two, as a parent with young children, the fear of living in a school district with, according to Buffalo Business First, relatively low graduation rates and poor academic performance, was a new and real (though probably unjustifiable) feeling.
That’s a long way of saying: when my family moved back to WNY, we settled outside the City and into a situation where we could, however contritely, become more functional gears in the engines of climate change, sprawl, auto-centricity, and spatial inequality.
So, what does this story have to do with the Buffalo Mayoral election?
Think of it this way: if you could go back and experience the City as it was ten (or sixteen) years ago and then suddenly reemerge in the present, what changes would stand out most to you?
There are numerous positive changes to point to, to be sure. Still, upon closer inspection, what stands out to me is that Buffalo’s development outcomes appear to have been substantially better for well-off property owners and high-wealth communities than they have for the public good, or for the spaces that experienced the greatest levels of disinvestment dating back to at least the formal redlining practices of the 1930s.
While some key indicators, like those low graduation rates that might concern prospective in-movers, have been rising as of late, they arguably haven’t kept pace with faster-rising real estate prices. Or rent. Or the wealth of the already wealthy (according to Business First, Buffalo is the only WNY municipality where income inequality is higher than the national average).
Here’s where the dots connect. The challenger in the upcoming Mayoral election, India Walton, is running on a platform of inverting these patterns — of prioritizing investments into public goods and neglected neighborhoods. And that platform has currency — not just with the majority of Democratic voters who led her to victory in the Primary Election; but, more specifically and consequentially, with young voters.
Analyses of election turnout data suggest that Walton won Democratic Primary voters under 35-years-old by a landslide. The most recent poll conducted for the General Election seems to echo that message, finding that voters aged 18–34 prefer Walton over the incumbent by a massive 63–19 margin.
These are the voters who will spend their lifetimes dealing with the fallout of decisions made by leaders and institutions who’ve elevated corporate profits and private wealth accumulation above people and the public good; and by everyday people like me who’ve done more to reinforce inequitable, environmentally harmful development patterns than challenge them.
I won’t be voting in Buffalo’s upcoming Mayoral election — I can’t. But if you can, then it’s worth listening to these young voters before you do. Their forebears made Buffalo into the Queen City it is today — a place of unlimited possibilities and unmatched assets, but where the propertied aristocrats in the Queen’s court still tend to fare the best. Perhaps a new generation can set Buffalo on a path to better embody its other moniker, the City of Good Neighbors — where development occurs without displacement, and where democratic public decision-making puts the long-term public good, and the health and needs of all people, at the top of the agenda.
