“But Just Not Yet…”: Unanswered Questions Amid the Buffalo Renaissance
I spent the first 18.5 years of my life in a suburb of Buffalo, New York. The Buffalo of my childhood was not what it is today. The reverberations of late-century deindustrialization and the apparent failure of the Dot-Com Boom to penetrate the post-industrial Midwest meant that Buffalo was, for the most part, economically depressed.
Bethlehem Steel had shuttered most of its once-largest operation in 1983, other local manufacturers and affiliated corporations followed suit, and people left. Erie County, the most populous part of the Buffalo-Niagara region, posted four consecutive decades of population decline, losing just under 200,000 residents from 1970 to 2010.[1] Those corporations and residents took with them not only investment in the local economy but also vital tax dollars for schools and municipalities. Combine that economic cocktail with the late-2000s Great Recession and, well, you get the idea.
I watched my brother and his classmates graduate high school in the wake of the economic collapse and envied their avenues out of Buffalo: academic and athletic scholarships to nationally renowned universities outside of Western New York. Though years away from going to college myself, I knew that I, too, would leave if I were so lucky.
And in August 2015, I did just that. Driving a few hundred miles East, I moved to Cambridge, MA, for my undergraduate career at Harvard with no intention of looking back. And, plans be damned, Buffalo started appearing in headlines that had nothing to do with unconscionable levels of snowfall. Local and national pundits, college bloggers and gourmet chefs, craft brewers and wine snobs alike all proclaimed the Buffalo Renaissance™. Hardly a week went by my freshman and sophomore years of college without Facebook friends sharing the latest article about why Buffalo was “The Most Underrated City in America,” “The Best Place to Visit Every Year,” “The Best Place for Millennials to Move,” etc. (quotes my own).
My brother’s cohort was among the first generation of Buffalo expats to repatriate en masse, and with them came an explosion of craft beer, Etsy-artisan markets, and more summer festivals in a city that boasts too many such events in the first place (and if you’re thinking about gentrification, don’t worry, so am I). When we came home each Thanksgiving, Christmas, spring break, and summer, my generation of Western New Yorkers, many of us more progressive than the Zip Codes that raised us, shared our own hopes of “coming back.” Future accountants, doctors, arts managers, and educators all expressed hopes of coming back, living downtown, and proving to the world (and, more importantly, our college roommates) that Buffalo was as cool as all the yuppy travel guides said it was.
To be fair, Western New York’s renaissance has not been even, and the above portrait is only part of the story. Buffalo remains one of the most segregated cities in the country.[2] Achievement gaps between well-funded, white suburban public schools and under-funded, socioecomically marginalized urban public schools persist or have worsened.[3] New Americans and refugee families face alarming rates of lead poisoning and other toxic conditions in housing stock that has been negligently maintained by local and out-of-town landlords looking to make a quick buck off of people in crisis.[4] Structural unemployment that began with the collapse of industry four decades ago continues to plague too many Western New Yorkers.[5] And, perhaps most consequentially, the Western New York political machines are as nefarious and tight-knit as ever, representing a modern-day Tammany Hall on both sides of the political aisle.
Most progressive-minded folks in Western New York get these issues but fail to act on solving them, only gesturing toward the need for more civic-mindedness, togetherness, and mutual concern. Most local conservatives either blatantly don’t care or are too concerned with spinning worn-out “culture of poverty” theses from their McMansions and country clubs that they have barely stepped out of the 1950s. Is everybody pissed off at me equally now? Great.
On top of these issues, which will require substantial planning, cooperation, and lifestyle change to solve, I’d like to add one more problem we should think about: for too many Western New Yorkers who leave for education or training or military service, the pathway to come back and build a better Buffalo does not immediately exist. Despite our strongest hopes of returning to a city that needs bright young minds to serve its citizens and solve its problems, few of my college-educated friends outside of the medical industry found opportunities to return to Buffalo.
And it’s not for lack of effort. In the interim period between graduation and grad school in the UK, I’ve had more than a dozen conversations with high school classmates that go along the lines of: “I really wanted to be back here, but nobody would hire me”; “I wanted to take the job, but the company just couldn’t match the training opportunity I’d have in [insert city]”; or “I wanted to teach at that school, but I couldn’t afford to do it, have a car payment, pay rent, and take care of my student loans.” Even for me, an aspiring academic historian researching post-industrial economic collapse, I know that my ultimate entry into the job market in seven or eight years will come with the realization that other universities in other cities will likely provide more stability, more support, and better opportunities to teach and research than Western New York’s academic institutions.
Simply put, while Buffalo has a lot of things going for it (and a lot of work left to do), a whole generation of Western New Yorkers still has to say: “I want to be back there, but just not yet.” The longer we have to say that, the more likely it is that we’ll just stay where we are.
With that and the previous discussion of Buffalo’s other socioeconomic challenges in mind, I can only ask these questions: What good is a city’s “Renaissance” if it largely excludes many of its best and brightest young minds as well as its most vulnerable communities? Can we really call Buffalo a star on the rise if talented young Buffalonians who care about the city have to move elsewhere to start their careers or if the zip code you’re born in is an overwhelmingly accurate determinant of your likelihood to graduate high school or end up entangled with the prison-industrial complex? Are we so confident in our ability to ignore the past that we really think structuring the local economy predominantly around one industry (in our current case, medicine) will be the long-term cure for all of Buffalo’s challenges? Exactly whose Buffalo are we building?
These questions are, no doubt, as vital for Western New York as they are for other post-industrial communities around the country seeking to build an economy and community for the twenty-second century, when climate change will make insulated, relatively disaster-free places like the post-industrial Midwest and Great Lakes attractive places to live. More importantly and more existentially (not that climate change isn’t an existential crisis — it is), answering those questions with the good of all Buffalonians in mind is what being “The City of Good Neighbors” is all about.
Notes:
[1] “Erie County, New York, Population 2019,” http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-counties/ny/erie-county-population/.
[2] “A City Divided: A Brief History of Segregation in Buffalo,” https://ppgbuffalo.org/buffalo-commons/library/resource:a-city-divided-a-brief-history-of-segregation-in-buffalo-1/.
[3] “2019 test results find less than half of N.Y. students proficient in ELA, Math,” https://buffalonews.com/2019/08/22/2019-test-results-find-less-than-half-of-n-y-students-proficient-in-ela-math/.
[4] “Buffalo lags on addressing lead poisoning,” http://www.investigativepost.org/2019/05/01/buffalo-lags-on-addressing-lead-poisoning/.
[5] “Buffalo job market still among worst according to Wall Street Journal,” https://www.wivb.com/news/local-news/buffalo-job-market-still-among-worst-according-to-wall-street-journal/.
