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Paving Paradise to Put Up More Parking Lots

After several months of debate, last week Amherst’s town board voted four to three to approve Benderson Development’s proposed Amherst Town Center project to be built on 33 acres of rural land on Maple Road, a.k.a. the former Buffalo Shooting Club. A coalition of opponents walked out of the meeting in protest after the decisive vote. Their key concern was that the $44 million “lifestyle center” would add to rampant suburban sprawl in Amherst while increasing traffic, carbon monoxide and noise along Maple Road and arterials. There is also the prospect of increased property assessments and taxes to pay for road widening and other infrastructure improvements required. This is all in addition to the change from a fairly quiet green landscape to a busier, browner one with even more strip development flanking the community center, i.e.-more suburban sprawl.

In his recent his Artvoice articles, Bruce Fisher discussed the footprint of suburban sprawl in Western New York since 1970: 75 percent more land area was developed at the same time that our population decreased by 180,000. Coincidentally, this drop matches Buffalo’s population decline over the same period, where net new land development has been scant. In other words, outside of Buffalo, Erie County’s population has remained fairly flat during exactly the same period that “development” there has been rampant. If you believe that somehow property taxes have remained flat during this same period you should consider joining the Flat Earth Society. It costs megabucks to lay all those new sewers and to expand and maintain all those roads to the malls and to all the far flung new ’burbs.

Lost in the debate over whether to approve the Amherst Town Center is the laudable concept of walkable communities. Also forgotten is the fact that many of Erie County’s 45 municipalities actually had walkable communities before malls of all sizes and shapes began monopolizing our landscape, enslaving us to our cars, trucks and minivans and mortally wounding retail and social life in the original town centers.

The problem with the “walkable communities” proposed by Benderson and other area developers is that they are isolated from the existing commercial and social landscape, hence you need to drive some distance to them, and then again from them, to get most of your essential goods and services, sprawled across the ex-urban county. Also, for the retail outlets in these new “walkable communities” to flourish, others will have to perish, given our shrinking population and net worth. This results in still more ghost malls dotting the over-paved suburban landscape.

On the bright side, the debate over whether to permit the Amherst Town Center has been healthy and long overdue. It is also likely continue in the courts. However, it behooves all of us to get involved whenever a developer proposes yet another shopping complex in our town, because ultimately we’ll be paying for it with our taxes. We’ll also inherit the ghost malls left in their wake, which we’ll see a lot of as we drive even further, at greater expense, to our new, far-flung, walkable, multiple-use “centers.” To end this vicious cycle of boom, bust, and dust, we need to put developers on the hook for the infrastructure improvements that their projects require, and to keep them and/or their successors liable for maintenance costs for decades, whether occupied or not. This might make them think twice before launching another short-term project for quick profit.

Ultimately, we need coordinated regional planning with a long-term vision, like that described by Fisher which enabled Hamilton, Ontario, to prosper while Buffalo has floundered. Reviving and empowering the Erie-Niagara Planning Boards and regionalizing development incentives makes much more sense than the decentralized approach that now prevails. Currently, we have too many economic development boards which compete rather than cooperate, and dole out enticing incentive packages full of goodies, mostly at taxpayer expense, in exchange for projects of dubious public benefit and limited longevity.

It’s time to stop paving what’s left of our paradise in order to build more parking lots and megastores, a substantial percentage of which are doomed to fail and to join the ranks of one of this area’s biggest growth industries: ghost mall development.

Carl Mrozek

Buffalo

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