Activists demand that the Brown administration look beyond demolition

On Tuesday evening, close to 100 people gathered in Buffalo’s Common Council Chambers to urge Mayor Byron Brown’s administration to look beyond demolition of abandoned buildings as a means to stabilize deteriorating city neighborhoods.

“Demolition is not a plan, it’s a reaction,” said Harvey Garrett, the West Side housing activist and housing court liaison.

The occasion for the meeting was a public hearing on the city’s application for a grant from the state’s Restore New York program, which is in its third—and possibly final—year of passing out $300 million allocated in the state’s 2005-2006 “to revitalize urban areas and stabilize neighborhoods as a means to attract residents and businesses.”

Last year Buffalo received a little more than $10 million from Restore New York, most of which funded demolition projects. The city had applied for nearly $30 million to help pay for the demolition of 939 vacant residential properties and five vacant commercial properties—a project priced out at $62,289,000. Last summer, Mayor Byron Brown announced his “5 in 5” plan—an effort to demolish vacant 5,000 structures in five years.The $100 million proposal anticipated $60 million from New York State to complement $22.5 million from the City of Buffalo, $15 million from the federal government, and $2.5 million from private sector contributors in the city.

But the city only got $10 million from Restore New York last year, and critics have argued that the administration’s demolition-only plan is one reason; the program reward redevelopment plans, and the city has primarily asked for demolition funds. In the past two years,public hearings on the Restore New York grant application have been held only after the administration has submitted its application. That was the plan for this year’s process, too. But the Common Council stepped in and scheduled a public hearing in advance of the application, in spite of the Brown administration’s opposition to the idea, in order to hear how community members thought the city might win more money this year and how it might be better spent.

The Brown adminstration recently accused critics of the “5 in 5” plan—specifically, it seems, Catherine Schweitzer of the Baird Foundation, who has suggested that a demolition plan does more harm than good if it is not strategically linked to positive revitalization efforts—of being high-minded delusionaries who don’t know what’s going on outside their Elmwood Village enclaves. The mayor invited his critics to take a bus tour of the city’s most blighted neighborhoods.

But Tuesday evening’s critics came from every part of the city, including those blighted neighborhoods, and all agreed that demolition of vacant structures was a vital component to restoring the city’s well-being. Just not the only component.

“Some areas are too far gone,” said Michele Johnson, the East Side housing activist and former member of the mayor’s Anti-flipping Task Force, arguing in favor of demolitions—so long as the city adopted a rational approach rather than taking down one house here, one house there. “What are you going to do, rehab one house on a block where the rest are vacant?”

“Of course demolition is necessary, but it has to be strategic,” said Anthony Armstrong of Local Initiatives Support Corporation, a national nonprofit that helps community groups tackle distressed neighborhoods. “Demolition alone doesn’t work” to protect and revitalize neighborhoods. As evidence, Armstrong cited the US Postal Service’s statistics on undeliverable mail, which indicate long-term, chronic vacancies. There are 19,691 undeliverable addresses in Buffalo—14.3 percent of all addresses in the city. Four Census tracts bordering Broadway have a higher vacancy rate now than they did when Brown took office—despite also leading all other Census tracts in the city for number of demolitions in the same period.

“The state wants projects that will attract private investment,” Armstrong concuded, noting big Restore New York grants to Rochester, Utica, and Troy that rewarded projects that emphasized rehabilitation and redevelopment—positive developments onto which private investment can attach itself. “They’re not just paying for demolition.”

Joy McDuffie, a GIS expert who serves on the Anti-flipping Task Force, cited the failure of the $1 billion Joint Schools Construction Project to deliver on its promise to redevelop the communities surrounding targeted schools. As an example, she offered the 1,200 properties immediately surroinding the Buffalo Academy of the Visual and Performing Arts—of which 585 are vacant. The city has been hollowing out nieighborhoods through demolition since the 1960s, she said, with little positive effect—not because demolition isn’t necessary, but because it’s not enough on its own.

“You want to talk about demolition?” she said. “Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. It’s time to do something else.”

Assemblyman Sam Hoyt, who drafted the legislation that led to the creation of the Restore New York program, said the city had failed to take full advantage of the program in its first two years. Considering the state’s looming budget crisis, he said, this year was likely to be the program’s last, and he feared the city was going to blow its chance again. (That’s a mild take on Hoyt’s salvo against the Brown administration; to read the full text of his remarks, go to AV Daily at Artvoice.com.)

Johnson said the city needed to start landbanking, as per the legislation Hoyt recently brought through the legislature. Garrett said that any programs funded by Restore New York ought to have job training and creation provisos, so that the people in affected neighborhoods realized a long-term gain, whether the programs favored rehab or demolition. Many suggested that Restore New York money ought to be used to help the city deal with its 8,000 properties, often the most derelict of all.

Some speakers beat their own drums: South District Councilmember Mickey Kearns spoke briefly about floodplain insurance and Hickory Woods; an associate talked about Kearns’ roof replacement and repair program in South Buffalo. Those in attendance heard pitches for the preservation of the Columbus Park neigborhood from the Peace Bridge Expansion Project and for investment in Black Rock’s commercial corridor.

But most blended their specific interests with an appreciation for the big picture. Tim Tielman, the city’s best known historical preservationist, conceded that his sort tend to focus on endangered commercial structures—office buildings, banks, theaters, etc.—and occasionally on historic residences. But as a preservationist, Tielman said, he was concerned that the dense city neighborhoods that supported these historic commercial structures be maintained, so that neighborhoods have enough people to support future reuses of those structures. He suggested that the city consider using the Restore New York grant to fund a strategy other cities have successfully pursued: Identify the worst building on every blighted block and rehab it completely. “That’s inspirational in a way that demolition never is,” Tielman said.

The biggest of big pictures was sketched by Terry Robinson, a frequent speaker before the Common Council and once a candidate to fill the Masten District seat vacated by Antoine Thompson when he left for the State Senate. (Demone Smith, the choice of Democratic Party headquarters and the mayor—maybe the last time those two parties agreed on anything—was awarded the seat.)

Robinson was pitching his own project, too: a comprehensive revitalization of the Fillmore Avenue corridor, which would turn the neighborhood into a showcase for sustainable redevelopment. Restore New York funds could be used to make every residence in the target area LEED-certified, to save money on utilities for cash-strapped homeowners. Vacant lots could be transformed into community gardens that supplied vegetables to neighborhood food co-operatives, housed in formerly vacant, city-owned buildings.

Sound crazy? Robinson allowed that his plan was just one more in the pile, and eventually the city would need to choose a strategy and act, rather than react. “We’ve planned the shit out of this thing,” Robinson said. “We could re-create all those studies over the next 10 years if you want.”

In any case, Robinson said, the city would do well to use the people in Council Chambers that night as resources in its effort to arrest the decline of the city’s poorest neighborhoods—the decline that has made Buffalo the second-poorest big city in the nation and the worst place to be born Latino or African-American. There are people in this city, he said, who have toughed it out for 30 or 40 years, and those people might turn the city around if invited into the process.

“When we walk past these [vacant] houses, they housed people that we knew,” Robinson said. “They’re not just pieces of flotsam on the stream.”