Wall Street Journal Article on Buffalo (City)

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Forgive me for posting the entire article, but it is a pay-subscription site:

 

The Empire State Can Rise Again

Upstate cities like Buffalo and Rochester were once powerhouses. They can be again, if politicians encourage local entrepreneurship

 

By JONATHAN COHEN AND JOHN GIARDINO

Wall Street Journal

JULY 23, 2011

 

To understand how New York earned its nickname as the Empire State, take a trip along Interstate 90 west of Albany.

 

Syracuse is the first stop. Built by the descendants of German immigrants in the 18th century, at its center is a large university that boasts Jim Brown, Lou Reed and Joe Biden among its alumni. Here in 1937, Willis Haviland Carrier built his famous air-conditioner manufacturing company, which, ironically, made the Sun Belt habitable for millions of migrant New Yorkers.

 

Next, pay a visit to Rochester, birthplace to such diverse influences as Xerox (founded in 1906), the Mormon Church, and Susan B. Anthony's women's rights movement.

 

Some 75 miles away is where Nikola Tesla's experiments with electrical power made Buffalo known as "The City of Light" at the turn of the 20th century. Two U.S presidents—Millard Fillmore and Grover Cleveland—were born in Buffalo, and a third, Teddy Roosevelt, was sworn in there. Mark Twain edited the local newspaper; Frank Lloyd Wright built at least four homes and a major factory; and F. Scott Fitzgerald lived as a boy on Irving Place.

 

Today New York's once-vibrant upstate region is no more. People are moving away in droves. Industries like Bethlehem Steel in Buffalo and Kodak in Rochester are dead or dying. Cultural institutions struggle for funds and relevance. The University of Buffalo, once regarded as the crown jewel of the SUNY system, barely ranks on a national level. Buffalo's population, 580,000 in 1950, is now dwindling toward 260,000, and the city is now the third poorest in the nation on a per-capita basis.

 

Can the region revive? Not as long as it follows the failed top-down strategy its leaders have long pursued.

 

For years, elected officials have promised exciting projects to turn things around. A high-speed train is the fantasy of the moment. From time to time, convention centers and other forms of temporary employment do materialize. But these projects create very little sustainable income. In fact, they often have a negative effect. In the 1980s, the late Congressman Jack Kemp led an effort to replace Buffalo's perfectly well-functioning transit corridor, Main Street, with a subsidized subway line and a downtown pedestrian mall. Ridership never achieved projected levels for the subway. The system has never paid for itself and, by banning cars, the pedestrian mall killed downtown's commercial district.

 

This is a pattern in a city where real-estate deals are often disguised as economic development strategies. Last year, a brave group of locals was able to defeat a sweetheart arrangement to bring the fishing and hunting superstore Bass Pro to Buffalo's waterfront—but only after tens of millions in misguided spending. The successor scheme is to relocate Buffalo's university buildings five miles down the street to the new "bio-medical corridor." It's all part of something called UB 2020 and it has a price tag in the hundreds of millions.

 

As Bruce Fisher, who directs the Center for Economic and Policy Studies at Buffalo State College, remarked earlier this year, "What's so striking [about the plan] is that there's not much in it about intellectual innovation, but a whole lot in it about real estate." How it will generate long-term jobs is anybody's guess. But there's no question that the local contracting industry is pleased.

 

If there is one lesson to be learned from New York State's history, it's that people and ideas must precede bricks and mortar. The empire-building spirit can be restored if local officials get real about smaller populations and smaller budgets, and pursue policies that encourage local entrepreneurship—not dependence on Albany and Washington.

 

First, everyone needs to stop running recklessly at mirage-like projects. Instead, resources should be invested in making communities work for the people who live in them now: safer and cleaner streets, high-quality schools, and infrastructure improvements for the facilities that anchor neighborhoods.

 

Privately sponsored Business Improvement Districts where local businesses join together to fund and manage basic neighborhood improvements could be a part of the answer. (Such districts have been a great success in Manhattan.) Then there's IBM's Smarter Cities Challenge Grant, which is awarding $50 million in technology and services to 100 deserving cities world-wide. Syracuse is using its grant to analyze neighborhood data on crime, poverty, garbage collection and housing vacancy to determine where to allocate city resources. The data-driven approach, as opposed to the real-estate development model, is one that other municipalities throughout the region would do well to follow.

 

Regulated hydrofracking to develop the region's shale gas reserves is also something worth considering if it indeed delivers the $214 million in additional tax revenue and 16,000 new jobs that advocates promise.

 

At the same time, there must be radical change in Albany. This means weaning upstate cities off downstate tax revenues. No more unneeded convention centers, light-speed rail projects, and subsidized fishing stores. When it comes to the university system, the primary investments should be in outstanding teachers, not building projects.

 

Above all, give the municipalities a bigger role in determining public-employee benefits and pensions. Albany dictates the rules and rates governing pensions for retired public employees, 25% of whom live out of state. The municipalities literally have no bargaining power. Even if officials wanted to, it's mathematically impossible to raise property taxes high enough to offset pension obligations.

 

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has accomplished a lot quickly: a balanced budget, marriage equality, a cap on real estate taxes. Brimming with energy, he is fairly a modern embodiment of the spirit that built the Empire State. Will he lead the reform necessary to revive upstate? It's long past time.

 

Mr. Cohen, a former aide to Mayor Ed Koch, and Mr. Giardino, a member of Buffalo's Financial Control Board, are the co-founders of the New York Policy Forum.

[TPS]

You don't need forgiveness from those here, rather you better hope the WSJ copyright police don't hunt you down.

 

Thanks for posting though. I think the article captures what most rust belt cities have done for years, going after the magic bullet, big box development, as opposed to focusing on cultivating small businesses and improving schools.

 

Local entreprenuer Mark Goldman has been harping on this idea for years--quit throwing big sums of money at big projects hoping they will be the catalyst for urban development. In fact, he has been instrumental in getting a more demand-based development stategy for the waterfront.

[Lurker]

As soon as I saw Bruce Fisher quoted, the article lost all credibility for me...