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Black neighborhoods were collateral damage in the remaking of Buffalo and Erie County. Remaking the city and suburbs meant that black neighborhoods had to be knocked down to make way for downtown expansion, institutional development, interstate highway connectors, and wider roads. These “unbuilding” activities merged with plant closings and outmigration to hit the East Side with sledgehammer force. This urban disfiguring process left the East Side with miles of vacant lots and empty structures; it’s a physical setting so scarred and foreboding that Robert M. Silverman, University at Buffalo urban planner, has called it Zombieland1. Today, the most distressed and blighted properties in Erie County are found in this part of Buffalo.
The mutilation of the East Side is not benign.
It robs people of the value of their homes. An East Side homeowner said to me, “Dr. Taylor, the house next door to me is empty, with a tree growing through the roof. It is worth sixteen thousand dollars. My house is in good condition, and I have big investments in it; and it is only worth eighteen thousand dollars. I don’t get it. I’m still going to put another twenty thousand dollars into my house, even though I know I will never recoup it. So, I am making this investment in my family and my children.” This is how housing market dynamics operate on the mutilated East Side.
Cities don’t grow like weeds.
The city’s shape and form are the result of political decisions, not the invisible hand of economic determinism. Yesterday, Buffalo was built for white higher-paid workers, professionals, and business elites. Today, the city is being built for the white creative classes, or the latte group, as I call them. This is a broad group of whites, including folks in the arts, educators, researchers, doctors, and other professionals. To make them happy, urban leaders are refashioning the city with hipster neighborhoods, recreational areas, and public spaces where the latte group can converse, bike, jog, work out, attend outdoor concerts, and congregate in restaurants, bars, and coffee shops. The latte group bathes itself in liberalism and issues a clarion call for diversity and social justice, while simultaneously condemning the black and Latino masses to a blighted and disfigured urban dystopia.
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The hard-core reality is that Buffalo’s latte city, when stripped of its fanciful color-blind mask, is nothing more than a neoliberal white city—a place where millennials and the creative class claim the most hedonic houses and neighborhoods for themselves, where they live longer, healthier, happier, and more prosperous lives than Buffalonians of color, who are forced to live in the most undesirable and unhealthiest neighborhoods in the metropolis.
Black Buffalo is invisible.
Black Buffalo is Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Whites see blacks, but not really. Whites hear blacks, but not really. In preparation for a presentation at a recent forum on blight in New York state, I read numerous reports and newspaper articles on blight in metropolitan Buffalo, and the terms “black” and “African American” were rarely, if ever, mentioned. For example, even though blight concentration is synonymous with the East Side black community, Blueprint Buffalo, an action plan for reclaiming vacant land, said, “At the beginning of the 21st century, Buffalo has an unprecedented opportunity to identify, assemble, and reclaim vacant parcels for start-up businesses, new families, artists, entrepreneurs, and major commercial partners to join in the region’s renaissance.” Most of that vacant land is on the East Side, but there was not a word about black neighborhood development. There was not a word about urban leaders uniting with the black masses to transform and change the East Side.
Not a single word.
In the 2015 “One Region Forward” report on housing and neighborhood strategies, the challenges facing the black community are barely discussed, except in a veiled language that suggests “… for areas where disinvestment has left few of the assets, anchors and actors that are needed to power successful neighborhood revitalization … the time for conventional neighborhood development might be decades away.” The authors never use the terms “black” or “East Side,” but any person knowledgeable of Buffalo understands the code, and knows they are talking about the East Side black community.
My point is city leaders know about the challenges facing Black Buffalo, but they constantly feign ignorance and surprise. But they know. More than two decades ago, I teamed up with a group of scholars to produce the most comprehensive study of Black Buffalo ever undertaken. This blueprint for change, written by a team of scholars from the University at Buffalo, Buffalo State College, and Fordham University, along with support from the Buffalo Urban League and the City of Buffalo Common Council, was never implemented. Later, my center conducted an investigation of the health status of Black Buffalo, funded by Kaleida Health and the Black Leadership Forum. The study was celebrated and then put on a shelf.
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In 2000, I led a team that outlined a strategy for the redevelopment of the east-side Fruit Belt community and demonstrated how tax increment financing could fund the plan. The study was funded by the City of Buffalo’s Office of Strategic Planning. City and medical campus leaders praised the report, ignored its findings, and then launched their own redevelopment strategy, which displaced 65 percent of the Fruit Belt population.
Yes, Buffalo is rising and happy talk abounds; simultaneously, thousands of blacks are being displaced from their traditional neighborhoods along Main Street. They are being pushed out of every neighborhood of opportunity in the city. But no one seems to care or notice. Black Buffalo is invisible. Black needs, hopes, and desires are systemically ignored; promises are made, but never kept.
Yeah. I know some white person in Amherst is saying, “But Mayor Byron Brown is black. I don’t get it.”
Let’s be clear. Black faces in high places don’t mean a
