razing thousands of vacant houses - "sign of progress."

[jk]

glimpse of the future?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/ny...21852f&ei=5070


Vacant Houses, Scourge of a Beaten-Down Buffalo

BUFFALO — In this city beaten down by decades of factory closings and residential exodus, the razing of thousands of vacant houses is being touted as a sign of progress.

Gangs, squatters and teenagers have been burning down hundreds of houses a year, straining the meager resources of the Police and Fire Departments. Some of the properties have been turned into crack dens and places to stash guns and drugs. A few have been booby-trapped or had their floors ripped out by scavengers looking for pipes they can sell to metal dealers.


The burned-out and boarded-up buildings, which are visible on nearly every street in east Buffalo, have deterred even the most pioneering investors from moving in.

etc

[Andreuccio]

Re: razing thousands of vacant houses - "sign of progress."

What a shame. Those look like they were decent houses in their day: craftsman style, a bit of character, well built. It's too bad they can't come up with some creative solution to save them, and restore some livelihood to the moribund city. Maybe give them to immigrants, with the opportunity for residency with the stipulation they live there for ten years and fix the place up.

I wonder how much of this blight is due to the housing bubble, vs. the fact that Buffalo is just dying anyway?

[Rajiv]

Re: razing thousands of vacant houses - "sign of progress."

I wonder how much of this blight is due to the housing bubble, vs. the fact that Buffalo is just dying anyway?

Here is a paper presented in 2005 -"Labor and Urban Crisis in Buffalo, New York: Building a High Road Infrastructure"

Buffalo’s Crisis

Buffalo’s economic fortunes have, over the past century, markedly changed. Located at the most important transport node between Midwestern farms, mines and factories and east coast consumer markets, Buffalo was once well situated for transit, commerce, and manufacturing industries. Known as the Queen City of the Great Lakes, Buffalo was tied with San Francisco as the 10th largest city in the US, with 506,000 residents in the 1920 census. Its importance in transport, commerce and heavy industry, however, began to wane after World War II.

By the 1970s, Buffalo was beginning to suffer the effects of economic decline, as the waterfront commerce, aerospace, electronics and steel industries all faced collapse. From 1969 to 2003 manufacturing employment dropped in the metropolitan area from 180,000 to 88,000. Between 1970 and 1990, Erie County shed all but 3,100 out of nearly 29,000 jobs in primary metals, mainly steel. Since the mid 1980s, however, manufacturing employment has stabilized (Figure 1). The auto industry has provided some of this stability, as local auto parts plants have achieved enough investment to offset much of the loss of jobs to lean production, technological change and low-wage competition elsewhere. Dependence on outside investment (i.e., from Detroit-based automakers and lawmakers in Albany and Washington) has intensified, as many of the employers that have grown up in Buffalo (Trico Products, Buffalo China and Client Logic) have exited the region.

Population decline followed economic decline. After a peak of 580,000 in 1950, the city began to lose residents to the suburbs. By 1980 it was the nation’s 58th largest city with 350,000 residents. The metropolitan region as a whole, although faring somewhat better, also declined: after a peak of 1.4 million in 1970, the population had slid to 1.2 million by 2000.

Suburbanization has made the region highly unequal, placing native-born blacks, who comprise a third of the city’s population, at a deep disadvantage. Blacks have a poverty rate of 36 percent, about 15 points higher than the city’s population as a whole. Compared to the city, the suburbs are overwhelmingly white and have much lower unemployment rates (Table 1). Buffalo’s whites are largely descended from the Poles, Italians, Irish and Germans, who migrated to the city during decades of industrial expansion. As they dispersed into the suburbs, urban neighborhoods lost that ethnic identity. African-American institutions, such as churches and community service organizations, by contrast, have retained their vitality, partly because of their struggles during the civil rights era.

Market-driven free enterprise has proven ineffective in addressing these problems. Abundant resources—miles of undeveloped waterfront, ample renewable energy, highly skilled labor force with a strong work ethic, distinguished institutions of higher education, exceptional arts and cultural institutions, and rich architectural assets—have not attracted sufficient private investment. Furthermore, Western New York’s strategic geographic location as the second largest port of entry into the U.S. has failed to bring job-creating capital, even in this period of rapidly expanding international trade.

Meanwhile, local government is increasingly incapable of filling in the economic cracks. In Buffalo, the diminishing municipal tax base has led to chronic budget problems, fiscal insolvency and a 2003 takeover of municipal finances by a state-appointed control board. At the time, various commissions and suburban interests proposed “reforms” that would have effectively abolished the city government by merging it with the county government. Then, in early 2005, Erie County faced its own fiscal meltdown due to a taxpayer revolt against a proposed sales tax increase. The county’s crisis resulted in the largest round of layoffs since the plant closures of the 1980s, a loss of as many as 2,000 jobs, or nearly 20% of the county workforce. The government’s attempts to reduce costs, services and employees have met resistance from public sector unions and sparked controversy and consternation throughout the community.

Some current discussions of Buffalo's problems at "fix buffalo today"

[zoog]

Re: razing thousands of vacant houses - "sign of progress."

What a shame. Those look like they were decent houses in their day: craftsman style, a bit of character, well built. It's too bad they can't come up with some creative solution to save them, and restore some livelihood to the moribund city. Maybe give them to immigrants, with the opportunity for residency with the stipulation they live there for ten years and fix the place up.

I wonder how much of this blight is due to the housing bubble, vs. the fact that Buffalo is just dying anyway?

Buffalo has been below the national average for a long time...


EDIT:

oops, forgot to start them both out at 100 at the same point.:eek:

Nonetheless, their bubbletime gains were still below the overall.

[SeanO]

Re: razing thousands of vacant houses - "sign of progress."

On a related note... with the wave of foreclosures here in CA, we are starting to see lots of dead lawns, broken windows, and mosquito infested pools. It won't take but a few years here for the local governments to fire up the bulldozers and start tearing down anything that stays in a state of disrepair (and add the bill to the owners property taxes).

I've attended the property tax auctions in a number of counties and I was surprised to see vacant lots going to tax sale, that were owned by banks as a result of foreclosure, and which had their homes bulldozed. It certainly isn't an overnight process, but it is truly amazing what a bank can lose track of through this chaos.

Sean