The key to attracting residents

Some people view the idea of the shrinking city as the desire to shrink. This is incorrect. It is the acceptance of the reality of our situation. We would, however, welcome all comers. How do we continue to attract new residents with the charms and wiles on offer?

An article in New York magazine muses on “what could possibly make someone want to leave New York and move to Buffalo?” In “Where the Urban Dream Life Is Going Cheap,” writer Adam Sternbergh examines people who’ve moved to the big city to find their fortunes only to reach that critical moment where they ask themselves, “Do we want to move to an apartment that’s a lot less space for a whole lot more money, just to stay?” The other option, they realize when looking at a place like Buffalo, where they can afford to have a home and children and a life, is to “change our lives completely.”

I know this story well–it’s my story, and so do many of you from experience. It’s the new Youngstown, and telling your stories is the key to attracting residents here. The 2010 site does this well, and Anthony Kobak and Rick Alcorn deserve credit for that. What’s interesting about this article is what Buffalo, and specifically Buffalo PUSH is doing to help use abandoned properties for its residents.

Some people will read this as a story of defeat. They will look at Herbeck and Cloyd and think, They came; they couldn’t cut it; good riddance. That’s also a familiar New York narrative, one that’s especially comforting to those of us who stay and stick it out. Because, sure, stained glass and spare bedrooms are nice and all, but no one moves to New York because they think they’re going to get a great bargain on an apartment. You move here because you want to live in New York City.

But I am here to tell you that this is not a story of defeat. Rather, it’s a story about choices. It’s a story about reaching that pivotal moment when the dream life you imagined for yourself in New York no longer seems attainable or attractive, or simply no longer seems worth the wearying chase. It’s a story, admittedly, about the kinds of people who have the luxury to move away, just as they once had the luxury to choose to move here; that is, people not pulled to one city or another by family obligation or job transferral, but rather by some grander idea of who they are and where they might best fit.

Here are a few things you probably don’t know about Buffalo: The city’s median income is $28,000, and with nearly 30 percent of its citizens below the poverty line, Buffalo is the second poorest city in America. (Number one: Detroit.) The median home price is just $60,000. In 1901, Buffalo was the eighth largest city in America, a booming industrial metropolis, and the site of the World’s Fair. By 2008, thanks to white flight and industrial decay, its population had dropped by half, from a mid-century high of 580,000 to about 270,000—fewer people, in fact, than lived there in 1901. As a result, large tracts of Buffalo are essentially abandoned, turned into “urban prairie,” full of boarded-up buildings and weedy vacant lots.

If you’re really interested in Buffalo’s sense of possibility, you should talk to Lesley Maia Horowitz. She’s a petite woman in her mid-forties, with sandy-blonde hair and a fondness for funky miniskirts. She grew up in Buffalo, a typical misfit, the one who worshipped David Bowie and swooned for the local punk rocker, then got the hell out as soon as she could. Now she lives in Manhattan. She and her partner, Dominic Sinesio, have, if I may say, a very glammy-glam New York life. They run the design firm OfficeLab. They specialize in brand management, and they’ve handled, among others, the branding of the Soho Grand and the Hotel on Rivington. Horowitz’s current New York life is, I imagine, not that different from the one she once imagined for herself when she was plotting her escape from Buffalo.

And yet, almost every weekend, she flies back home. She’s not exactly sure why. But her stab at an explanation sounds familiar to me. “This place just feels like there’s so much still left to the imagination,” she says.

Horowitz has, for example, befriended a guy named Aaron Bartley who runs an organization called PUSH Buffalo. Bartley, who’s 33, grew up in Buffalo, went to Harvard Law, got involved in community organizing in Boston, then moved back to Buffalo to see if he could put the city’s abandoned buildings to good use. (There are roughly 10,000 abandoned houses in the city, half of which are now on an official to-be-demolished list.) PUSH takes ownership of these derelict houses, fixes them up, then moves in a family in need of a home. The family pays rent into an escrow fund, and after two years, the money can be used as a down payment on a house of their own.

On my last day, Horowitz and Bartley take me on a tour of one of the most depressed parts of the city. It seems a strange way to end my visit, but fitting as well, as these neighborhoods, with their rows of empty houses each available for $1, represent exactly the kind of possibilities that drew the two of them back.

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