Where the blame has fallen for the urban decay in University Heights is a classic example of the cause-and-effect fallacy, applied to urban neighborhoods. If there are more students (or more low-income residents) and more problems, then the students are to blame for the problems. Right?
Unfortunately, Buffalo's civic leaders have overlooked the fact that the person who has the most control over the condition of a rental property is the landlord. Many landlords in the University Heights are hard-working men and women who fix problems right away. But far too many Heights landlords - more appropriately called "slumlords" - are not doing their jobs.
Slumlords can't be blamed for the thumping, top-volume dance music coming from houses on Saturday nights or the red plastic cups strewn about lawns on Sunday mornings. But they have direct control over the property maintenance issues that plague the Heights - unkempt lawns, sagging porches, flaking paint and faulty appliances.
Group Legal Services at UB said 40 percent of the issues it handles involve student-landlord disputes. It's one thing if those disputes are over broken windows from parties. But anyone who has lived in the Heights (indeed, anyone who has ever lived in a rental property) knows most of them are over busted washers and dryers, failed hot water heaters, collapsing gutters, or unmowed lawns that go ignored for weeks or months.
With a new administration taking over UB, and a general recognition in the community that conditions in the Heights are worse than ever, it's time for some action. University Heights will never improve unless UB realizes two things: first, that it has a stake in the neighborhood's future; and second, that it can't pawn off Heights removal on the City of Buffalo, which already has far too much on its plate.
UB should budget a sizable sum of money for a Heights renewal project and then study how best to improve the neighborhood. UB could buy a number of properties in the Heights and offer them for rent to students (much like the on-campus apartments). There is a clear demand for quality housing. Having UB act as a responsible landlord would give students who want to live in the Heights a shot at quality housing while raising the bar for other landlords.
Slumlords are a problem all over Buffalo. Over the course of a generation, thousands of properties in Buffalo's inner city have gone from being owner-occupied homes to rental properties. This trend - which signals a neighborhood's downward trajectory from a middle-class area to a low-income area - happened over the past 15 years in University Heights. The result has been an exodus of families and an influx of students and low-income renters.
But Buffalo's civic leaders and community leaders have long viewed the neighborhood as a false dichotomy between "students" on one side and "families and low-income renters" on the other side. In fact, low-income students and low-income renters share a crucial similarity - they are both far too often at the mercy of negligent slumlords.
UB is the only entity that has the resources to make an immediate impact by investing in the neighorhood. The time to act is now.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
