Buffalo is a city that truly needs an urban facelift. Many parts of the city are in abominable disrepair, as people passing through run red lights to avoid an awkward vulnerability, stopped in the middle of the bad part of town. Residents from environing suburbs can imagine what terrible crimes can occur in one of the abandoned Bailey Avenue buildings.
Gentrifying the dirty parts of Buffalo seems to be the obvious answer. Investing in a project that would bring more attention to a dangerous blind spot sounds like the only way to make Buffalo a more attractive, cosmopolitan city.
Central Park in New York City was built on the strength of eminent domain, its planners having booted out the Native Americans that lived within the park's property. Today, the park is a cardinal attraction for citygoers and tourists, and it is a staple of New York City culture.
But the most recent example of the flipside concerns UB and its multi billion-dollar incentive to build its medical campus in Buffalo's Fruit Belt area. It was intended to buy up inhabited land and to displace its residents to a different part of town.
Though planners claimed that the new subsidized housing units would be upgraded in size and quality and that the area offered more public amenities, the plans were met with loud public recoil. Fruit Belt residents did not want to leave their homes because they had established a comfortable sense of community at their current location.
Narrow-minded business and real estate administrators look at an available Buffalo lot and see what the property could be without the elements of its current plight, including the current residents.
Many of us, in this case, forget what it is to have a sense of home because the issue is too far across town, beyond the shortsightedness of our perspective.
We cannot feel good about moving people from a one-bedroom apartment to a three-bedroom penthouse if the resident in question preferred his or her smaller abode. It is a patronizing means of claiming to know what others want and a presumptuous notion of what is better for people in general.
But Buffalo is struggling mightily, having suffered an economic and commercial decline since American industrialism took a steep dive decades ago.
It is easy to say "Fix it" and spit-shine the spotty parts of a potentially beautiful town. But for every beautifying initiative, there are consequential side effects that do not always share in the benefits of the project's aim.
It is also easy to say that people should be sensitive to the blunt end of the deal, because people are unwilling to deal with the eyesore that is East Buffalo.
It is even easier, though, to say that we cannot do anything about the displacement of the Native Americans from Central Park. The difference now is that we have a choice.
