Four hundred and fourteen boarded up, neglected, and decrepit houses sit in ruin. Tiny apartments house families of all sizes, ethnicities, and walks of life. Little to no access to healthy food, poor transportation, violence, and gang activity are common problems. But the residents of Buffalo's Commodore Perry neighborhood are getting assistance, courtesy of UB.
Students and faculty in UB's Center for Urban Studies have partnered with the Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority (BMHA) to come up with a proposal to return the area into the community it once was.
The BMHA Perry Choice Neighborhood Initiative is being funded through the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Choice Neighborhood Initiative. The $250,000 grant went to 17 out of 119 schools that had applied for the grant. Spearheading the plan is Henry Louis Taylor, a professor at the Center for Urban Studies.
"My interest has always been in distressed neighborhoods and in building a model that shows us how to do it," Taylor said."The idea is to change the neighborhood into a community of opportunity."
The Perry neighborhood was once a thriving community filled with people of all cultures, nationalities, and ages. Those of Polish, Italian, German, Canadian, British, Irish, Russian, Austrian, Hungarian, Swedish, Czech, Romanian, and African heritage once called the diverse neighborhood home.
Today, the neighborhood's main residents are African Americans living well below the poverty line. For more than half a century, the one-time neighborhood of opportunity has slowly turned into a dangerous place for its residents, and it has started to affect the students in the surrounding schools.
Taylor believes that simply renovating the housing won't solve the problems that face the distressed community. To fix the issues, Taylor wants to build a network of supportive neighborhood services, develop an employment strategy, and encourage neighborhood-oriented businesses to help pull business and revenue back into the community, allowing people living below the poverty line to reach stability and economic independence.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is not solely funding the Perry neighborhood renovation. In addition to the $250,000 HUD grant, the BMHA donated $350,000 to the proposal.
Taylor said the total of $700,000 will be used in a two-year planning grant, which allows Taylor and his colleagues to figure out how many housing units to build, what will be torn down, and the best place to put the new houses. In February 2013, the group will apply for a $30 million implementation grant to start renovating the neighborhood.
Taylor has a group of about a dozen students working closely with him on the project, and through their experiences working on the Perry renovation alongside him, Taylor believes that the lessons they'll learn will go beyond the classroom, allowing them to see what they can really do to affect the lives of others.
"It broadens their horizons and heightens their skill levels," Taylor said. "I think it gives them a better understanding between theory and practice. I think it deepens their appreciation for ordinary people. Especially people of color, like blacks and Latinos. I think it shatters what they thought things in distressed neighborhoods are all about, and I think it gives them optimism about their abilities to change the world."
Taylor said he hopes the project creates a nurturing and supportive environment for the children of the neighborhood after its completion that will hopefully have an effect on people of similar communities.
"Our goal here is to create a model, and if we can build that model in Buffalo, how we can rebuild a neighborhood in a way that changes the trajectory of people's lives, then to us, that's a model that we can export to other locations and places," Taylor said. "It's a chance for us to create a better world in the process of [neighborhood] planning and development."
Taylor has high hopes for all the people affected by the proposal.
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Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
