the inquisitive techie

As housing trends shift, and Urban areas once again become popular with home buyers, other markets naturally become unpopular. Here in Buffalo, urban renewal has hit full stride with a myriad of residential redevelopment projects that have turned old warehouses, factories, and other rust belt leftovers into sparkling new homes. People have started to move back downtown, and it is now considered hip again to live downtown. But it’s important to note the history of the area that got us here.

Suburban flight was in full swing by the time Buffalo’s inner city was rocked by riots, drugs, and changes to the economic climate of rust belt cities in the 1970’s. Many manufacturing jobs left forever, as steel, automotive, and other industries laid off tens of thousands of men from well paying union jobs. The area was jolted by over 15% unemployment. Once solid ethnic defined neighborhoods that had been terrific places to live for five generations, quickly degenerated into ghettos, as housing prices plummeted and empty buildings popped up nearby.

Poor families replaced working families in homes that were hastily divided into apartments by owners who left the city to live in clean new suburbs like Orchard Park, Amherst, Cheektowaga, and West Seneca. Families that did want to stay, eventually moved out though, as neighborhood businesses closed and most of the city’s urban center was overcome by poverty in the 1980’s.

By the 1990’s homes that had gone from family legacies to slum rentals stood now stood abandoned. Neglect, a 20 year economic slump in the economy, and a general lack of interest in living in the city left thousands of homes abandoned in huge areas just outside of the city center.

Driving into the city from the suburbs now meant driving through the East and South sides of the city, both decimated by two decades of poverty. There were almost no retail businesses left downtown, but most of all, it was just plain depressing, Main Street was lined with mostly empty storefronts, stores that were open sold knock off sporting goods and cheap jewelry. There are a lot of photos of the remnants of Buffalo’s Urban Decay at this site.

In the 90’s they came with the bulldozers. Empty houses, likely targets for squatters, arsonists, and crack addicts, were now razed, by the thousands. Entire city blocks were leveled. Homes that stood alone looked oddly out of place, like the survivors of a huge battle. Many of these fell to what I suspect was trauma, after being left alone without their neighbors.

These empty fields began to sprout new homes – suburban style. Vinyl siding, concrete driveways, front facing garage doors, and all the earmarks of the burbs wrapped their smaller citified cousins. At first the homes were sold to low income families, the only people willing to live in the former war zone. But as these neighborhoods grew, so did the size of the homes, and not long after, middle class and luxury developments started popping up nearby downtown. Buffalo is now in the throes of an urban residential boom.

As the sub prime mortgage crisis hits full stride, there are communities all over the country that are now seeing a remarkable side effect of developments full of McMansions standing nearly empty. They are experiencing the same familiar problems that rust belt inner cities felt in the 1970’s and 1980’s – owners renting to questionable tenants, gang activity, increased property crime and graffiti, and a huge increases in violent crime. That’s right – inner city demons exported to suburbia.

In it’s article The Next Slum?, Atlantic Monthly predicts a grim outlook for many of the newer suburbs built in the last 10-15 years:

“But much of the future decline is likely to occur on the fringes, in towns far away from the central city, not served by rail transit, and lacking any real core. In other words, some of the worst problems are likely to be seen in some of the country’s more recently developed areas—and not only those inhabited by sub prime-mortgage borrowers. Many of these areas will become magnets for poverty, crime, and social dysfunction.”

Well built houses from the 1800 and early 1900’s had to be gutted for their copper, woodwork, and other valuables before succumbing to the elements to fall down. Today’s particle board wrapped, vinyl sided exteriors are no match for the brick and solid hardwood of 100 years ago. Decay in the suburbs would happen very quickly, and be tough to stem in the larger, more expensive to maintain homes being built in the suburbs.

This will be an interesting trend to watch.