11/20/2008

UB 2020 and the City's East Side

I must confess, I've never understood if UB 2020 is supposed to be a time-stamp or some sort of vision statement. BuffaloRising recently linked to UB's Comprehensive plan - right here. Great comment stream! Anyway, while looking through the links on the B/R post I arrived here - Building UB - an amazing flickr series with links to many of UB's planning pics and sketches. There's a growing comment stream associated with every pic.

This pic, from the Downtown Campus set, depicts UB's future expansion just east of Main Street and immeadiatly south of the Artspace neighborhood. What's interesting here is the green shaded area just east of Michigan Avenue, between Goodrich and North streets. There are a number of existing structures here and after a first read through UB's website, I couldn't locate what's planned for this area.
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Make sure to check out additional images here. Before the next Artspace Neighborhood Walk, I'll go over and check out a number of structures on that Michigan Avenue block. Really fascinating as the $40 million reconstruction of City Honors High School is adjacent to this site, on the other side of North Street.

Maybe by 2020 we'll see things right, 'till then things seem slightly blurry.
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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great comment stream? BR sounds like an incestuous family that has been spending too much time together.

Sarah said...

I was listening to WBFO's piece on the plan yesterday and one question that struck me was, what about the south campus park-n-ride? The plan includes greening over all the parking on Main St. While I love the idea of more green space, I wouldn't want this plan to discourage use of public transit.

Anonymous said...

There was some preliminary discussion at UB about which units to move to the downtown. People I know are about 50/50 split in supporting/opposing the move. It often depends how long they have been in Buffalo and where they live. Personally, I think it's a great idea for the city and UB.

Anonymous said...

I came here too late in the day to comment at your Sycamore Village article. I want to say a lot! Maybe tomorrow (or next week this being a holiday preparations week). Instead, I am putting in my nickel's worth of comment about that neat title, UB 2020.

That's a catchy number and timely too. It probably means both perfect vision and a time stamp. It portrays UB's governmental position of projecting twenty years into the future.

What interests me is that many years ago, including in the late part of the 19th century,
government used to project 50 years into the future. That time slot turned out to be too long a projection due to the rapidity of change during the past century.

I remember a time when families stayed in one house for several generations.

Besides that, there also was a time when houses had new ownership but the dollar amount stayed the same or didn't increase much!

And, the sellers didn't remodel the bathroom or kitchen just to up the selling price. Instead, the new owners changed what they wanted to themselves according to their needs.

There certainly was no minute-by-minute increase in the price of any house!

Today, what if the remodeling jobs don't appeal to the new owners? Can the house price be cut way down?

It is fascinating to me that a baby born in Buffalo in the 1950s can have been around to see the prosperity of the past, the decline now and still be alive to see the changes in the future.

OK, so, this is interesting to me...