fixBuffalo

6/08/2005

Wired Buffalo?

The innovative folks over at Intel have just released their Most Unwired Cities Survey. Buffalo is ranked 56th and in the bottom half of the 100 largest metropolitan areas of the country. Hmmm...We are ahead of Tulsa but way behind cool places (?) like Toledo which is ranked number 5th. When did Toledo become a cool place to live? Places like Seattle (1st) and San Francisco (2nd) don't have to advertise how cool they are...they just is...

Wanna make Buffalo a cool place? Wanna put Buffalo on the front page of the New York Times and draw people to this place. Think Wi-Max Cloud and total coverage for the whole city...east-side & west side, schools, homes, community centers...

Think Vonage and Skype....did someone say free phone service for Buffalo?

I've put together this Buffalo Wi-Fi map which shows the free wi-fi sites I know about! Let me know if there are more.

I mean aside from the folks at Buffalo Wi-Fi is anyone else working on this solution for Buffalo?

Planetizen also picked up Intel's survey with links to Cyburbia forums.
Daily Wireless is an excellant forum for urban wireless planning stuff.

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Artspace Archive • Annals of Neglect • BAVPA • Where is Perrysburg? • Broken Promises...
Writing the City • Woodlawn Row Houses • Tour dé Neglect - 2006

6/07/2005

Maps of Buffalo

While figuring out the best way to use google maps and the latest crack, GmapTrack to represent some stuff happening here on the city's east-side, I found these images which I hadn't seen. Click on any image for a larger look and a little attribution.

905 Humboldt...going, going...

I first posted about this place last month. And in Monday's Buffalo News real estate transaction column I noticed that the property had formally transferred to HUD's hands. Returning from the morning bagel and coffee run, I noticed the Dick Kern had sent me this information about 905 Humboldt. There is a complete property report available to download.

Starting Price $14,000

Bids for this property close on 6/12/05...so hurry!

I e-mailed J-M Reed over at Polis Realty and he told me this short story about what happens with banks and HUD. I asked him what he thought 905 might fetch...

I would guess about 10k – 66k is the amount insured on the mortgage (equates to the judgment amount, essentially.) often this shows up as 10.00 if you see it recorded as such. The way it works is this: the property was mortgaged for say 70,000 with an fha backed (insured) loan. The lender forecloses on the property when the borrow is in default with a final judgment amount of 66k. The property is then deemed to be any amount less than that (often much less) so title is transferred to hud and hud pays the judgment amount of 66k (an insurance payoff). Hud now sells the property amount for their appraisal (say 10k). So what we end up with, is taxpayers paying the 56k. While this was designed to be a vehicle to increase home-ownership with the feds guaranteeing loans (which is the positive) we have ended up with a situation where banks will write the loan knowing they will get their money back no matter what. A flawed system which will result (as greenspan has indicated) must result in fewer federally insured loans.

J-M has keys to the place and would be very interested in helping
a serious buyer with the purchase of this totally cool property.
JM Reed can be reached at 716-881-1200
or jmreed@polisrealty.com

6/06/2005

Deconstructing Buffalo - Part I

***Update***

June 8, 2005

Two additional reclamation and re-use models have surfaced via Cyburbia!
This first one has a pretty cool environmentally sensitive twist. Check it out!

Hillsbourough, California
Bridgeport, Connecticut

Michele Johnson doesn't spend much time talking about getting things done, she does things! She has spent years and hundreds of hours tracking down the quasi-legal "flipping" of properties on Ebay. This resulted in her commitment and participation in the "Mayor's Task-Force on Flipping." Here's that news conference last month.

Now she has agreed to lead a group of activists, community groups and with the cooperation of some of Buffalo's most enlightened elected officals and possibly city employees to establish Buffalo's first building materials reclamation and re-use project.

This is the alternative to expensive demolitions and sending Buffalo's architectural heritage to a landfill in Pennsylvannia. More about the this story as it quickly develops and the call for volunteers to begin the deconstruction process.

Meanwhile, a quick posting to Cyburbia...the most innovative message board for innovative urban planning related stuff...yielded two models of successful "reclamation and re-use" projects located around the country.

The Harmony Project - Charleston, SC - These items are as good as new, except they are used. These and so much more can be found at the Harmony Warehouse. They carry everything from toilets, full cans of paint, buckets full of doorknobs, and electrical switch boxes to desks, sofas and out-of-tune pianos. The most sought after items in the Warehouse are windows, doors, lumber, washing machines, shingles, siding and flooring.

The Loading Dock - Baltimore, MD - The Loading Dock, Inc. is the nation's first successful, self-sustaining, nonprofit clearinghouse of reusable and surplus building materials. TLD helps improve living conditions for families, neighborhoods and communities while positively impacting the environment. Mission: We increase the supply and use of affordable building materials for housing and communtiy improvement by redirecting landfill-bound, reusable materials into productive use. Since 1984, TLD has saved low-income housing and community projects over 6.7 million and has rescued over 33,000 tons of building materials from landfills.

6/05/2005

ChicagoCrime.org

This is too cool!

Play with ChicagoCrime.org and see what's happening by zip code, block, crime type or hour of the day!

How’s this for a clever use of Google Maps and public data. Check out all crimes reported in the 3 am hour on May 5, 2005 in Chicago. You can even map out all the prostitution busts. Plus you can subsribe to RSS feeds for any neighborhood! Cool!

See what other people are saying about this google map hack, over here!

University at Buffalo Professor Alex Halavis has this to say about ChicagoCrime.org!

Take the Chicago police blotter and run it through Google Maps and you get ChicagoCrime.org. Take a look, for example, at where you are most likely to be robbed at gunpoint, or find a dice game. (NB: Both occur with frequency on sidewalks—see the links under the map.) I wish they had this in more big cities. I love to walk cities, but I would also love to know what I’m walking into.

Adrian Holovaty put this site together. Here's Adrian's explanation as to how ChicagoCrime.org was developed and a few interesting directions that will help you exploit and plumb the data.

Any chance that somebody in Buffalo could run the police blotter thru google maps. How about Housing Court Scofflaws?

Urban Blogging...

On the left hand side I've been linking to all these urban blogs for some time. Here's a quick look at some recent highlights.

A Daily Dose of Architecture features a post about the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Projects in St. Louis. It's called, An Anniversary of Sorts and reflects on the residents and the architect Minouru Yamasaki who's most famous commission was the World Trade Center in NYC. He also designed M&T Bank in our own downtown. This is one of my favorite blogs.

Cascadia Scorecard features environmental news often with an urban twist. Peak Performance is a recent post discussing the impact of oil production. There seems to be enough science on both sides of this debate. Some of the posts discuss other sustainability related issues.

City Comforts is part of the self described "reality based community." I don't know what that is supposed to mean yet many of the posts have a liberal bias. This one on the coming housing bubble is somewhat representative. It's called, Mapping the Bubble, where are the biggest.

Cool Town Studios is all about innovation and urban vitality. A recent post In Town Living: A Different American Dream is a review of a book by Amy Breen and Dick Rigby. They also run The Waterfront Center which I trust some of our elected and anointed have checked out. This is my other favorite in the bunch.

Peter Gordon's Blog looks at economics and urban planning. In a recent post he quotes one of my favorite New York Times reporters, David Brooks. Third Way or Third Rail? Discects the clubby, entitlement mentality of euro-crats and why things seem to be falling so much apart in high tax environments. I thought he was writing about New York State for a moment.

Planning Livable Communitie s looks at urban challenges across the country. A recent post looks at In-Fill Development. Maybe a few lessons here for Buffalo's increasingly larger "urban prairie."

Veritas et Venustas is written by John, a self described recovering architect. In this recent post, Architecture School Buildings he wonders why architects get trapped by ideology and build brutal buildings for themselves to teach in. Lots of good stuff here. btw...the title means "Truth & Beauty."

Why? ruminates mostly on left coast stuff involving urban planning and transportation issues. This post about bicyling in the city, How to Ride Assertively, caught my eye as I'm an avid cyclist who left home on a bicycle when I was 16 and peddled to Bar Harbor from the southtowns.

All of these blogs are heavily archived, richly linked and full of stuff to explore if you are interested in things urban that is. They are all syndicated which means you can keep track of new posts through your free Bloglines account.

While Walking Down Jefferson Avenue...

On Saturday afternoon while checking out construction progress on the new F rank E. Merriweather County Library at the corner of Utica & Jefferson, I noticed a series of new benches had been installed recently along Jefferson. Saturday afternoon was a terrific day. The street was full of people. I was stumped because not a single one of the dozen new benches was occupied.

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I sat down to see if they were comfortable. Big time. Then I realized. The benches are not located next to bus stops and are way too close to the street for comfort. On Elmwood, they'd be set back from the street. Call it city or "shitty" planning? I mean how hard would it have been to have placed this bench in the green space there on the corner?

A shot of the new "suburban" Top's Market that opened less than a year ago at the corner of Jefferson Avenue & Riley, in case you haven't shopped here yet. And a cool satellite view of the neighborhood clearly showing the Tops and an adjacent plaza set back a good 100 feet from Jefferson Avenue. Yeah, more good "city" planning, I know.

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I lifted the "sub-urban" diagram from City Comforts which I have been linking to over on the left hand side for the past few months.

6/04/2005

A Tale of Two Cities...Chapter 2

Last month I presented Chapter 1 comparing two satellite views of Utica Avenue, one at Elmwood and the other at Jefferson Avenue. You can see those pictures over here. Cool shots of the ever increasingly larger "urban prairie" where people used to live in real houses. This month we have another comparison, Chapter 2 - Fire Damage.

Fire damaged houses are the pretty much the norm on many blocks here on the city's east-side. That's not the case in more affluent neighborhoods in the Elmwood Village and Delaware District until recently.

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The first house is located at 198 Glenwood Avenue and the second, perhaps more familiar, is located at 60 Brantford. See this map!

198 Glenwood was partially destroyed by fire 3 years ago. It's located just one very short city block away from the new home of Performing Arts High School located at the corner of Masten & Woodlawn. See this map! There is an outstanding Housing Court warrant for the owner.

60 Brantford was partially destroyed by fire on Friday May 13th! Apparently the owner failed to pay his fire insurance premium and is now trying to sell the place thru Holcberg Realty as there is now a sign posted, even though Carol Holcberg doesn't have 60 Brantford listed on her website. Wonder why that is?

Question? Which house do you think will be "secured" or "properly enclosed" first? Keep in mind that both houses are very near schools and that 198 Glenwood has a 3 year head start!

Any other guesses as to why 60 Brantford is still wide open? Let me know...

Chapter 3....coming soon!

*** Update ***
June 5, 2005

A few people tried to call me out on the what I said about fire damaged houses
being a norm here on the east-side of Buffalo. Here's an example of another one
just south of Broadway on Playter Street. The Lt. Col. Matt Urban Center which
used to be called the Polish Community Center is right across the street.

click to enlarge

Woodlawn Row House...

I've been taking pictures and documenting the "demolition by neglect" of the Woodlawn Row Houses for the past 17 months. On Friday afternoon I coincidentally met a man, originally from St. Kitts and now living in Brooklyn, walking around the row houses as I was taking pictures. He had a well worn Catalog of City Property For Sale with him.

click to enlarge

He told me an inspiring story of his recent investment in the city. He purchased a number of homes in the Genesee & Bailey area and is looking forward to his family joining him soon in another house that he in renovating in the Fillmore District.

I also had an opportunity to talk with my two neighbors who live adjacent to the Woodlawn Row Houses. They are extremely concerned about their own safety and expressed the same concern to me about the possible fire damage to their own homes if something happens to the Woodlawn Row Houses.

I told them that I will have the opportunity on June 9th to meet with Judge Henry Nowak, from Buffalo's Housing Court, to discuss this text book case of "demolition by neglect." Judge Nowak has asked me to serve on a new community preservation task-force that he has started. One of the goals is to specifically address these sorts of concerns. The first meeting is this Thursday in Council Chambers at 7pm.

I will be presenting the Petition to Save the Woodlawn Row Houses to Judge Nowak during the course of the meeting. If you haven't signed the petition, please do so before Thursday. Most of the neighbors have signed a "hard-copy" and you can read and sign the on-line petition right here.

6/03/2005

Smart City...Radio

I've been a huge fan of Smart City hosted by Carol Coletta for months. You can catch her latest show this afternoon on WNED - am at 3pm or Sunday at 7pm. Alex Garvin and David Bergman are the guests this week on Smart City.

The purpose of planning is to generate a widespread, sustained market response, according to Alex Garvin. He should know. His career represents an impressive succession of assignments from directing planning for New York's 2012 Olympics bid to heading development and design for the redevelopment of the World Trade Center. His most recent project is Atlanta's Beltline, an exciting new proposal for a circle of parks and transit around the core of the central city.

Also with us is David Bergman of Economic Research Associates. David will share his thoughts on urban and regional development strategies and the role of culture industries in economic development.

Smart City archives your favorite urban thinkers, planners and even mayors. This fully archived show from last November caught my eye - Can Lagging Cities Catch-up. Click and listen!

And Smart City is sponsoring the Creative Problem Solving Insitut e in St. Paul, MN later this month.

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Buffalo's very own Hyde Family Foundation generously underwrites Smart City. Thanks George!

6/02/2005

Franczyk & Hoyt...more laws won't work!

A month ago I reported about a bill that local New York State Assemblyman Sam Hoyt has sponsored. It's known in Albany as the "Demolition by Neglect" bill. It should not become law. I sited a very recent court case in NYC that is mistakenly used by supporters of Hoyt's bill to advance the cause of this misguided attempt to legislate compliance and save cool historic buildings. In that case Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Walter Tolub ruled that the owners of the Samuel Tredwell House in NYC must fix the building. He relied on the enforcement of existing building codes to reach his decision. He didn't need Hoyt's fix!

This is a very good thing. We have plenty of laws with substantial fines that accrue on a daily basis to compel most entities that own deteriorating property to bring their buildings into compliance. Now, Buffalo Common Council President David Franczyk has introduced and sponsored a similar piece of legislation here in Buffalo to do the same thing that Assemblyman Sam Hoyt would like to see done from Montauk to Michigan Avenue.

Franczyk's Resolution #129 "Demolition by Neglect" includes this language:

Whereas: Often these buildings are willfully left to deteriorate so that an unscrupulous property owner justifies having the structure demolished instead of renovating or repairing the structure; and

click to enlarge

Whereas: This situation is commonly referred to as "demolition by neglect". Demolition by neglect should be avoided at all costs. Severe penalties should be imposed on any property owner who participates in this practice; and Penalties should be increased for any property that is located within a historic district or for a building that is declared a local, state, or national landmark; and

New laws just before an election cycle smell really bad. The thing to remember is that old laws will save old building provided that they are vigorously enforced.

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The maximum fine per violation that can be imposed in Housing Court is $1500 for every day the violation exists on a property. Say there are 10 violations on one of the properties in the above pictures. Doing the math - that's $15,000/day! And multiply that by a twenty or thirty day inspection/trial cycle. It's hard to imagine a developer, non-profit organization or even Bishop Kmiec not being phased by those numbers.

Seems to me that if our old laws were properly enforced "demolition by neglect" would be a thing of the past. A few leading preservationists that I have talked to agree! Then again, who is going to bring the City of Buffalo, the CAO of Erie County or the Bishop Kmiec to Housing Court.

And then there is that property in Perrysburg, David Franczyk...who's going to bring that into compliance?

Welcome to Perrysburg, NY!

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Time, energy and money would be better spent David, properly securing and protecting city owned local and national landmarks such as the Woodlawn Row Houses and the Wollenberg Grain Elevator. Forget the election spin, we are so very tired David & Sam. Get back to the fundamentals! Old laws only work if they are enforced. It's really quite simple!

East Side Map

Frequent visitors know that I've been shooting and cooking Google Crack for the last few weeks. And Arj, the creative genius behind GmapTrack, has been dealing some awesome rock. He's really tweaked his product and helped me create the East Side Map. Word has it that another Buffalo based blog is coming out with a similar map real soon...

9/1/06...gmaptrak bit the dust and probably ran in to problems with Google's tos.

5/30/2005

Beth Jacob Cemetery

update...July 17, 2005 - right here.
update...June 3, 2005

I met with two officials from the Jewish Federation of Greater Buffalo this morning, Charlotte Gendler and Daniel Kantor. They assured me that they have contracted with a local landscaper to properly maintain the site. Like many property owners in heavily blighted areas of the Fillmore District both Charlotte and Daniel are very frustrated with the issues of vandalism. Charlotte gave me a book, From Ararat to Suburbia: The History of the Jewish Community of Buffalo by Selig Adler as a gift. I also learned that the archives of the various Schuls that prospered here in Buffalo are now housed in the Butler Library at Buffalo State College.

_________________

While checking on the city of Buffalo owned house located at 319 Koons Avenue this past week, which is still wide open, I walked north on Koons Avenue and explored an abandoned cemetery at the end of Landsdale Place. I'd never seen this cemetery before. It's adjacent to Concordia Cemetery. Check out the satellite image on this map to orient your self to the location.

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Most of the grave stones have been vandalized and toppled. If the sun hadn't been brilliant that afternoon I'm sure I'd have come home later and pulled Sarte or a collection of essays by Camus and a bottle of vodka off the shelf before sinking into a depressive state.

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The Jewish Federation of Greater Buffalo claims responsibility for this cemetery yet it appears as though no maintenance or care has been done in years.

5/29/2005

How Buffalo Get a Warhol

I read How Buffalo Get a Warhol the other day. It was written by Craig Reynolds over at Soundlab and appeared in the first issue of Basta! (Spring 1997).

Unlike other cities, where it’s easy to sink into the flow of everything’s fine, in Buffalo, you must be a prophet or drown in utter mediocrity. Buffalo demands existential authenticity, and the rock we push up the hill (only to have it roll back down over us time and time again) is our only salvation. Like Rimbaud in the gutters and back–alleys of Paris, in Buffalo, you have no choice but to remake life; there’s no bullshit left to buy, no palace gates to hide behind...

If you're down on Buffalo read How Buffalo Get a Warhol. __________________________________________________________________________________

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5/28/2005

St. Vincent's - Archive

Here you'll find a number of posts about St. Vincent's Female Orphan Asylum, on Ellicott Street. Designed by Buffalo's leading architects Edward Green and William Wicks the orphan home was constructed in 1898 and was last used by Erie Community College as a City Campus 25 years ago. The building and grounds are currently owned by a local businessman. If you're interested in additional orphanages in Buffalo you may want to visit Buffalo Orphan Studies.

St. Vincent's flickr photos
Return to Building & Issues Index

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