If struggling communities don’t preserve their architecture, there’s no chance of any resurgence down the line.What makes Midtown unique is the architectural character and unique personality. Building suburban houses on large lots like the ones proposed not only do not help, they make the neighborhood worse by destroying the personality and character of the neighborhood which is its most compelling economic asset. It saps the potential and undermines the character of the neighborhood. Midtown: Poised for Renaissance, written by Chris Hawley (for the City of Buffalo), looks at the assets of this neighborhood and draws a set of conclusions that vastly differ from Belmont's plan. Hawley recognizes the necessity of restoring the neighborhood's historic building stock and deemphasizes the suburbanization of the neighborhood as undermining its character and economic potential. It's the City's own plan. Why isn't it being followed?
Officials in Cleveland are grappling with at least 10,000 abandoned homes, many owned by lenders or speculators who trade them like baseball cards.Buffalo NY is grappling with vacancy and abandonment and has a higher percentage of vacant property than any other city in the country, except St. Louis. The foreclosure crisis in Cleveland and how it intersects with banks not completing the process and re-taking title to a house as described in today's New York Times is not isolated to Cleveland. The same series of events plays out here in Buffalo everyday.
...in my humble opinion, there are scant few good urban planning blogs, so I wanted to create an enlightening, provocative, and entertaining forum for planning-focused issues in my hometown of Buffalo, NY.
The fresh angle is this: the city doesn't need to add another high-priced manager and yet another layer of bureaucracy. We can get much better management of downtown transportation/parking assets if we better utilize the resources we've already got. Private companies routinely reorganize management structures to adapt to changing conditions, so why can't the city?
Does America have a transportation strategy? We'll speak with David Goldberg of the group Transportation for America to find out what realtors, civic leaders, urban planners and non-profit organizations are doing to tackle the problem of how we get around.
And we'll speak with John Campbell about one of the most exciting revitalization projects happening in North America, the Toronto Waterfront. The Waterfront works across a broad sector of public and private organizations to create parks, public spaces and cultural institutions along Toronto's shore aimed at reducing sprawl and developing sustainable communities.
There has been a nationwide shift toward de-construction (led by companies like Planet Reuse and Buffalo Reuse, the surgical taking-apart of homes to salvage the building materials for reuse, but often the building materials used in these developments aren’t of good enough quality to warrant salvaging.
