University at Buffalo professor has plan to revitalize East Side: Investigative Post

UB professor describes ‘radical’ challenge of traditional neighborhood redevelopment.

Henry Taylor, director of the Center for Urban Studies at the University at Buffalo. Photo by I’Jaz Ja’ciel.

---

What do you like about your neighborhood, the interviewer asked. What are your concerns? How optimistic are you that things will improve?

There were no right or wrong answers for the 567 residents who responded to the survey, but their responses will help determine which neighborhood serves as a pilot to help rebuild Buffalo’s East Side and uplift the black community from the city.

Henry Taylordirector of the Center for Urban Studies at the University at Buffalo, unveiled the framework last November in “How We Change the Black East Side: A Framework for Neighborhood Planning and Development.”

This model poses a radical challenge to traditional American concepts of neighborhood development. Neighborhood councils elected to oversee community growth. Land trusts to obtain properties. Housing cooperatives and other shared ownership housing are favored in place of access to private and individual property.

“In very diverse neighborhoods, you have to have diverse strategies,” Taylor said. “Shared ownership is more realistic than individual ownership for low-income populations, like Black Buffalo,” its report states.

As it stands, many East Side neighborhoods — most of which are at least 40 percent black — consist of substandard but unaffordable housing, which is largely inhabited by renters, said Taylor. Most renters spend well over 30 percent of their income on housing, putting them in the rent-burdened category by federal standards.

“The City’s lucrative approach to neighborhood ‘development’ will not change the Black East Side,” Taylor wrote in his report. “More importantly, it threatens the long-term viability of the community by triggering the threat of gentrification.” »

The new model, he said, will lead to lower rents, improved housing and increased community and generational wealth. Additionally, improved housing will lead to a better overall quality of life on the East Side, he said.

The most devastating result of disinvestment in East Side neighborhoods is its effect on residents’ health, Taylor said in his report.

“These underdeveloped neighborhoods, by their very nature, become sacrifice zones, where people are expected to sacrifice their lives and their well-being so that others can live better lives,” he told Investigative Post in an interview this week.

“We can see it in the appalling infant mortality rates. We can see this in the equally infamous low birth weight babies. We can see this in premature mortality rates. We can see this in everyone we know whose bodies are ravaged by disease.

It’s also evident in the disproportionate number of children with lead poisoning who live in East Side ZIP codes made up of predominantly black households, according to data from the Erie County Department of Health.

“We’re saying these neighborhoods need to be transformed, because they’re killing people,” Taylor said. “Black people have always lived in these neighborhoods that kill them, and so we say, enough is enough. Enough.”

The early stages of the first year of the project are largely focused on data collection through community surveys, focus groups and neighborhood visits. Working with the community is considered essential to successfully rebuilding the community, according to Taylor and Marcus Watsoncoordinator of the African Studies program at Buffalo State University, who is assisting Taylor on the East Side plan.

---

Marcus Watson, coordinator of the African Studies Program at Buffalo State University. Photo by I’Jaz Ja’ciel.

---

A timeline for future steps is already in place, with the next step imminent. Organizers hope the pilot neighborhood will be selected by the end of June.

Taylor said he plans to contact backers by September or October and hopes to have all the necessary resources in place by early 2025.

Implementing the plan will cost money – approximately $2 million to $3 million over a five-year period. The funds will be used for consultation, organizing a team to work in the pilot district, travel to study similar projects, organization and mobilization. Money will also be required for land bank acquisitions and other housing development costs.

If the pilot is successful, the plan would expand to another East Side community.

Phase I in progress

Data collection was a grassroots effort for the project’s “Unit Agents”—volunteers who surveyed community members to collect and report data on residents’ attitudes toward their neighborhood, their concerns, and their concerns. hopes for the future.

They spent six weeks surveying nearly 600 residents in five communities to determine which one would become the pilot neighborhood. The decision will be based on several factors, including community characteristics and residents’ interest and attitude toward their neighborhood.

“We focused exclusively on five neighborhoods and communities, so we know we have the type of information that we can generalize to other populations in those five neighborhoods,” Taylor said.

The survey is not intended to determine which neighborhood is worth selecting, Watson added. Instead, project organizers are looking for residents who will actively participate.

“All black communities deserve something, including each of Black Buffalo’s distinctive, predominantly black neighborhoods,” Watson said. “It’s not about who deserves it. What we’re looking for is which neighborhood is most likely to be willing to get out and work together.

In a debriefing session, an Agent of Unity volunteer discussed her findings with Watson, identifying census tracts that she said appeared most and least prepared for transformation. His observations were based on the attitudes of the residents interviewed, their optimism levels, their interest in the pilot project and their general behavior.

Both negative and positive experiences surveyors have help determine which neighborhood has the characteristics the project team is looking for, Watson said.

---

---

The investigations yielded results that surprised and moved the project leaders.

First: Many East Side residents love their neighborhood, even though they live with crime, poverty, and limited resources.

“In most of our writing, we emphasize negative dimensions,” Taylor said. “Sometimes we forget that people love their neighborhood and their community, and surveys have shown that people love their space. »

Another element that fascinated Taylor was the duality that many survey respondents demonstrated when describing their hopes and fears for their communities. He mentioned one resident who said he felt safe in his neighborhood, but relied on a security system in his home because he was aware of crime in the neighborhood.

“The existence of this paradox that we tried to capture in the beautiful and the terrible allows us to see the powerful connection between how much I love this space and how much I fear this same space,” he said.

Next, the team will conduct a series of focus groups in selected census tracts to explore its findings with community members. Community education will remain one of the most important elements throughout the project, Watson said.

Why rebuild the East Side?

“Black Neighborhoods Matter” has been Taylor’s rallying cry since the release of his 2021 report, “The harder we run“, which has revealed little to no progress for Black Buffalo residents over the past four decades.

Despite the millions of dollars invested in the East Side, as Taylor reported in “The Harder We Run,” past city and county revitalization efforts have yielded little or no success, he said. -he concluded. He cites homogeneity as responsible, using the Adams Street Infill Project For example.

“One of the problems with the infill housing strategy being rolled out is that many people are building houses haphazardly without having an idea of ​​the target population. What specific group are you trying to reach? How will this design versus this design work in this neighborhood versus that neighborhood? he said.

Taylor said he has spoken with infill project organizers and other government entities in hopes of expanding the scope of what he calls the micro-level revitalization project model.

“This model is limited when it comes to transforming neighborhoods and communities, and so rather than challenge it, we want to complement it so we can work closely together,” he said.

An important element for planners to consider is the economic and social diversity that already exists among residents, he said.

---

---

“In some cases, in a specific neighborhood, about 20% of the population earns $75,000 or more. In the same neighborhood, 33 percent of the population earns $23,000 or less.

The concept of “focused universalism” is at the heart of community rebuilding, which serves as an antithesis to the racist practices of decades past that have contributed to the current state of the predominantly black East Side, according to Taylor.

“In 1932, real estate appraiser Frederick Babcock and others developed a property value system based on the theory that blacks and other low-income groups triggered neighborhood decline and falling property values when they moved into communities dominated by landlords,” Taylor reports. States. “They should therefore be excluded from these residential areas. »

Class segregation has done as much damage to neighborhoods as racial segregation, Taylor said, and the way to repair that damage is through a shared vision. Transforming neighborhoods will require meeting the needs of all groups, he said.

“If you want to isolate yourself from someone just because they’re poor, then what can you say to someone who wants to separate yourself from you just because you’re black? ” he said.

“We have a responsibility to create truly inclusive spaces and places and that’s why we always say that inclusiveness and belonging must grow together. »

published 29 seconds ago – May 30, 2024