Is Buffalo the new Pittsburgh? Hint: that’s a compliment.

Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Milwaukee bounced back from decline. Buffalo is next.

I am easily fooled but difficult to shock. The other day I was shocked to see that unemployment in my hometown of Buffalo, New York, is at 3.6 percent.

For a generation Buffalo has been plagued with lack of jobs (unemployment much worse than the national number), lack of capital investment, government corruption and population decline. When the sprawling Bethlehem Steel foundry on the south side shut down in 1982, the city’s fate seemed sealed. Steel, grain milling, transmission manufacturing and other Buffalo businesses were falling pray to deindustrialization. Those with means were leaving. The high school I attended, which had 3,000 students in three grades in when I entered, declined to 1,400 in four grades.

Recent years have been better. Population decline stopped. The significant new Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus is drawing investors and high income workers to downtown, including to the underserved East Side. Real estate, long depressed, is trending up .

In Buffalo one can buy a fine house, including Beaux Arts designs near a large park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, for a fraction of the cost of sketchy homes in New York City, Boston or Los Angeles. Or San Francisco for that matter, but why would anyone choose to live in a city where a decadent ruling class encourages street crime?

In my office hangs a pen-and-ink of Buffalo’s Union Ship Canal around the year 1900, when it was the nexus of American grain trade, filthy with smokestack haze. Through the 1950s the canal bustled. By the 1970s the Buffalo waterfront was abandoned, no giant ships docking, no one there after dark. Now the area is a popular family-outing and night-club destination that includes Canalside, pounding with the sounds of dance music rather than of industrial labor.

Buffalo’s ship canal, late 1950s. Today, a night club district.

Waterfront development for housing, dining and tourism led the urban rebounds of Cleveland and Pittsburgh; now this is happening in Buffalo. The Allentown arts district of Buffalo is booming as dancers and painters who couldn’t possibly afford Boston or Philadelphia find good spaces.

Thriving arts districts were surprisingly relevant to contemporary Cleveland and Milwaukee as well – the arts are not just nose-in-the-air, they are good for urban economics. That leaves Buffalo hopeful about the refurbishing of Shea’s Theater, a century-old masterpiece of traditional stage design, which boasts one of the few theater organs of the Gilded Age still functional in its original location.

Another plus for Buffalo is the new political deal that keeps the Bills local for the next 25 years. Some $850 million in public money will go toward the new stadium, from which the NFL and the television networks retain 100 percent of profits.

It’s a clear outrage, though, a lesser outrage that the $1.2 billion in public money directed into the Tennessee Titans (Nashville) new stadium this year, or the roughly $5 billion (numbers are a hinky owing to public grants of land that were designed to be incomprehensible) California taxpayers forked over for the field where the Rams and Chargers now perform.

The NFL had $18 billion in revenue in 2022, yet New York taxpayers are paying $850 million toward a new stadium where profit will go to football’s billionaire owners and billionaire rentiers such as Jeff Bezos (via Amazon’s control of the Thursday night TV slate).

The conundrum is that losing the Bills would have been a body blow to Buffalo’s positive economic vibe. If, say, Denver or Miami lost their NFL franchises, those cities still would glisten with cache. Buffalo – not so much. The momentum of becoming the next Pittsburgh in trendiness terms would have ended.

The missing opportunity is that the new field will be in the suburb of Orchard Park, across from the current stadium (to be demolished), not downtown. Putting an NFL stadium in the Canalside area would have been a crown jewel. Think aerial shots of a new NFL field on the Buffalo waterfront to open Monday Night Football, cue the discussion of low unemployment and the new medical campus, would have been fabulous, especially for revival of the East Side, the low-income area of downtown. (Also called the Fruit Belt because the streets bear names of fruits.)

A good reason for new-stadium suburban location is that the county and the team already owned the land – having to buy waterfront land downtown would have added hundreds of millions to the price. A not-good-but-realistic reason to stay in the suburbs is that there is so much corruption in Buffalo city government, and in the city’s courts, that payoffs would have added far more. Tort lawyers run amok in local courts – if new stadium work had been located downtown, on-the-job injury claims would have begun before groundbreaking.

The bad reason for the Orchard Park location is a residue of racism. Back in the day, the Buffalo Bills played at War Memorial Stadium (“The Rockpile”), a WPA project that was downtown in the Fruit Belt, with scant parking lots. My dad, brothers and I got to it taking regular city buses.

When in 1972 work began on the current Bills stadium, white flight was in full feather. The goal was to move the NFL facility far from black neighborhoods into the white ‘burbs where there would be ample parking lots so the customers could arrive in cars, not buses.

Around that time much of Buffalo was reengineered to separate white from black neighborhoods. Mayor Pete never actually said there are “racist roads,” but it’s clear the locations of limited access expressways, in the Buffalo Fruit Belt, in Little Rock, in other cities, were racist by intent. So was the location of the stadium where the wonderfully entertaining Buffalo Bills perform.

That was then, this is now -- why is the sequence being repeated? Readers of All Predictions Wrong can expect more on how roads and other public works drove people apart, and governments refuse to act on this.

What about deindustrialization? Shouldn’t it end?

Intellectuals, some of whom have never done an honest day’s work, speak the word “deindustrialization” as if it were horrible – some kind of corporate conspiracy. Deindustrialization should be the goal almost everywhere!

Tenured faculty may romanticize factory labor but it’s dirty, dangerous, bad for your back and your ears, shortens lifespans.

My high school class sent more grads to places like this nearby General Motors engine factory than to trade schools or liberal-arts colleges. When I’d meet up with the factory guys 20 years later they were already old men, damaged by the crushing 1950s style of manufacturing. The ones who’d been to trade school seemed younger and the ones who’d been a liberal arts college hardly seemed to have aged, though of course were neurotic.

When the Wurlitzer factory near my childhood street, a plant where barrel organs and tonophones were manufactured for nearly a century, closed in 1973, there was handwringing in the newspapers about the end of good jobs. Today there are far more good jobs than in 1973 – but the negative tone in media continues, because negative tone is all the media does.

Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

Buffalo once cornered the market on barrel organs. Then nobody wanted them anymore.

Maybe it was romantic to think of a factory that built barrel organs for street musicians. But working conditions inside Wurlitzer were nightmarish, and the life of the musician who stands on streetcorners begging for tips is hardly is hardly cushioned.

America street music buskered out in the 19^th century, dominated by instruments including barrel organs manufactured in France, which had an established street performer culture. Congress enacted import tariffs and quotas on French devices for street music and for circuses, creating a domestic industry exemplified in Wurlitzer. Now street music is rare and circuses are falling extinct too. All that matters to most people is that unemployment is low – new roles replace old ones.

In this sense deindustrialization is a social good so long as blue collar becomes white collar. This new study by labor economists led by David Autor of MIT found that in the postwar era, when machines replaced people at work the net was usually more total jobs; new job categories tended to pay better than categories that faded away; today millions of people work in job categories that did not even exist in 1940. So far at every stage of transition of the postwar American economy, the net has been more jobs and more prosperity for a broader range of people.

Buffalo demonstrates this. That U.S. steel production would decline (click MAX on this chart) yet Buffalo unemployment hit a record low is tremendous news. Because the media are addicted to negative spin, all we ever hear about is old factories closing, not new ones (like the Tesla car-part plant in Buffalo) opening.

The nation’s smokestack heritage should not be maintained, rather, kissed goodbye. Weirdly, preservationists want to keep things such as Buffalo’s Great Northern Elevator, completed 1897.

The Great Northern Elevator in happier times. Library of Congress photo.

At that time Buffalo was the terminus of grain shipping across the Great Lakes. Cereals from the Midwest harvest would move via freighter to this elevator, where they would be distributed to railcars for delivery across the east coast. Gradually concrete grain silos became more efficient. There are now several dozen unused grain silos on the Buffalo waterfront, the last taken out of service in 2017.

For decades General Mills silos were essential to the Buffalo economy – whole wards of the city smelled like Cheerios. (Our neighborhood had factory dust from the G.M. plant on cars in the morning, just as Joe Biden says of factory dust in the mornings during his childhood.) Now the grain business bypasses Buffalo, freighters moving straight up the Saint Lawrence Seaway without transshipment of cereals.

And unemployment is at a record low, on-the-job deaths and injuries at record lows. There should be no nostalgia for old ways of manufacturing, mining and milling. The grain elevator was majestic to look at – also obsolete, decrepit and dangerous as parts came crashing down. It’s finally demolished, and no one should miss it or the social phase of backbreaking labor the elevator represented.

Yet local snobs fought like the dickens in courts and legislatures to have the elevator left standing. The fight to “preserve” this worthless hunk of junk, which symbolized suffering by workers for many decades, lasted years before a judge finally said enough is enough. Here is a lament composed by -- an art critic!

In addition to the unemployment number, there is something else that shocked me about Buffalo news -- gentrification has become an issue. For a full generation Buffalo real estate was so hard to sell that the thought of gentrifiers moving in seemed like an SNL sketch. Now it’s happening. Gentrification in Buffalo New York! Saints defend us.

Local NIMBYs and others are opposing gentrification by, for example, stalling construction of desirable apartments. Developers have the money on their side, and can cross palms. Activists have the legal stalling edge. The result is pointless delay of new construction that would be beneficial to almost everyone.

Today Buffalo faces the gentrification dilemma of many cities. If no new capital comes in, if no new renters want to take occupancy, neighborhoods go downhill, along with schools and public services. Residents complain bitterly. If capital does come in, if new arrivals are bidding for square footage, the neighborhood improves but rents go up. Residents complain bitterly.

Typically those who have lived a while in a neighborhood want someone else to pay for improvements while they receive rent-control exemptions from market forces. Typically the money that funds the improvements in generated by market forces. Activists demand that developers pay rent subsidies and fund public infrastructure upgrades. Developers say no-thanks and go to the many suburban and exurban places where they are welcome.

There’s no obvious solution to this dilemma. However playing out, it’s important that a community (Buffalo in this case) not become like New York City where affordable housing is short because a developer would have to be a prize fool to invest in anything other than construction for the super rich.

Photo by John Matychuk on Unsplash

Entire wards of Buffalo once smelled of Cheerios.

All Predictions Wrong will in months to come provide political and sentimental commentary on Buffalo New York. My most basic advice: buy real estate there now while the price/quality ratio still is outstanding, and before climate change makes Buffalo a vacation paradise.

Snow? Hmmm, it snows in Buffalo. The pattern is predictable because of lake-effect – a lot in the southern towns (the “Snow Belt”), not that much on the north side.

Buffalo has this strange quirk – the snow gets plowed. Quickly and efficiently. I’ve lived in Chicago and can report that snow is far more disruptive of daily life in Chicago than in Buffalo. Buffalo, Minneapolis and Montreal, the snowiest big cities of North America, have shown that quick, efficient plowing can handle anything less than a full-on blizzard.

Okay, a full-on blizzard happened last December. But there isn’t anyplace you can live that is not subject to freak weather. One year ago at this time if you’d said, “I want to live in Los Angeles because there are never any floods there,” how would you feel today?