It All Starts In Our Heads
By: Ashok Subramanian
Date: December 30, 2006
Pundit posted recently on the concept of “Shrinking Cities,” which discusses how other, older American cities have successfully begun to cope with dynamic changes in their urban core.
It’s a good piece and provides some evidence for a thought related to Buffalo I’ve been trying to wrap my head around for a while.
Specifically, my interpretation of the Shrinking Cities article is that the cities that have more successfully shrunk, like Youngstown, Ohio and Richmond, Virgina, have come to terms with the fact that the world has changed. In doing so, they have recognized that their cities must be remodeled to accept current reality and a likely future, rather than trying to recapture a bygone era.
This, to me, is a simple but extraordinarily important point — and something which Buffalonians have not successfully recognized.
One of our biggest problems is that we, as a public, continue to aspire to be the Buffalo we once were. To develop a city of a supposed size, stature, and prominence that reflects our past — when Buffalo was one of America’s ten largest cities.
At its core, we are driven by nostalgia. A sense that our redemption will come from creating a Buffalo today and in the future that can rival the leading light of Buffalo’s past.
The irony with this approach, well-intentioned and motivated though it is, is that these nostalgia-driven targets have themselves made us ripe for the failure and frustration we have experienced in our recent past.
As Prof. Kevin Hardwick has noted in the past, I like to mix my metaphors. So let me bring in a sports analogy.
In football, if the game is tied heading into the fourth quarter, what does an offense normally do? It maintains its game plan based on football fundamentals. You run, you pass, you block, you tackle. You play smart.
In contrast, if you’re down 21 points, what do you do? You pass on every down. You look for deep outs. You test double coverage. You take chances. You, in effect, play dumb because you’re backed in a corner.
For the past several decades, we as Buffalonians have approached the economic development of our community as if we’re down 21 points. Why? Because we’re measuring ourselves against the Buffalo of 1900 or at least 1950. We feel like we’re way behind in a game with time running out.
The result? A mentality that seeks omniscient and omnipotent leaders to deliver silver bullet ”Hail Mary” projects that aim to quickly bring Buffalo back to where it once was through a few pen strokes. Or so the blueprint would go.
Throwing $60 million at Bass Pro and dropping hundreds of millions in incentives for HSBC is no different from trying to force a pass into triple coverage in the end zone. There’s a slim chance these might work. They might create jobs and they might engineer spin-off investment. There’s a slim possibility that the so-called mega-projects yield the economic development equivalent of a touchdown. More likely, however, the ball gets batted down or, worse, turned over. And that’s what we’ve done as a community, time and time again, in the form of wasted taxpayer dollars, misguided projects, and unfocused public attention.
It’s easy to blame our elected officials. I think the problem rests squarely with us. We’re never happy with the less-than-thrilling outcomes of these mega-projects. But the actions and initiatives are aligned with a broader strategy that we are implicitly asking our elected leaders to pursue.
The answer?
Forget the past.
Let’s never talk again about trying to make Buffalo “what it once was”. Let’s drop all links to tired phrases like “Renaissance,” “Revitalization,” or “Reclamation.” Let’s no longer try to ”Recapture” a past era.
I’m not on the Steering Committee or anything but this is an important piece to Buffalo Old Home Week. It’s about celebrating the present rather than comparing the city to, and faltering against, the nostalgia of Buffalo’s past.
The mindset shift I’m talking about may seem minor and segments of the population are probably already there. But losing these underlying motives of “revitalization” or “reclamation” would substantially reduce the impetus to silver-bulletize our way out of our predicament.
It would also force a recognition that the world has changed since 1950, something not all are willing to acknowlege. The economic conditions that allowed Buffalo to be a manufacturing and shipping powerhouse are no more and will not be. The sooner we turn the page on those pipe dreams — and recognize that we are competing against Beijing and Bangalore for skilled people and investment capital as much as we are with Charlotte and Phoenix — the better.
Instead of dwelling on the past, imagine for a moment that we are who we are. A city of 282,000 and a county of 930,000. Don’t think of Buffalo as a “sick” city because it was once held 600,000 inhabitants. Revel instead in the fact that we are endowed with glorious architectural and cultural assets for a city our size. Set modest objectives that include getting the city population over 300,000 and the county over 1 million. And as a corporate CEOs are measured against clear performance objectives, let’s measure the effectiveness of our mayor and county executive, in part, against these concrete targets.
The implications are stark and painful. We would still need to take some tough decisions about the multiple costly layers of local government - something that a healthy city/county of 1 million can scarcely afford. We’re also hindered by an albatross in Albany that makes living and doing business in New York state uncompetitively expensive.
But it also makes for a more feasible, less frustrating approach to growth. Our changed expectations would encourage our leaders to prioritize attention on smaller, sensible local decisions on a more regular basis. Like using public money to make downtown more attractive and more livable — by fixing streets, lighting up buildings, bringing cars back to Main Street a whole lot faster, redeveloping derelict housing and land tracts into parks, and supporting other initiatives to create critical mass. We’d probably spend a lot more time, money, and attention building small businesses instead of living the pipe dream that a few big businesses will fly in on a magic carpet and provide jobs for all.
We can do it if we stop chasing our own shadow.
Ashok Subramanian is the author of the website Buffalohodgepodge.com and a member of the WNY Coalition for Progress. This column originally was posted on Buffalohodgepodge.com
© Ashok Subramanian, 2006.
The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author and do not represent those of the WNY Coalition for Progress.
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