More than a decade after its creation, the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus is reviving a large swath of urban Buffalo, breeding $400 million in private development outside the campus.

In the past five years, a Buffalo News real estate analysis found, 30 different investors and developers bought or renovated more than 100 largely vacant or run-down commercial properties outside the campus boundaries.

They spent more than $41 million to buy the properties, mostly along the Metro Rail transit line and on nearby streets. The News found they are expected to spend nearly nine times that amount – estimated at more than $350 million – to fix up their new buildings and lots.

The development effectively extends the medical corridor along Buffalo’s Main Street as far north as Hertel Avenue and as far south as William Street.

It is also creating new wealth – an important piece for Buffalo’s economic revival – and making winners of a small group of real estate investors who bet that the medical corridor would take off as promoted. And it promises much-needed cash for City Hall through increased property taxes on these improved properties – many being developed without property tax breaks.

Perhaps more fundamental: The city’s east-west demarcation line – the “right and wrong side of the tracks,” so to speak – may be shifting east, or at least getting a bit fuzzy. If developers are right, it will even be trendy one day to live and work on the eastern side of Main Street and along some side streets heading toward Michigan Avenue and even farther east toward Jefferson. Investors and developers, The News found, have started buying residential properties in the city’s Fruit Belt and other East Side streets within a walk or Metro Rail ride to the Medical Campus.

“I have a vision,” said developer Dennis M. Penman, an executive vice president with Ciminelli Real Estate Corp., “of the double yellow line on Main Street being erased.”

Buffalo’s East Side isn’t about to become the new Allentown or Elmwood Village. But as the West Side and even North Buffalo neighborhoods become pricey, the near East Side – marred in recent decades by crime and poverty – could return as a healthy area of commercial and residential activity, developers say.

“Within the next 10 years,” Penman predicted, when asked when the Medical Campus spinoff will start transforming the near East Side.

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