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Governor to put focus on Buffalo as target of pilot project tasked with rehabilitating empty, deteriorating housesAlbany and Washington shine light on Buffalo housing blight
By Phil Fairbanks, News Staff Reporter
Updated: October 23, 2009, 8:26 AM /
Buffalo, a city with a vacant-housing crisis rivaling New Orleans and Detroit, is catching the eye of state and federal officials interested in making it a model of how to right-size and rebound.
Gov. David A. Paterson unveiled a major initiative Thursday that would make Buffalo the initial focus of a statewide effort to end the spiraling nature of vacant housing.
Paterson, who will officially announce the strategy in his State of the State address in January, said Buffalo would serve as a pilot project for an initiative that will emphasize the rehabilitation of abandoned housing.
“If we are going to succeed in revitalizing our upstate cities, we have to attack the underlying issue of vacant and abandoned property,” Paterson said in a statement Thursday.
The governor’s announcement followed the news that federal Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan will visit Buffalo today to learn about a similar project proposed by Sen. Charles E. Schumer and Rep. Brian Higgins of Buffalo.
Schumer and Higgins are sponsoring federal legislation that would set aside $400 million over three years to address the vacant-housing crisis and create 30 pilot projects in places like Buffalo.
State officials say Paterson’s initiative is complementary, not competitive, and pointed to his proposal for a “Green Development Zone,” a strategy for rebuilding a 16-block neighborhood on Buffalo’s lower West Side.
The goal behind the zone, which would be located west of Richmond Avenue and south of West Ferry Street, is to create a national model for green-designed neighborhood revitalization.
The emphasis would be on housing rehabilitation and other green-friendly reuses of abandoned property, including community gardens and urban farming.
“We’re excited that the governor is committed to working with us to create quality housing and jobs,” said Aaron Bartley of PUSH Buffalo, a West Side group partnering with the state.
Bartley said the project — a collaboration between the state and community groups such as PUSH, Homefront and the Massachusetts Avenue Project — will include an emphasis on creating good-quality jobs as part of its investment in the neighborhood.
While Paterson’s primary focus is on housing rehabilitation, his strategy also includes a newly created state fund to pay for the acquisition and demolition of vacant buildings that stand in the way of positive development.
“In pushing forward with a pilot program to address Buffalo’s vacant-housing crisis,” Paterson said, “we will use every tool at our disposal to reverse decades of decline that have left a cloud over one of the great American cities.”
Paterson’s advisers described the strategy as a major component of the governor’s 2010 legislative agenda and said his goal is to include funding in the next budget and get the Buffalo project up and running later in the year.
Those same advisers stopped short of offering any details on how much money would be needed, a key stumbling block, given New York’s troubled finances, and indicated the size and scope of the project is still being worked out.
A Paterson spokesman also dismissed any suggestion that the governor’s pilot project might conflict with the pilot project proposed by Schumer and Higgins.
“I would say they’re very much complementary,” said spokesman Peter Kauffmann.
The Schumer-Higgins bill would create a pilot program in 30 cities, and today’s visit by Donovan, the nation’s top housing official, gives the two lawmakers an opportunity to recommend Buffalo as a likely candidate.
“The big issue is to expose the secretary to the vacancy crisis that exists in older industrial cities,” said Michael Clarke, executive director of the Buffalo office of the Local Support Initiatives Corp., a nonprofit group active in community issues here and across the country.
The message Donovan is likely to hear is that Buffalo’s vacant-housing crisis started long before the housing meltdown nationwide.
He also will hear, after visiting neighborhoods on the East Side and West Side, that the depth of the abandoned-housing problem here rivals New Orleans and Detroit.
“It’s just as pervasive here,” said Clarke. “A lot of people who have come here have said there are neighborhoods in Buffalo that look more like New Orleans than people here want to believe.”
A 2008 series by The Buffalo News explored the magnitude of the problem here and found Buffalo’s vacant housing rate to be the highest in New York and trailing only Detroit and New Orleans among the 100 largest cities.
The series also found one out of every 12 or 13 properties in Buffalo — a total of 7,000 to 8,000 — are owned by City Hall, making it Buffalo’s single biggest landowner.
Bartley, who helped organize the tour, sees the visit as an opportunity to sell Donovan on the notion that Buffalo’s problems are different than other cities and therefore warrant new remedies.
“We have a unique opportunity to communicate both the challenges and opportunities facing our neighborhoods,” he said of the tour.
Donovan is expected to visit properties on the West Side and Broadway-Fillmore area.
pfairbanks@buffnews.com