This project represented the UB Center’s first community economic development project. Funded by the Ellicott District Task Force, this was the marketing phase of a larger project to revitalize the Towne Gardens Plaza. Our study was to conduct a market study of the Town Garden community and to design a retail mix for the plaza based on our findings. This was the first project in Buffalo to demonstrate that a viable economic market existed in the inner city. This project resulted in the construction of the Towne Gardens Plaza, which still exists today. Most significantly, the study gave us insight into the role that retail plazas and commercial corridors play in the development of inner city neighborhoods. The study also made us keenly aware of the problems that accrue in neighborhoods when they are food and service deserts.
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The Spatial Structure of Poverty and the Rise of an Underclass in Buffalo, New York
This initiative grew out of a commission that organized by the Buffalo Common Council to explore the reasons why poverty and an underclass were growing in Buffalo. The UB Center won the contract to lead the work of the commission. This work unfolded concurrent with work on the Black Buffalo Project. This caused the insight from project to influence the other. The result was the development of two very complimentary initiative. The commission concluded poverty and an underclass was growing in the black community because of economic dislocations caused by the city’s changing economy. Most significantly, the commission concluded that poverty was not randomly distributed. It had a spatial dimension. Poverty was rooted in the black neighborhood. The commission concluded that a neighborhood-level community economic development strategy, which was linked to human service delivery, was needed to attack this issue.
The commission also discovered that an organizational mismatch existed in Buffalo. The view was that economic and neighborhood developments were paramount in the black community, but there were no organizations to attack these intertwined problems. Thus, the commission, in partnership with the UB Center and UB Law School, transformed the commission into the Office of Urban Initiative (OUI), a 501C3 community economic development organization and housed it in the UB Center. OUI became the first organization in Western New York that was focused exclusively on community economic development issues.
Historical Roots of the Urban Crisis: African Americans in the Industrial City, 1900-1950
Historical Roots of the Urban Crisis: African Americans in the Industrial City, 1900-1950 grew out of the quest to understand the relationship between the black experience in the industrial city and the contemporary urban crisis. We believed that the key to understanding the predicament of cities, formulating effective policies, and creating initiatives to solve current problems is knowing the historical roots of the urban crisis. Conceptually, the book focused on the city building process and how the changing urban environment and economic shift combined with decisions, definition of problems and policy formation to affect the ability of blacks to find housing, build communities, get jobs and advance occupationally.
The book unearthed the importance of agency in the struggle of African Americans. Three elements were extremely important in the community building efforts among blacks on the eve the Civil Rights Movement. (1) There emerged a strong leadership composed of working- and middle-class leadership (2) blacks maintained solidarity despite class, gender and ideological differences and (3) Blacks built a strong institutional base to guide the activities of the group.
African Americans and the Rise of Buffalo’s Post-Industrial City, 1940 to the Present (1990)—a State of Black Buffalo Report
Inspired by W.E.B. Dubois’s Philadelphia Negro, this interdisciplinary study launched the UB Center for Urban Studies, then called the Center for Applied Public Affairs Studies. The study was sponsored by the Buffalo Urban League in partnership with City of Buffalo Common Council. The study was to be modeled after the Urban League “State of Black Buffalo” model, but given the dynamic changes that were taking place in the city in 1990, we want to produce a bolder and more visionary portrait of the black community than the typical Urban League reports. This approach gave birth to African Americans and the Rise of Buffalo’s Post-Industrial City. This is the most comprehensive study ever conducted of Buffalo’s black community. It brought together scholars from the fields of history, sociology, education, economics, criminology, urban studies, and urban planning. The book grappled with the issues of work, education, housing, crime, and the organizational structure. One of the most important findings was that an organizational mismatch existed. We had a set of problems driven by economic hardship and blighted neighborhoods, but or organizations were set up only to deal with the symptoms of those problems.
There were two very unique dimensions to this study. The first is that we rooted the study with a chapter on the history of African Americans in Buffalo. The second is that concluded the book with a detail set of policy recommendations. While the scholarly community conducted the research, a team of almost 30 practitioners poured over their findings and then developed a comprehensive set of recommendation to attack the problems facing Black Buffalo. The study called for the establishment of a Development Zone that would cover the entire East Side and the launching of a variety of initiatives to solve the problems facing blacks. The Black Buffalo study captured the imagination of a generation of practitioners, but its bold strategy was never implemented. One reason is that the Urban League never embraced the strategy. So, without a lead organization to drive the planning and implementation of the strategy, it was never implemented.
The East Side History Project
The East Side History Project
The East Side History project is based on the premise that history is a continuum, which moves through the dimensions of time and space, going from the past to present and future, and continually jumping from back and forth across different moments in time. Thus, history is a dynamic, interactive process that transforms people into “time travelers” and change agents, who can refashion the present and create alternative futures. To bring history to life, we must build interactive connectors to the past, present and future. This view fuses together history and urban planning, transforming them into one entity, with two interactive dimensions that connect the past to the present and future.
This conceptual framework informs the East Side History Project. Through funding from the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library (from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences), a large collection of historical documents, reports, plans, photos and news clippings are currently being digitized, annotated and organized in order for researchers and practitioners to be access to access them. In addition, citizen engagement helps drive the project. Residents are involved in the project by (1) sharing stories about their lives and experiences in the Commodore Perry Neighborhood and elsewhere (2) being engaged in the collecting, processing and digitizing documents, photos and oral interviews and by (3) participating in program development and in the interpretation and analysis of data.
The East Side History Project is about using the past and present to meet the challenge of recreating the distressed East Side communities which are embedded in a shrinking city and region situated on an international border.
View the East Side History Project here.
BMHA Perry Choice Neighborhood Planning Initiative
BMHA Perry Choice Neighborhood Planning Initiative
The BMHA Perry Choice Neighborhood (PCN) planning initiative was a collaborative led by the Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority (BMHA) and the University at Buffalo Center for Urban Studies, as planning coordinator. The two-year planning initiative, funded by a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Choice Neighborhood planning grant awarded to the BMHA in 2011, seeks to transform the BMHA’s Commodore Perry Homes and Extension, and Buffalo’s Perry Choice Neighborhood, into a vibrant community of opportunity, which functions as a platform that enables residents to earn a living wage and that helps children do well in school, graduate on time, and go on to college and/or obtain a job with a meaningful career ladder.
The planning grant provide the UB Center with an opportunity to forge a plan based on the interplay between the built environment and the neighborhood superstructure. In the Choice plan, the three components—housing, neighborhoods and people—were actually surrogates for the built environment (housing and neighborhoods) and the superstructure (people). The driving idea was to develop a plan that improved significantly the built environment, while simultaneously reimagining and strengthening the organizations and institutions, including schools, hospitals, and social service agencies, that provides services for people and helped them solve socioeconomic problems. Concurrently, the strategy viewed the household as institutions and sought to build a supportive infrastructure that would nurture residents.
Work on the development of the Perry Choice plan give us considerable insight into the neighborhood development challenge in black neighborhoods. While the plan was strong on improving housing within the Commodore Perry Housing Development, it had no meaningful solution to dealing with housing in the surrounding neighborhood. The new builds simply would not stimulate the low-income rental market in the surrounding area. Also, the mixed-income, poverty reduction strategy was flawed. HUD was critical of the goal of building institutions to blend together the old and new populations and did not seem to understand the conflict that would occur between high- and low-income renters. So, while HUD sought to develop a project that would integrate public housing residents with the surrounding neighborhood and use public housing to trigger development throughout the community, its overall vision precluded that from happening.
The Allstate Minority and Women Emerging Entrepreneurs Program
The Allstate Minority and Women Emerging Entrepreneurs Program
The Allstate Minority and Women Emerging Entrepreneurs (MWEE) Program is a joint venture of the UB School of Management’s Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership and the UB Center for Urban Studies. The program’s mission is to construct a pathway that enables minority and women entrepreneurs to move their companies to the next stage of their development through mentoring and technical assistance. Participants (protégés) work with a mentor (who is, or has been, successful with a business with a similar background), and attend monthly business development seminars, networking events and complete a revised or newly developed business plan. The Protégé of the Year receives the Allstate Minority and Women Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year award and a $1,500 prize.
The program, partially funded through the Allstate Foundation, is designed to help participants:
- Forge relationships with successful business owners
- Learn more about the varied aspects of running a small business
- Formulate clear objectives and outcomes to guide the development of their business plan
- Devise realistic business goals and timetables and develop strategies for achieving them
- Learn about and connect with existing organizations and resources, public and private, that can assist with the development of their business
The community as classroom initiative
Futures Academy Community & Creative Placemaking Initiative (Community as Classroom)
The Community as Classroom uses the Fruit Belt neighborhood of Buffalo, NY and other distressed neighborhoods, as a “classroom” where students use the knowledge and skills learned in the traditional classroom to work with neighborhood residents and stakeholders to solve problems in the “neighborhood” classroom. There are four components that comprise the initiative: (1) Community Art, (2) Futures City and Neighborhood Building, (3) Community Heritage, and (4) Community Parks and Gardens. The varied components are highly interactive and relate to different aspects of the community development process. The Community as Classroom compliments the school’s curriculum, but it is not integrated into regular classroom activities. All of the activities occur during the school day, with students participating in the program being given release time from their science/social studies blocks. Referrals to the program come from the school’s guidance counselor, principal, and teachers, with some students referring themselves, after hearing about the program from participating students. Community as Classroom programs are taught by UB undergraduate and graduate students from a wide array of UB Departments, including Urban Planning, Architecture, Education, Engineering, and Visual Arts.
- Community as Art: The community art project involves students in the struggle to change the visual image of their community by adorning it with a range of art projects. The principle is to show students how they can change the way their neighborhood looks and feels. Dilapidation and a forlorn environment do not have to be the characteristic features of distressed communities. Within this framework, we want students to think aggressively about ways to re-image their community and to imbue it with the energy of youth culture.
- Futures City and Neighborhood Building: The Future City competition engages the students in a simulated problem-solving activity with real world implications. Each year, as part of a broader national competition, we develop one or two teams of no more than 10 seventh and eighth grade students, who use SimCity software to build a futuristic city based on a specific chosen theme such as nanotechnology, transportation, or alternative energy sources. In this process, they explore various policy choices and decide which ones to apply in the building of their city. In addition to developing a computerized city, they must also construct a scale model of a smaller portion of the city. The students take field trips, using the broader community as their ‘classroom’, to deepen their understanding of the theme and to gain insight into ways that the policy and decision making process shapes neighborhoods and cities. Local engineers and urban planners volunteer to work with the students in the development of their projects. This further facilitates neighborhood connections and deepens the ties between students and role models in the larger community.
- Community Heritage: Neighborhood pride and identity are critical community building components because they create attachment to place and give students, along with residents, a stake in the neighborhood development process. The purpose of the Community Heritage component is to provide students with an opportunity to gain insight into the Fruit Belt’s history, its process of development, and forces that have driven its development over time. The ultimate goal is for students to learn how to reflect on the past in order to gain insight into the present and formulate perspectives for the future. The Community Heritage project represents an effort to begin the systematic analysis and understanding of the neighborhood’s history.
- Community Parks and Gardens: In 2001, the UB CENTER transformed three vacant parcels of land across from Futures Academy, where dilapidated housing once existed, into a community garden. The project was more than symbolic. The vacant parcels were the first and last thing Futures Academy students saw to start and end the school day. The message the vacant parcels sent to the children was that no one cared about the neighborhood. The community garden, designed by Futures Academy students, was the first step to helping the students understand that they could change their community, if they were willing to put forth the effort. Since then, the UB CENTER has added a vegetable garden as well as a bird garden. The gardens are used as a home for several public art projects; to teach the principles of community gardening and urban food systems; and assists in the visual transformation of the areas surrounding the school.
- The Community Clean-A-Thon (CAT): The annual CAT is a community building project, which seeks to create linkages between Futures Academy and residents and stakeholders by using a neighborhood clean-up to improve the health and visual image of the community. A major objective is show students that even with limited resources a community can improve its living environment. The guiding principle is that citizen participation and building partnerships are the keys to building a strong community. Thus, the Clean-A-Thon is an empowering strategy and an organizing vehicle that connects Futures Academy to residents and stakeholders. The Clean-A-Thon is organized around the theme, “Collective Work and Responsibility,” which stresses the importance of the entire community taking control of the neighborhood’s destiny.