Tearing a page from the Bread and Puppet Theater, the Coalition for Economic Justice staged the following skit at the condos down by the waterfront yesterday. Pictured is a great big Tom Golisano puppet.

Location: Behind Waterfront Place Condos
Date: 10/1/09
Time: 4:00 PM

A Press Conference in 1 Act:

Setting: Rally at Waterfront Condos

Designated “Cast”:
Politician played by Eric Gallion
Developer  (Carl Paladino) played by Roger Cook
Condo Buyer  (Stephen Barnes) played by Harrison Watkins

Foreclosed Home Owner played by Jane Piazza
Unemployed Worker played by Rachel Wilson

Activist: Eric Walker

Act 1: The Press Conference (Politician, Developer, and Condo Buyer stand next to each other, behind podium)

Politician: “We are gathered here today to celebrate the opening of the Waterfront Place Condos.  It has been my honor to pave the way for these condos to be built in a tax-free zone, spurring economic development that only the wealthy can afford.  This development is a perfect example of creatively using the Empire Zone program, which was originally intended to promote investment and job creation in poorer areas, to subsidize luxury condos for the entitled elite.  Without further ado, I would like to introduce the developer who had the courage to take advantage of these subsidies in the third poorest city in the country when he could have built these condos with his own money.” (more…)

In last week’s paper, we published a story about West Side Neighborhood Housing Services delaying the acceptance of a host on new member applications they’d received this summer. The delay seemed like a reaction to criticism aimed at WSNHS (from this paper, among others) last year, when a couple dozen new members had been accepted into the organization just in time to qualify to vote in WSNHS’s annual meeting in November. Most of these were city employees who reported to Mayor Byron Brown and didn’t live in WSNHS’s service area: Peter Cutler, for example, who lives on Linwood Avenue; Jessica Maglietto, who lives on Crescent Avenue in North Buffalo; Brian Reilly, who lives in the Elmwood Village; Allentowner David Granville; and others.

To qualify for membership in WSNHS, which costs $2 a year, an applicant must live on or somehow be considered a “stakeholder” in the West Side. The influx of voting members aroused suspicion that the mayor’s office was trying to take control of the organization, and that the board and the executive director were allowing it to happen.

This year many new applications for membership were submitted, many from residents of the Cottage District, who are interested in WSNHS’s partnership with developer Sam Savarino to redevelop the White Bros. Livery on Jersey Street (a project that yesterday received a little jolt of Restore New York money). Apparently stung by last year’s criticism, the board and executive director voted to delay the acceptance of the members, and to send letters confirming their membership applications.

I use words like seemed and apparently because I don’t know: I called and emailed Linda Chiarenza, executive director of WSNHS, before publishing last week’s story, but nobody from WSNHS has gotten back to me.

That was early August. Two weeks later, none of the new applicants had yet received a letter, so we ran the story. Chiarenza was apparently (there’s that word again) hurt and furious. But here’s the important part: his week, the applicants began to receive the letters the board had voted to send three weeks ago. (Here’s a copy.) Our story was published August 26 online, August 27 in print. The letters are dated August 29.

The letters seem benign enough. Is this a permanent change in the way the board will review membership applications?

This is sad.

Dave Torke has been beating the drum for this historic property for years, and now they’re gone.

AV’s City Hall correspondent Ellen Przepasniak sends this report on yesterday’s Common Council meeting:

Lawmakers are taking another step to revitalize Buffalo’s economy this week as the Office of Strategic Planning organizes a grant application through Restore NY, a state program that provides money for revitalization of commercial and residential properties. This grant money is one more part of a decades-long housing revitalization effort. Brian Reilly, commissioner for the Department of Economic Development, Permit and Inspection Services, admits this money isn’t enough to fix the city’s housing problems, but it’ll make a dent.

A discussion was held at Tuesday’s Common Council meeting as part of a public forum time required by the grant application, prompted by a resolution from Niagara Councilmember David Rivera. The city will be requesting $20 million, split evenly for commercial and residential development, and Reilly anticipates receiving at least $1 million. “No project is getting everything they’re asking for,” Reilly says.

The grant cannot be used toward any new construction, just for demolition and rehabilitation. However, many city residents are concerned that it focuses too much on the former instead of the latter.

Terrence Robinson, a resident of East Buffalo is anxious about the demolition of historic homes. He saw Monday’s Dyngus Day celebration in the Broadway-Fillmore district as “an infusion of life into that community” that was a positive step toward attracting residents into the neighborhood. “I’m concerned about the historical, cultural, and social fabric,” he says. “Once it’s demolished, there is no chance to recall it.”

Aaron Bartley, executive director of PUSH Buffalo, a West Side housing development organization, encourages other community development organizations and neighborhood leaders to get behind the proposal. Bartley has seen real changes in his community because of past years’ Restore NY grant money and he believes this funding is a chance to tackle “a monumental problem that few cities have faced.”

The key to receiving more money from the state is all in the marketing, according to Reilly. He says the city hasn’t obtained a bigger slice of the pie in past years because the grant application has been unfocused. Buffalo is competing with the rest of the state for funding and needs to fight for its allotment. The state is looking for feasibility and readiness—essentially projects that are packaged and ready to go.

Sam Magavern, a University at Buffalo law professor and co-director of the Partnership for Public Good (PPG), is concerned the city isn’t including enough in its grant application. He is pushing for lawmakers to consider adding block-by-block and green initiatives. The city does not currently have green criteria for demolition or rehabilitation, but Magavern says it should push for salvaging or recycling materials. Chicago requires 50 percent of all construction and demolition debris to be recycled. As a trial, Magavern suggests lawmakers could write recycling materials into the contract for 50 houses they demolish.

He also believes that including block-by-block planning—like how PUSH focuses on a five-block radius—would make the application stronger. Planners must step back and look at the whole process from demolition to the green space that will be left afterward. “Each block is so different, that’s why you need it,” says Magavern. “You can’t just look at the structure, you have to look at the spaces too.”

The old Kentucky Fried Chicken at 448 Elmwood Avenue is among those commercial properties on the grant list. The money would be used to aid in the demolition of the building after which construction for the planned multi-use building can begin. Abandoned libraries like Fairfield and North Park have also made the list and qualify under the grant because the buildings  are currently vacant.

Reilly reminds residents that demolition plans for any building is not absolute; if someone wants to purchase and rehabilitate property, they’re always open to compromise. For this grant, the Office of Strategic Planning is working under the umbrella of the Queen City Hub comprehensive plan, which was adopted in 2004 and lays out a sustainable development strategy for the city. “We want to learn from our experience of failure in Buffalo,” he says.

David Torke has a terrific series of posts going over at Fix Buffalo. He’s taking a critical look at Belmont Shelter’s $12.1 million plan to build 50 “rent-to-own” houses on the city’s East Side, in the Cold Springs neighborhood, scattered across 60 city blocks.

He questions whether scattershot new-builds are a good strategy for revitalization. He asks whether $240,000 per house is a bit too keen a pricetag for these sorts of properties in these neighborhoods. He suggests, and references, what a lot of other smart people have been saying: that we’d do better to focus our energies on preserving and rehabbing historic structures in tightly focused project areas, preserving the urban nature of the environment rather than swapping it out for a false sense of suburbia.

Torke is at four posts and counting. Start with this one.

Interestingly, someone who claims to be former board member of Belmont Shelter has been commenting on Torke’s posts, suggesting Belmont’s first loyalty is not to its housing mission or to its target communities, but to the bottom lines of the for-profit construction, development, and property ownership companies that are subsidiaries of the not-for-profit housing agency.

As promised in this article, the membership list for West Side Neighborhood Housing Services is right here. Highlighted in yellow are city employees who report to the mayor or their relatives; highlighted in pink are other city employees. Most of the highlighted names (though not all) are new members, who joined just in time to vote at last Thursday’s annual members meeting, when Harvey Garrett was voted off WSNHS’s board.

She’s like our Erin Brockovich, only cooler. She’s been insulted, slighted, harassed, threatened and shot at in her 30 years as an environmental advocate—the mother of Superfund.

Lois Gibbs, who was in town last week to mark the 30th Anniversary of the Love Canal Homeowner’s Association, is an inspirational icon to millions for her humble courage in speaking truth to power. It all began as a result of maternal concern for her children, and those of her neighbors, who began developing a puzzling array of illnesses including cancer, epilepsy, asthma, urinary tract infections, and more.

All as the result of the 20,000 tons of chemical waste buried under the schoolyard across the street.

What began as concern evolved into her life’s work. She continues to serve as Executive Director of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, the grassroots organization she founded in 1980 to help communities deal with the real health threats posed by hazardous materials.

Here are a few things she had to say last Friday, as she led old friends, new activists, and media types on a nostalgic walk down 99th, 100th and 101st streets in the ghost town known as Love Canal.

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In this week’s AV, I wrote an account of Tuesday night’s public hearing in the Common Council on the City of Buffalo’s 2008 Restore New York grant application. During the proceedings, Assemblyman Sam Hoyt—who wrote the legislation that led to the $300 million Restore New York program—laid some pretty heavy treads on the Brown administration.

Here are Hoyt’s remarks:

I am here to tonight to talk about the original intent of the RestoreNY program, which developed out of legislation I drafted called Repair New York, and to talk specifically about how the City of Buffalo has fallen short for the last two years in producing a thorough, thoughtful application that would maximize the potential of this funding to revitalize our City. This year’s application represents the third and final round of available RestoreNY funding, worth a statewide total of 150 million dollars, and as such there is no more room for error. New York State’s fiscal condition may not permit another round of funding. If the City of Buffalo does not produce a more inclusive and creative application this year, then three years of opportunity to transform the landscape of our neighborhoods and three years of state-funded support will have been squandered.

RestoreNY funding is intended to attract individuals, families, industry, and commercial enterprises to the city. The funding is flexible enough to allow for creativity in putting together a plan that mixes rehabilitation, restoration, deconstruction, and demolition to strategically strengthen neighborhoods. To date, the City of Buffalo has used RestoreNY funding primarily for demolition of properties, and even that has not been done in a particularly strategic way.

Statewide, the first round of RestoreNY disbursed 50 million dollars in funding for various programs. The City of Buffalo received 3 million dollars from that application, used entirely for demolition projects. Round One allocated a total of 11.8 million dollars for demolition, and 29.2 million for rehabilitation. The second round of funding provided 100 million dollars in state funding for this program. The City of Buffalo received 5.7 million dollars for demolition and 4.5 million dollars for renovation of the Trico Building. While renovating one major industrial building shows a slight shift toward rehabilitation, the fact remains that The City of Buffalo’s application requested 30 million dollars in funding and received just over 10 million. To those who say demolition is a crucial component of eliminating blight and making our neighborhoods safer, I agree completely. Demolition HAS to be part of the solution. This is so important I need to repeat it. Demolition HAS to be part of the solution. However, it does not alter the fact that the RestoreNY program was never intended to be used overwhelmingly for demolition and one commercial rehabilitation. There are other funds available for demolition. I secured 5 million dollars for thousands of demolitions that were done in 2007 above and beyond the 3 million dollars awarded through RestoreNY.

It seems to me that the City of Buffalo’s lack of creativity and vision in putting together a RestoreNY application that could be a starting point in neighborhood revitalization is part of a bigger failure of leadership on housing issues. Much of the focus has been on big picture economic development, including a large effort to draw big business to Buffalo. What is the point of bringing big business to our City if we do not have affordable, thriving neighborhoods where people would choose to relocate to work and raise a family? That is the only way to create the holistic economic development that will truly restore Buffalo to what is should be.

As a state legislator, I have always tried to be inclusive in developing legislation that would address the full scope of our housing crisis, turning to the community members and organizations who best understand the breadth and depth of the crisis and who can provide information on their own unique solutions or direct me toward best practices from similar communities. This grassroots-focused development strategy led to the Affordable Housing Corporation’s Block-by-Block program, which is going to bring a few million dollars to Buffalo to do what the City of Buffalo has not yet allowed RestoreNY to do—to acquire and rehabilitate dilapidated but salvageable properties that can anchor neighborhood reinvestment.

This grassroots-focused development strategy led me to draft legislation that would enable creation of a “land bank” to promote the acquisition, rehabilitation, management, and strategic reuse of vacant properties countywide. The City of Buffalo, which owns over 8,000 properties in Buffalo and has proved to be a very poor landlord indeed, has refused to support this legislation in the interest of gaining more control over properties they cannot currently maintain or market. Even when presented with a significant resource like RestoreNY that would enable a more comprehensive strategy for addressing these serious concerns, the City of Buffalo chooses the path of least resistance.

The City of Buffalo seeks no community input, nor does it seek to craft an inclusive strategy that would: promote strategic demolition where necessary; provide resources for rehabilitation to strengthen neighborhoods and encourage additional investment; or develop a greenspace management program to turn the vacant lots created through so many thousands of demolitions into bountiful additions to the fabric of the City.

Demolition is not the only solution to urban blight, despite the City of Buffalo’s efforts to make us believe that that is so. Demolition is an important component for a number of reasons, but we must do so much more. RestoreNY will give us the resources to allow us to do so much more. Combined with powerful community-changing initiatives like my land bank legislation and the Block-by-Block program, we can stop destroying our neighborhoods house by house, stop creating vacant lots that end up as trash-strewn fields that contribute to neighborhood blight, and stop waving goodbye to our neighbors as they move away from home. Demolition is a small part of an immense crisis, and it is time to do more. We cannot wait any longer.

I understand that the Common Council must vote to approve or reject the final RestoreNY application presented by the City’s administration, and that no Council input into the application process save that one vote has been requested nor welcomed to date. I think it is commendable that you have come together now to demand that the community be given a greater say, and I thank you for allowing me to speak to you tonight. Let me just say in closing that I believe the RestoreNY program’s squandered opportunities did not come about because one person thought too small. I suggest that the bigger issue is a broader administrative failure to plan ahead, build partnerships, and foster a sense of direction and leadership in the community. Without these things, we could claim we have attracted billions of dollars in investments and still have nothing to show for it because the fabric of our neighborhoods has been so degraded. In your role as Councilmembers, I ask that you do all that you can to ensure that this year’s application focuses more on raising Buffalo up, instead of razing it to the ground.

I urge the City of Buffalo to make this year’s RestoreNY application a more inclusive process to create a more inclusive application. Thank you for your time.

This sounds like bad news. From the New York Times:

Freddie Mac’s stock plunged more than 30 percent and Fannie Mae’s more than 20 percent in the first hour of trading. At 1 p.m., Freddie Mac was down 20 percent, to $8.26, and Fannie Mae was down 10 percent, to $13.71. It was the second straight day of declines for the companies.

Liquidity problems at the two firms, which operate under an implicit government guarantee, could cause catastrophic consequences for the American economy. Analysts expect the companies to announce a new round of write-downs and possibly be forced to raise capital by issuing additional stock, which would dilute their value for current shareholders.

In the last week alone, Freddie has lost 47 percent of its value, and Fannie is off 28 percent. Expectations of default at the companies has also risen; it costs three times as much today to guarantee a two-year Fannie bond as it did three years ago.

Speculation on the impact a crisis at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac might have on the national economy has provoked quick reaction from government officials, especially Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who said to Congress, “In today’s world I don’t think it is helpful to discuss any financial institutions and whether they pose systemic risk.”

Hardly reassuring.

Former Buffalo housing activist (and columnist for AV, Buffalo Beat, and Alt) Dick Kern sent around this note earlier in the week, in response the three-part series in the Buffalo News about the city’s plague of abandoned properties. (Here’s part one. Follow the links to parts two and three.)

Here’s what Kern has to say:

The Buffalo News‘ provocative, three-part series on abandoned homes once again does not mention other parts of a dramatically failed housing policy, which is speeding neighborhood decline.

Why is there so little debate about the wisdom of taxpayers paying for a frenzy of new housing construction in a shrinking city drowning in abandoned housing, for which the mayor is planning the massively costly demolition of 10,000 buildings?

Why is HUD so silent, as Buffalo’s poverty fuels a steady stream of lucrative “poverty housing” funding that too often makes things worse, not better? Isn’t Steve Banko ashamed to preside over the second poorest and third most vacant US city as he has watched all those $100s of milions pour through Buffalo? What does he propose his Department of Housing and Urban Development should do?

And why is City Hall’s flagship poverty agency, BMHA, engaged in a costly building frenzy as ever more of Buffalo’s poor live in dangerous, half-empty neighborhoods? BMHA spends over half of City Hall’s poverty housing funds on less than 10 percent of the city’s poor. That is blatantly unjust. What is BMHA executive director Dawn Sanders’ vision for a virtually obsolete agency more fairly reducing poverty and blight among Buffalo’s ever-growing ranks of the poor?

And why are Buffalo’s too-numerous, too-small “neighborhood housing agencies” getting a free pass while being scandalously unproductive? For example, West Side Neighborhood Housing Services has lost more clients in foreclosure over the past several years than it has rehabbed houses, generally slowly rehabbing at the rate of merely two per year. They currently are not rehabbing any houses and have not released any plan.

A dramatic example of the problem is Massachusetts Avenue, where WSNHS has focused more resources than any other street except their Connecticut Avenue “backyard.” Their $50K rehabbed 353 Massachusetts Avenue is currently in both mortgage and tax foreclosure, and WSNHS has been unable to sell their 807 Prospect (at the corner of Massachusetts) for which they paid $7K in July 2002.

After the jump you’ll find a list of 17 city-owned properties on Massachusetts Avenue, and 20 more scheduled for tax auction in October. What does WSNHS plan? Do they have a plan?
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