Since Mike Beebe has done such a nice job picking up the Syaed Ali story for the News—even acknowledging AV’s reporting, for which I thank Mike and the editors who didn’t strike the reference—I’m going to take the day off and instead complain about a problem of my own.
I live on a short, narrow street on the West Side that sees a plow about once a month. I have to traverse similar streets to get out of the cat’s cradle of one-way streets that comprise my neighborhood.
In the last two months, snow and ice have ripped a whole in my muffler and played hell with my transmission. I blame both problems, which I will soon pay plenty to have fixed, on the city’s poor job this year of clearing the streets.
On Friday, right after work, I parked on a very slick and mucky Elmwood Avenue to visit my bank; when I came out, I found someone had sideswiped my car. The damage isn’t too serious, though it surely will prove to be expensive: I can barely open the driver’s door.
There was no note, but that’s fuel for another fire. Absent the driver of the car who slid into my car, I’d like to focus on that part of the blame that fixes on the road conditions. Elmwood Avenue at 5pm on Friday was a wreck. How can that be?
Any lawyer out there who thinks I have a claim against the city, feel free to call. Anyone who wants to join in the suit, there’s plenty of room.
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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