Downtown Buffalo’s Problem Was Never the Train as Some Claimed.
Metro Rail was Always the Solution.
By Seth Triggs, Vice President, Citizens for Regional Transit
Buffalo’s downtown economic decline easily explained by numbers
Figure 1. Crop of 1973 NARA/EPA aerial photo of downtown Buffalo, showing the sea of parking lots and urban renewal scars (Source: National Archives)
It’s a tale that’s exceedingly common. Someone posts a historical picture of downtown, often from the 1950s or 60s. Sometimes the pictures may even be from the early 1980s. If Main Street is anywhere in the photo, inevitably someone will say something amounting to “It was so great before they put the train in.” In reality, it really, really wasn’t, and Metro Rail’s transit mall (referred to as Buffalo Place) was actually a last-ditch effort to save downtown. Worse yet the ideas behind it (utilization of European car-free city center design) were incompletely applied.
The first thing to note is that the construction of Metro Rail and the Buffalo Place transit mall were in the midst of a decades-long decline of Buffalo’s population (1960s-1980s). Everything happening downtown needs to be understood through this lens. Wikipedia summarizes U.S. Census data for Buffalo, for this relevant time period.
Table 1. City of Buffalo’s Population and related Buffalo milestones.
|
Year |
Population |
Rate of Change |
Important Milestones |
| 1950 | 580,132 | +0.7% | |
| 1960 | 532,759 | −8.2% |
|
| 1970 | 462,768 | −13.1% |
|
| 1980 | 357,870 | −22.7% |
|
| 1990 | 328,123 | −8.3% |
|
| 2000 | 292,648 | −10.8% | |
| 2010 | 261,310 | −10.7% | |
| 2020 | 278,349 | +6.5% |
|
Think about what this represents. The City of Buffalo lost almost 40% of its population between its peak in 1950 to 1980, mostly to Buffalo suburbs. What this means for city businesses is loss of customers and foot traffic while the suburbs gained. What this means for the City of Buffalo is loss of tax revenue, and its effect on services…the very services necessary for sustaining not only residents but businesses. New automotive-oriented shopping malls flourished as they were more convenient to suburbanites. Do not forget this point; it’ll be important later. Further, while Main Street access to shops was open for pedestrian traffic, motor vehicle access via Washington and Pearl Streets was always available, as was parking.
Now we also must consider the systemic erosion of manufacturing in the United States…often due to automation but also due to foreign competition. Overseas, plants were more modern (in many cases because their predecessors were destroyed in wars) and efficient, producing a lower-cost product. And this was part of the beginning of the Global Race to the Bottom in wages.
This means less money that can be spent in city stores at the same time retail is already taking the hit just from the city’s population loss.
Now let’s add massive job losses to the equation. At the same time Metro Rail’s construction begins, with Buffalo absolutely reeling from massive population loss and abandonment, the bottom falls out of Buffalo’s industrial economy. Both Bethlehem and Republic Steel, the city’s two largest employers, curtailed their operations in 1982 and 1983. The effects of this cannot be overstated because such large manufacturers would be the customers for other businesses. There would be other business sectors that rely on the existence of these companies, especially retailers. So there is no surprise that downtown retail and city manufacturing production—already moribund due to suburbanization—would be on the way out.
Suburbanization, “Urban renewal,” and expressways are the real culprit
The first picture in this article is a prescient one. It dates from 1973 and is a documentation by the then-new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of the state of Buffalo’s pollution. But in this picture, from the air, we can already see the troubles downtown is facing.
Even in the 1970s, downtown was a sea of parking lots and even vacant land, partially as a result of population leaving for suburbs or leaving the area entirely. The then-new Marine Midland Center is surrounded by essentially nothing. It is easy to see the disruptions to the street grid for urban renewal...the I-190 carves a path around downtown and you can begin to see the demolitions in place for a planned inner loop expressway. This expressway was stopped of course, but the overbuilt ramps at Elm, Oak and Niagara Streets remain. This is also part of why Elm and Oak Streets are nightmares for pedestrians…they were changed into relatively high-speed routes to funnel people quickly through downtown. These routes all were for the benefit of suburbanites to commute to downtown jobs…until many of those same jobs either moved to the suburbs themselves or moved out of state or country.
“Urban renewal” was also the fad of the time, and in many places whole blocks were clearcut, removing the destinations and crucially housing that would be needed. New housing was built but it tended to be composed of architectural fads that ended up aging poorly or even failing entirely to be demolished later. You can see some of Ellicott Mall, such a housing project, in the lower right (east) of the picture.
Removal of destinations is fatal to a downtown, especially where stores rely on foot traffic to survive. It’s not even necessarily automobile traffic; if people can access the shops conveniently to where they live (or work), they will patronize them on foot. It is an important principle that is often missed when people attempt to establish retail downtown: the access by the people is most important, not the cars, because the cars are space-inefficient for downtowns. Cars themselves take up the space of several people, so the storage of a car requires much more space than one would think. Now consider that for most trips, a car is occupied by a single person, and you see the amount of space that would be necessary to support cars to the level that could be accomplished with a population that walks to the downtown.
Consider the suburban vs. urban land use style in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Comparison of suburban and urban styles of development and accessibility also featuring a “stroad,” a large arterial styled as a street but inaccessible to pedestrians. Illustration by author.
“The Buffalo Niagara Regional Report; the Dollars and Sense of Development Patterns” has numerous examples of property values based on development patterns across WNY. (https://regional-institute.buffalo.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/155/2021/07/Dollars-and-Sense-Buffalo-Niagara.pdf) The report was sponsored by the Buffalo Niagara Partnership, national Grid, and NRDC.
Cities (the urban form) were typically designed before the advent of the automobile. This means that there is a high degree of accessibility by foot. Because of this, numerous destinations can exist in a single block. It is this effect, in fact, that shopping malls try to emulate, where foot traffic is important. But the major difference is that a shopping mall is not necessarily a “public” space. Nowadays, “lifestyle centers” exist as a sort of fake downtown. But the problem there is that these malls still need acres and acres of parking, meaning that it is generally only practical to access them with a car. The large, sprawling space dilutes the effectiveness and financial performance of public transit, and sometimes public transit facilities are pushed far to the margins of the development, making it even more inconvenient for service. This especially matters in inclement weather.
Downtowns—therefore—are much better retail locations for city and suburban residents because accessibility to them would be better. However, many American cities have tried to make themselves into places where it’s expected to drive everywhere. This results in situations like what you see in the 1973 photo: acres and acres of parking surrounding a steadily diminishing number of destinations (due to suburbanization and abandonment/demolition).
There is a critical difference too; all that parking in the photo (and the following photo) is paid parking. And it would always be. After all, suburban shopping malls offer free parking (even this does not ensure that the mall will survive). So why can’t downtowns offer it? It’s because the land is more valuable. This is the main reason there are so many destinations, and that these destinations are generally multistory. They are maximizing the value of the land. Downtown land contains more value because there is more infrastructure attached to this.
Importantly, the beneficial infrastructure includes Metro Rail because that is a tangible, long-term and valuable asset that improves the value of the land by it. Consider, if you will, the valuable recent developments that have happened on Main Street after Metro Rail was started—especially downtown. Fountain Plaza, the hotel developments, the M&T Center, and Canalside.
Figure 3. Underutilized paid surface parking lots on Pearl Street, mid-morning on a Wednesday - photo by author
What retail needs to survive in a downtown
In short, it is the presence of residents nearby who can access the amenities conveniently. Failing that, it needs to be possible for people to easily access the area for less cost and distance to where they live. Because of the suburbanization typical in American cities, this meant that large-scale downtown retail only tended to survive in the biggest, wealthiest cities that also had an entrenched population still living downtown. Urban renewal, especially in creating expressways and high-speed streets, discourages walking. The pollution nearby to these roads, especially when cars are traveling at speed, discourages residents. It kills the value of the surrounding neighborhoods. And that means less foot traffic for your retail districts and stores. Surface parking lots become vast winter-swept tundras for residents and visitors alike, hindering their patronage of shops and restaurants. What may seem counterproductive—infilling lots with multi-use residential and commercial spaces, as well as parks and green spaces—is really an enhancement to induce a better quality of life for residents, which also enhances visitors' experiences.
This means that in the overwhelming majority of older American cities, downtown retail is dead or dying. It is not even necessarily due to urban planning…a large number of retailers are gone because of changes in the business model and shopping habits of people. Brick and mortar retail for certain dry goods has been rendered irrelevant in a number of quarters due to online commerce from outlets like Amazon. Indeed we can look at the fates of all the historic department store chains (Sibley’s, L.L. Berger, AM&A’s, Hengerer’s, Jenss, Kmart, Sears, Kobackers, Montgomery Ward, Grant’s, SS Kresge, The Sample, Sattler’s, etc.) in upstate New York, and their fate in each of the prominent cities upstate and elsewhere. All had suburban stores; all those stores are gone.
In short, whether or not Metro Rail was constructed, the result would be the same. All of the department stores would be gone as they are in Rochester, Syracuse and Albany. With large department stores as anchors, suburban retailers are mostly gone now, too.
However, local specialty retail can make it, and that’s only possible with a steady source of residents nearby. It cannot, must not, be based on accessibility to cars because downtown (due to the value of land) can’t support large-scale seas of free parking. That only works in suburban areas because the land is cheaper.
If residents are living downtown, if they can access local retail amenities on foot, it will be more convenient than having to go to the garage, drive, park. They can make shorter, more frequent trips, they can easily discover new things, they can easily mix with other people and build community. Cities have also been more amenable to “third spaces” that aren’t walled off by a sea of parking, where people from the community can easily and freely come together.
Indeed this was the element missing from the Buffalo Place transit mall and why it was actually incompletely applied. Pedestrian-oriented spaces work when there is a large resident population that can access the amenities easily. If there is no housing…and worse yet the residents who would spend time there are prevented from walking there by horrific high-speed roadways, they may instead choose to get cars and drive to suburbs where they can park for free. Pedestrian-oriented spaces work when people can walk to them; the density of people required to sustain businesses means that an equivalent number of cars would never fit.
Buffalo’s downtown is better off now
When you look at contemporary pictures of Buffalo, note how much new development there is. Along Main Street, there are far more buildings, and exciting adaptive reuse projects have taken place. Indeed, the places that seem to have suffered most turn their backs on Main Street. Shopping malls in general have been dying, and a mall intended as a suburban type of structure, with little to no street presence, is doomed to fail. There is success downtown. But people also need to patronize it.
Part of what has to happen is that people have to actually go downtown and see for themselves. There is a lot of vibrant activity that was not there in the 1970s or 1980s. There have, crucially, even been upgrades of vacant or incompatible use. Important examples of this are on the 600 block of Main Street.
The intersection of Main and Chippewa Streets is actually completely built out. At one point, three of the four corners were vacant following demolitions over the years. But after the transit mall came to be, there was value to be found in adding buildings. M&T Center (formerly Goldome) was finished in 1983 during construction of Metro Rail, but the other developments are fully afterwards; Fountain Plaza in 1990-1991, the Holiday Inn Express (formerly Journey’s End) around the mid-1990s and the SEFCU Building completing the intersection in the early-to-mid 2000s.
Further north on the block there was a McDonalds, a purely suburban usage in the middle of downtown (complete with a unique layout of drive-thru!) This was gone in the 1990s, and in the early 2000s replaced by a building hosting the Buffalo Niagara Partnership, other offices and a restaurant. Various other adaptive reuse projects have added value to the historic buildings there.
Transit is part of what can be used to make downtown even better
Remember, the density of destinations in a downtown means you need to make it easier for more people to get downtown, not necessarily their automobiles. Automotive infrastructure takes space that could be taken up by not only destinations, but places for people to live. There is always a need for more places to live. And if you make it easy for people to have traveling by transit a viable option, this is less expensive for them and leaves them more spending money. The entire goal is to be given options.
Right now, Buffalo is in a situation where numerous surface lots are virtually empty in the middle of the day, following the work-from-home revolution via the COVID pandemic. This is an opportunity to start using imagination and establishing more residence downtown so that there’s a local population to support local businesses. After all, walking across high-speed roads is nobody’s idea of fun…or safety. It is time for upzoning (that is, allowing for mixed use instead of low-rise or single-use commercial), to provide incentives or even guidance to not only rescue properties but to start encouraging development of underutilized paid surface lots into actual destinations.
Buffalo is already doing the right things downtown (and indeed adding more actual transit-oriented development on Main Street), but there needs to be even more of it. And there is a need to further embrace transit, because it’s people—not cars—that make downtowns work.