Buffalo, New York. “Queen City” wants to reverse the decades-long population loss that puts it at a little over quarter of a million people now. Downtown office lease signings are, for the moment, front page news and for good reason.
Even on the shortest possible visit you’ll be likely to hear that Buffalo and its good people want company. It’s the only place this reporter has been made to feel truly welcome, as in, move here, we want you. That feeling of being welcomed by strangers is a confusing pleasure.
Thank you for it, Buffalo. And in friendship this suggestion: do make Buffalo glow again but don’t make the mistakes that Chicago and San Francisco are making. Don’t squander your energy and invention by handing your work and your town over to the tech industry and their fierce kitten army of start-ups.
Of course they’re cute and they seem to promise to spend and overspend: $20 martinis, half-million dollar studio apartments. But please, dear Buffalo, don’t surrender municipal regulatory powers to bring in the Uber app as your own people are exploited to drive and pay for their own cars to build some billionaire’s portfolio. An Uberless city is unappealing to techies. Remember what the tech talent on that crowded San Francisco bus said last summer: “I really don’t understand why they don’t just Uber to work!”
Last week Chicago held its annual 3-day Neocon design conference at the Merchandise Mart. Neocon keynotes have a practice of delivering seminal ideas. One of them, Tom Eich, an engineer and product designer for ideo.com, spoke with a certain amount of swagger about the work his company has been doing to free generally tech-centric businesses from the inconvenience and expense of “place.”
Mr. Eich made his presentation with what, outside of Manhattan, could be called a sneer. His braggadocio was actually a dense collection of evidence in support of his argument that even the google campus and Apple campus might one day be ghost towns. This would happen because the “talent” – tech rhetoric for tech workers – will not be interested in commuting to a “place” – this word sneered. If Eich is describing anything “real” then all the “places” that make themselves over to please the tech industry may be left with newly scrambled economies.
If Chicago’s current courtship of all things start-up begins to fail we can retrieve our collective memory of half-finished high-rises, covered in snow, ragged construction tarps flapping in the high winds. The big schemes of more high rise offices, more high rise luxury condos buried beneath a civic stoicism, best not spoken of. That was our skyline, best not spoken of.
Buffalo, your new Main Street promises to be a sweetheart. All you have to do is make sure your city politicals make sure you come out of it with a diverse economy, an economically diverse populace, that your new Main Street will have something for everyone and be the destination everyone wants to get to on the week-end.
Primary Source wants to see that happen and wants to return to Buffalo for that and for that missed opportunity of the fried baloney sandwich, number 3 in the mighty Buffalo culinary trio of Buffalo wings (with suicide sauce), Beef Weck and the fried baloney wonder!
Additional Sources:
Here’s a link to a New York State website that puts population loss in New York State cities like Buffalo into a larger context: http://www.osc.state.ny.us/localgov/pubs/research/pop_trends.pdf.
Check today’s Chicago Tribune and Ron Grossman’s piece on the Uber phenomenon and its place in labor history.
One Block At A Time nan turpin photographs 
PRIMARY SOURCE 