Upper-Broadway Fillmore has been selected as the pilot neighborhood

BUFFALO, N.Y. – The neighborhood is a stone’s throw from downtown and the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. It is home to powerful local organizations, and its residents are engaged and eager to participate. It also contains more than 1,000 vacant lots and a variety of owner-occupied and vacant homes.

These seemingly contradictory factors are among the reasons why the Upper Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood, Census Tract 166, was chosen as the pilot for the ambitious East Side Neighborhood Transformation Project, a community-driven approach aimed at reimagining and radically transforming the Black East Side.

Led by Henry-Louis Taylor Jr., professor in the School of Architecture and Planning, director of UB’s Center for Urban Studies and associate director of the Community Health Equity Research Institute, the project evolved out of research documenting conditions in Black Buffalo and their negative impacts on the health of residents.

“Our research discovered that these poor health outcomes were inseparable from neighborhood conditions,” said Taylor, addressing a standing-room-only crowd of more than 100 at the King Urban Life Center (KULC) on Genesee Street last Monday. “These Third World health outcomes in our community were tied to the places where we live. The only way to impact health outcomes is to transform the neighborhoods.”

The meeting brought together residents, local activists, project partners and members of the UB community to hear about the neighborhood, why it was chosen and what happens next.

The neighborhood was chosen to serve as the pilot from five candidate neighborhoods. It was selected for its residents’ strong community engagement; its economic and racial diversity; the presence of strong community anchors, such as the KULC, Broadway Fillmore Neighborhood Housing Services and others; and its unique combination of occupied homes, vacant lots and vacant homes. Taylor said these factors provided “a rare opportunity” to reimagine the neighborhood.

The threat of gentrification was also a key reason, he said, as one of the goals of the project is to protect areas that are most at risk.

“This area is strategically located,” Taylor said. “It’s a stone’s throw from downtown and the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, near the Central Terminal and across from Martin Luther King Jr. Park, combined with large stretches of vacant land. The gentrifiers are licking their lips,” he said. “We want to preserve this neighborhood for the people who are living here and to transform it into a healthy, thriving, joyful place.”

The project includes multiple goals, such as reaching out to local owners of vacant homes and bringing them back online, developing a community land trust to purchase vacant lots and develop them, and engaging in “aggressive job training programs” so that, as Taylor put it, “residents can rebuild their lives as they rebuild their neighborhoods and communities.”

Residents will benefit from better access to health care in the community, said Tim Murphy, MD, SUNY Distinguished Professor and director of UB’s Community Health Equity Research Institute. In addition, he said, other services will be brought into the neighborhood, such as social services, public health and rehabilitative services.

Murphy noted the area needs more than one full-service grocery store serving 90,000 households and said it is time to “get creative” by considering developing urban farms and hydroponics.

The project, Taylor said, has already been “jumpstarted” with State Sen. Sean Ryan’s Block by Block program, through which $40 million is being made available to nonprofit organizations to cover construction costs and subsidize the sale of new homes to low-to-moderate income families in upstate New York.

At the meeting, the energy and optimism among the community partners were palpable. All insisted this project truly represents a break with the past.

A key difference about the pilot, Taylor pointed out, is that it leverages the strengths of existing organizations in the neighborhood. These include KULC, the East Buffalo Development Corporation, Back to Basics Ministry and Habitat for Humanity, in addition to the UB Center for Urban Studies and the UB Community Health Equity Research Institute.

“I’ve been here 75 years,” said Rev. James E. Giles of Back to Basics Ministries. “I’ve never heard of anything so transformational.”

Added Essence Sweat, director of the East Buffalo Development Corporation: “You’re sitting at a moment in history when things are never going to be the same. We are humbled to do this work.”

Christopher Kennedy, executive director of Habitat for Humanity, noted that his organization is celebrating its 400th house in Buffalo. And while that’s an important milestone, he said that as a partner on this project, the organization is eager to take a more strategic approach and focus some of its efforts on the pilot neighborhood.

“We’re at a time when Buffalo and the nation face uncertain and challenging days,” Taylor said. “The storm clouds are gathering. But in this moment, we have chosen to embrace optimism. Together we will build a community with a bright and hopeful future.”