The author is Mark Goldman and the subtitle is Buffalo, New York. I loved this book. It is a splendid portrait of twentieth century America, the connection of industrialism and the arts, the decline of manufacturing and the resulting urban casualties, an applied study of the wisdom of Jane Jacobs, and on top of all that it is the best book I've read on how excess parking helped destroy an American downtown. I recommend this book to all readers of serious non-fiction.
This may have been asked/answered elsewhere, but how many hours a week do you spend reading for fun? And how fast do you actually read? I’m lucky if I read a book a month.
Stories of corruption, delusional planning, sociopolitical arrangements outliving the economic activities which prompted and paid for them… could be told about most American cities.
The real reason Buffalo can’t seem to get out of the doldrums now is that neither its chilly location nor its low-average-IQ workforce appeals to profitable industries in today’s America.
For many and complex reasons, heavy industries have left for China and other places far from Buffalo. Medium and light industries have partly left, partly metamorphosed into capital-intensive labor-sparing activities.
No industry in the USA can afford to pay Buffalo’s low-average-IQ population high wages for moderately-skilled work. No new industry in the USA wants to settle in Buffalo: the weather is terrible, air fares and freight charges are unfavorable, state and local taxes are very high, city politics are corrupt and anti-business, and highly-educated workers and managers from elsewhere in the country won’t move to Buffalo.
(And don’t think semi-skilled service industries could prosper in Buffalo either– most of those are necessarily co-located with their customers (think old people and nursing homes). No one with money wants to go to Buffalo to obtain services there.)
Buffalo lives on tourism, some rents from things like electrical generation, and transfer payments from elsewhere in the USA. It has sunk, possibly forever, into a “local minimum” on the city-desirability graph. The only way to climb out would be to attract classier residents, but that’s unlikely since the current low-class residents repel potential classier immigrants.
Buffalo: east coast taxes and a midwestern economy are a BAAAAD combination.
Same for all of upstate New York.
There’s nothing wrong with Buffalo that, say, Texas’ tax and regulatory system couldn’t fix.
Tyler,
Just downloaded the book and its great so far. I was wondering if you would have any recommendations of a book of this flavor on the city of Detroit? Thanks.
Buffalo only exists for one reason (separated by several decades): it is as far east as you can get using the cheap transportation of the Great Lakes, and it is as far west as you need to get to tranship from NYC into the Great Lakes.
Once the Midwest developed, Buffalo developed the second largest rail nexus in the world to transship items that couldn’t go down the Erie Canal cheaply any more.
When they built the St. Lawrence Seaway, all of that was for nought. Other cities have similar reasons for existence (Chicago to connect the Lakes with the Mississippi valley, Toledo to connect Cincinnati and Dayton with the Lakes, Cleveland to connect Pittsburgh and Akron) but none of them had to deal with a technological improvement that decimated their comparative advantage. That’s why BFLO has declined more.
I don’t think if BFLO had used the perfect set of polices (including a Texas-style tax system) that it would have made any difference.
FYI: Another native Buffalonian here.
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