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Getting together with the neighbors: a common cause (continued)
For Danis Gehl, one hallmark of a renewed University Community will be the availability of housing that is appropriate for students in UB's graduate or professional schools who arrive with young families and low graduate student incomes, and then want to stay in the neighborhood as first-time home buyers after they graduate.
Kevin Helfer, who represents the University District on Buffalo's Common Council, agrees that this would be best for his constituents.
"The biggest problem in the district right now is housing," he says. "The housing stock has suffered twenty years of incredible neglect, and now a lot of it is decrepit."
Although he considers UB students an important part of the neighborhood, he sees the character of that population changing.
"Graduate students, especially students with young families, are looking for an entirely different kind of housing," says Helfer, a long-time resident of Lisbon Avenue in a neighborhood popular with students. He makes the point that the predominance of two-family houses in his district means that there will always be a rental market. But because UB's South Campus is now primarily a graduate center, with most undergraduate courses and activities located on the Amherst Campus, "the days when four or five or six students jammed into a flat are ending. We have to change with the times."
Helfer is working with the business community to try to attract the kinds of businesses to Main Street that will appeal to neighborhood shoppers. So far, though, he says, it's not an easy sell because of perceptions that the area is dominated by undergraduate tastes and commerce. Although the retail blocks on Main Street south of the campus have a few stalwart businesses with a broad customer base (Parkside Candy, the clothier O'Connell Lucas Chelf, Talking Leaves bookstore, the North Buffalo Food Co-Op), the commercial strip is obviously weighted heavily toward businesses that depend on college-age customers, such as bars (PJ Bottoms, Third Base, Molly's Pub, Mickey Rats, Broadway Joe's), pizzerias (Sal's, Pinzone's, Calamita's, Romeo's), coffeehouses (Coffee Bean Cafe, Stimulance), inexpensive restaurants (Amy's Place, Viet-Chi, Doctor Bird's Rasta-Rant), and purveyors of goods and services to students (Music City, Greeks & Sneaks, College Laundry, University Press and Copy Center, World Wide Music and Video Games).
What Helfer wants most from UB is the kind of involvement that the University Community Initiative offers. "I want them to be stakeholders. They can bring people to the table."
Ten years from now we will have turned the corner," Henry Taylor says. "People will speak of the University Community as one of the hottest neighborhoods in Western New York. We'll be a national model for building a neighborhood across racial and class groups."
At the macro level of the University Community Initiative, the planning process has matured and now the initiative is seeking to put together a partnership with financial institutions to start funding the acquisition, rehabilitation and resale of housing, beginning in Buffalo's University District.
At the micro level, in Danis Gehl's Planning Studio 501, students working on their master's degree in applied public affairs studies are preparing to make presentations to Councilmember Helfer on the results of their search for successful models of concentrated housing code enforcement as a tool both for neighborhood revival and for neighborhood commercial development strategies.
As they do dry runs through the material ("Don't use jargon and don't use acronyms," "Make it clear what these sources are"), one student suggests that the database they're developing be expanded and kept current for public use. Gehl says it's a great idea.
It is one of those small sparks of energy that come from the perfect confluence of the three parts of UB's mission in education, research and service.
Judson Mead is editorial manager in the UB Office of Publications.
