Reimagining Buffalo's East Side: UB's Center for Urban Studies Pushes Back Against Profit-Driven Housing Development

BUFFALO, N.Y. – As Buffalo officials celebrate plans to build hundreds of new "affordable" homes on East Side vacant lots, UB's Center for Urban Studies director is sounding the alarm — warning the effort could do more harm than good without a fundamentally different approach.

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, argues that the current market-driven model of neighborhood development is not designed to serve the low- to moderate-income Black residents who call the East Side home.

"Under the current system, new housing is always built for the upwardly mobile and middle class," Taylor said. "Developers do not build for low- to moderate-income groups. They build for those who can pay market rates — with a small number of below-market units included only to unlock subsidies and tax credits."

Taylor warns that publicly owned land — one of the last remaining collective assets in Black East Side neighborhoods — risks being transferred from public ownership into private hands, incorporated into the profit-centered housing market and used to generate wealth at the expense of existing residents.

The concerns are part of a broader national pattern, Taylor noted. In cities like Washington D.C., Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans and New York City, this type of neighborhood development has led to a significant decline in the Black share of major-city populations, with residents displaced from central cities to make way for wealthier, often White, newcomers.

"This type of neighborhood development places profits over people," Taylor said. "It resets land values, raises property taxes, and reorganizes neighborhood life and culture around a new class of residents."

Taylor's remarks come as the Upper Broadway-Fillmore Neighborhood Transformation Project — the pilot initiative of UB's Center for Urban Studies — continues to take shape in Census Tract 166, the northern portion of the Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood. The project, which Taylor has been developing for several years, offers what he describes as a radically different vision: rebuilding neighborhoods not for outside investors, but for the people already living there.

That vision is built around seven core principles — solidarity, inclusion and belonging, cooperative homeownership, communal ownership of land and property, regulation of market forces, cooperative economics and community wealth building. Central to the model is a community land trust that would keep vacant lots and new housing permanently out of the speculative market.

"The alternative is to reimagine and rebuild neighborhoods for the actually existing population in those communities," Taylor said, "turning places of arrested development into healthy, prosperous and joyful communities."

The project has already drawn strong support from community partners including Back to Basics Ministries, the East Buffalo Development Corporation, Habitat for Humanity and the King Urban Life Center. Funding efforts are actively underway, with multiple grant applications submitted to support on-the-ground organizers and neighborhood-level programming.

"Resist racialized, profit-making gentrification on Buffalo's East Side," Taylor said. "The East Side is not for sale."