Project That Aims to Transform Broadway-Fillmore Gets $3 Million Boost from Mother Cabrini Health Foundation

The grant fuels the Upper Broadway-Fillmore Neighborhood Transformation Project - UB Center for Urban Studies' pilot effort to rebuild neighborhoods for the people who already live there.

BUFFALO, N.Y. – A community-driven effort to reimagine Buffalo's East Side — and, eventually, to rebuild many more neighborhoods across the city — has received a powerful financial jump-start.

The Mother Cabrini Health Foundation, the largest foundation in New York State focused on health outcomes, announced Thursday a two-year, $3 million grant to the Buffalo Center for Health Equity in support of the Upper Broadway-Fillmore Neighborhood Transformation Project. The announcement was made at the King Urban Life Center on Genesee Street.

It marks a milestone for an initiative that has been years in the making — the pilot project of the University at Buffalo Center for Urban Studies — and one that differs sharply from conventional redevelopment models. Rather than importing outside plans, the project puts residents in the driver's seat, empowering the people who live in the neighborhood to shape how it is revitalized. By working across housing, education, and economic opportunity, its planners believe the effort can rebuild not only blocks and buildings but the health and wellbeing of residents themselves.

A model built by the community, not for it

What drew the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation to Buffalo was precisely what sets the project apart. Foundation leaders traveled from New York City last year to learn more about the work, struck by its community-centered design and the fact that it does not follow the familiar pattern of an outside organization arriving with a pre-made solution. The neighborhood, its residents, and its history are the starting point — not an afterthought.

Community members echoed that spirit at Thursday's announcement, describing a project that is not simply built for the neighborhood but genuinely shaped by it — an effort to center residents so that what is built endures.

The Cabrini grant will fund the initiative's early implementation: hiring a core team of on-the-ground organizers, establishing a resident-led Neighborhood Council, launching a community-wide planning process, and beginning repairs on some neighborhood homes.

Rebuilding for the "actually existing population"

The work is concentrated in Census Tract 166, the northern portion of the Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood — an area long shaped by disinvestment and a growing patchwork of city-owned vacant lots.

Henry-Louis Taylor Jr., professor in the School of Architecture and Planning, director of the UB Center for Urban Studies, and associate director of the Community Health Equity Research Institute, has developed the model over several years as a deliberate alternative to market-driven development. He warns that under conventional approaches, publicly owned land — one of the last remaining collective assets in Black East Side neighborhoods — risks being absorbed into the speculative housing market and used to generate wealth at the expense of existing residents.

Taylor's alternative is to reimagine and rebuild neighborhoods for the people already living in them, turning places of arrested development into healthy, prosperous, and joyful communities.

That vision rests on 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 designed to keep vacant lots and new housing permanently out of the speculative market — ensuring that revitalization strengthens the community rather than displacing it.

Broad community backing

The project has drawn strong support from a coalition of partners, including the Buffalo Center for Health Equity, Back to Basics Outreach Ministries, the East Buffalo Development Corporation, Habitat for Humanity, and the King Urban Life Center, alongside the UB Center for Urban Studies and the Community Health Equity Research Institute.

Leaders view the two-year grant as a first step. If the demonstration proves successful, they hope to attract significant additional investment and expand the model to neighborhoods throughout Buffalo — a blueprint for community-led transformation rooted in the conviction that the East Side belongs to the people who call it home.