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Can Buffalo ever come back?
Ed Glaeser says no and offers very many reasons why. His conclusion:
The best scenario would be for Buffalo to become a much smaller but more vibrant community—shrinking to greatness, in effect. Far better that outcome than wasting yet more effort and resources on the foolish project of restoring the City of Light’s past glory.
Does studying economics make the people of Buffalo happier?
Posted by Tyler Cowen on October 26, 2007 at 08:21 AM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
Holy Crap! When I die, Tyler, please do not let Ed Glaeser do my eulogy. Brutal!
Posted by: angus at Oct 26, 2007 8:54:45 AM
Holy Crap! When I die, Tyler, please do not let Ed Glaeser do my eulogy. Brutal!
Posted by: angus at Oct 26, 2007 8:54:57 AM
Buffalo should just wait until the south and the west run so low on
water the cities and businesses can no longer function.
If of course, there is anything left by then.
Posted by: save_the_rustbelt at Oct 26, 2007 10:06:30 AM
This week the Bills asked the NFL to let them play some of their home games in Toronto.
Posted by: spencer at Oct 26, 2007 11:24:56 AM
Interesting point raised about the weather. While economists like to study and debate the impact of taxes, regulation, etc. I wonder if there are any good studies out there on the impact of weather on economic growth? I have to think that one reason CA has been able to get away with a lot of its regulation is simply that companies have a higher tolerance for pain there and are willing to put up with more in order to enjoys its sunny climes and the accompanying pool of worker talent that enjoys the lifestyle there.
Posted by: Colin at Oct 26, 2007 11:45:36 AM
Save the Rustbelt has a point on the water. As a common pool resource, groundwater has not been handled well by the powers that be, and that has big, bad implications for the South and West.
Google's next big public policy project should be developing functioning water markets or quasi-markets.
Off the top of my head, I'm thinking that you'd need to start with a big honkin' simulation, incorporate your optimizing agents, and see what prices you need to approximate a competitive market.
I'm thinking hydro-economists are way ahead of me on this.
And I'm still thinking Megan non-McCardle, if she wants to actually do good in this world, needs to get out of government and work for Google or some other non-political agents who wants actual good to be done. And she should bring her friends with her!
Barring that, then go long on Buffalo real estate, baby!
Posted by: Keith at Oct 26, 2007 12:15:45 PM
The weather argument for Buffalo's decline is a lousy one. I sit here 100 miles north in one of the fastest growing economies of the world and the weather in Toronto is pretty much the same as Buffalo. Weather may be a factor but it is a minor one imo.
Posted by: Rebecca C at Oct 26, 2007 12:34:26 PM
The weather argument for Buffalo's decline is a lousy one. I sit here 100 miles north in one of the fastest growing economies of the world and the weather in Toronto is pretty much the same as Buffalo. Weather may be a factor but it is a minor one imo.
Posted by: Rebecca C at Oct 26, 2007 12:35:17 PM
The weather argument for Buffalo's decline is a lousy one. I sit here 100 miles north in one of the fastest growing economies of the world and the weather in Toronto is pretty much the same as Buffalo. Weather may be a factor but it is a minor one imo.
Posted by: Rebecca C at Oct 26, 2007 12:35:35 PM
Keith makes a good follow up on the water issue. Watch Atlanta very
carefully, eventually the metro area will be required to depopulate,
as will southern California. Not a popular idea but it will happen.
The weather actually does play a large role. The weather does not hurt
Toronto (one of my favorites) because it in southern Canada and it is
well, Toronto. If Atlanta were in Canada the results could be different.
Posted by: save_the_rustbelt at Oct 26, 2007 1:01:02 PM
An interesting question is whether Buffalo might benefit more from growth in the "Golden Horseshoe," Canadians' name for the booming region around the Western end of Lake Ontario anchored by Toronto. Is there a big border effect, and if so are there ways to overcome it?
Posted by: DLC at Oct 26, 2007 2:02:10 PM
I'm a native Western NY guy and serious Bills fan. It all hurts.
;-)
Posted by: Chris Meisenzahl at Oct 26, 2007 2:05:14 PM
Some northern metropolii will recover some prominence due to expensive oil, I think, but I find it hard to believe Buffalo is one of them (not enough rail).
Posted by: M1EK at Oct 26, 2007 2:16:47 PM
"An interesting question is whether Buffalo might benefit more from growth in the "Golden Horseshoe," Canadians' name for the booming region around the Western end of Lake Ontario anchored by Toronto. Is there a big border effect, and if so are there ways to overcome it?"
If North America had an economic union, like the European Union, then this would work. I'm all for replicating the European model in North America, because it would help cities like buffalo.
Posted by: anon at Oct 26, 2007 2:23:28 PM
"more vibrant": is that code for something?
Posted by: dearieme at Oct 26, 2007 2:58:05 PM
Glaeser is of course correct that throwing huge amounts of government money to revitalize Buffalo won't help, but removing government impediments to businesses could.
As one who for three years lived, worked, and went to grad school in Buffalo -- granted, in earlier days -- I was nonetheless surprised that Glaeser made no mention of the many positive features of life in Buffalo. The architecture is marvelous -- and includes buildings by such luminaries as Wright and Sullivan, and parks by Olmsted. Lovely arts and crafts homes and 19th century mansions are numerous. The Albright-Knox art museum deserved a mention.
I was also surprised that Glaeser didn't note the immigrant groups that formed a vital part of Buffalo life: Germans, Poles, later Serbs and Croats, as well as Bulgarians and Macedonians; even a small Albanian community. Have their descendants left?
Posted by: Francesca at Oct 26, 2007 3:07:10 PM
IMO Water is so cheap that if you have to double the price of water apart from agriculture the impact will be small and agriculture uses the most water.
Posted by: Floccina at Oct 26, 2007 3:30:03 PM
keith: " As a common pool resource, groundwater has not been handled well by the powers that be, and that has big, bad implications for the South and West."
Who are the "powers that be" you refer to?
Here's what I've observed in Arizona:
- suburban residences have no lawns, using existing desert landscaping;
- drip irrigation is used for agriculture and non-xeriscape landscaping;
- golf courses use gray water for irrigation.
When I lived in Sacramento, landscapers were intelligently using xeriscaping and minimizing lawn sizes to reduce water.
Here in north Texas, we have alternating seasons of flooding and drought. That's been happening for all of my long life. Right now, we have too much water. Lakes were overflowing for most of the summer and lakeside facilities could not be used.
I've been reading these dire predictions about the south and the west for a few decades. But Nevada and Arizona and Texas just seem to keep growing. And getting smarter about how they use water.
Posted by: John Dewey at Oct 26, 2007 4:23:15 PM
50 to 25 years ago much the same article could have been written about Boston.
But Boston has come back and is now a vibrant urban center even though it is not experiencing the population growth of many southern centers.
Much of the reason for Boston rebounding clearly stems from active government intervention, especially in the support of higher education and military R&D spending. Boston may be just getting to the new post industrial economy before others as part of the story behind Boston's revival was just the passage of time reducing the size of the old
uncompetitive industries to the point that they were no longer a major drag on the overall economy. For example in the 1960s and 1970s the old deserted brick mills provided cheap office space for the newly emerging high tech industries.
Posted by: spencer at Oct 26, 2007 4:25:13 PM
Buffalo has to be looked at in context. With the partial exceptions of Albany and Ithaca, all of the cities in Upstate* New York are in greater or lesser decline. Jobs are hard to come by, real estate values are weak, and way too many young people leave as soon as they can. Buffalo is perhaps the worst-off of these troubled Upstate cities, to some extent because it's the largest, but its woes are scarcely unique. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the problems are on a state level rather than on a municipal level.
* = "Upstate," in this context, means anything north of a line parallelling Interstate 84 about twenty miles to its north ... in other words, at least 75% of New York State by area.
Posted by: Peter at Oct 26, 2007 4:26:55 PM
Rebecca C,
The weather in Toronto is not pretty much the same as Buffalo. Toronto gets a lot less snow in winter than Buffalo (lake effect, you know).
Posted by: at Oct 26, 2007 6:39:30 PM
John, sounds great. If you have solid evidence that these areas price water at something approximating marginal cost (factoring in intertemporal issues), and that's led to the optimal amount of conservation, then I'm all for it.
One interesting point I hadn't considered: The replacement of farmland with suburban development tends to reduce water usage in an area. So you could be right.
Posted by: Keith at Oct 26, 2007 6:39:43 PM
All that snow also takes an economic toll. Apart from cancellations and tardiness/absenteeism due to foul weather, snow removal alone is a major budget line item.
I don't have figures for Buffalo, but for comparison, Montreal spends well in excess of $100 million annually on snow removal.
Granted, Montreal is a larger city, but it also gets far less annual snowfall than Buffalo.
Posted by: at Oct 26, 2007 6:52:47 PM
I have lived through many winters in both Buffalo and Toronto and I say the weather *is* pretty much the same. Lake effect is a one maybe two day event out of the winter. Residents of Buffalo are famous for shoveling out and moving on with their lives and business after after lake effect snowfalls that would cripple other cities. Toronto does not get lake effect but we both get about the same amount of cold, snowy, sometimes beautiful, sometimes dreary weather from November through April. I am confident the lake effect factor is minor.
Western N.Y.'s integration into the Golden Horseshoe will happen despite the efforts of "homeland security" to squash it. Dollar parity is a good step in that direction. http://www.thestar.com/article/269780
Posted by: Rebecca C at Oct 26, 2007 8:49:23 PM
I lived in Toronto for 6 years, and I can state unequivocally that the winters are much more severe in Buffalo.
Regarding other issues: Toronto is a cosmopolitan world city, while Buffalo is..well...Buffalo. When I lived in Toronto, there was a satirical play called "On a clear day you can see Buffalo!"
Posted by: Bill T at Oct 27, 2007 1:38:53 AM
