Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

If any of my readers should happen to have a spare $30,000,000 sitting around, would you mind donating it to the City of Buffalo?

That's roughly the sum the city was expecting to receive from the New York State government this week, without which the city is facing some very serious financial problems -- we're talking about not paying vendors and possibly missing payroll. This stuff has been brewing for years, as Buffalo's once-prosperous tax base has eroded over the years following the decline of manufacturing in the area and the mass exodus to the suburbs by families who once lived within the city limits. Many other cities that faced the "suburbanization" problem dealt with it by simply annexing the suburbs, so that people living there still ended up paying their taxes to the city, but for various reasons -- just about all of them political -- this solution isn't viable in Buffalo.

So the city keeps its hand out to the state, when the state's own budget is a train wreck (which somehow never seemed to come up during last fall's election, fancy that). This is during a time when most states are facing big-time budget problems, which are exacerbated by New York State's annual budget problems. (It's been something like two decades since Albany actually passed the budget by its legally-mandated date, a problem caused in part by monolithic institutional problems in the State Legislature, something I remember every time some anti-Federalist waxes poetic about state governments.)

But, as bad as things are today, there are some very small bits of news that may be seeds for a better future. First, some former industrial real estate has just been converted to loft apartments in downtown. If successful, this kind of project should lead to a new community of people actually living in downtown Buffalo, which should stimulate business growth much more than the people who head downtown for just a few hours at a time, for a show at Shea's or clubbing on Chippewa or whatever. Buffalo's efforts at downtown-revitalization have been founded, for many years, on getting businesses to open up in hopes that people would go where the businesses are. After years of very mixed results, they're trying the opposite approach: bringing in the people first, in hopes that businesses will follow. This seems to me a far more sensible track to follow.

The other good news has less to do directly with the City of Buffalo, but more to do with the entire Niagara Frontier region. It's the steps being taken to convert the Niagara Falls International Airport into a hub for cargo transport. The NFIA has sat unused for a number of years now, and now the facility is being investigated for its possibilities in cargo and freight handling. This is because many cargo-handling airports in the Northeast and in Canada are currently "maxed out" in the amount of cargo they can handle; a new cargo hub is needed, and the NFIA may fill the bill. The facility is just sitting there, and it has a very large runway that can handle the largest cargo planes in use. (These planes cannot land at the Buffalo-Niagara International Airport, because that facility's runways aren't big enough. The NFIA's runway is shared with a United States Air Force Base; that's why it's such a big runway.)

Air cargo has been suggested as an industry that could revitalize Niagara Falls, NY, what with the city's proximity to Canada and the general need for a new air cargo facility in the Northeast.