Once the "queen city" of the great lakes, the railroad hub of the north, the largest of the grain exporting cities.. ships no longer needed to port here they could go right past us..
Then world trade hit the industries.. It is sad that a once Jewel has become a rock ..
I think most here would love to have the city break with NYS and become part of Ohio or Pa.
We are more mid west in our lifestyles and interests that we are "east coast ' and the political liberalism and taxes have smothered any opportunity for the city to get on its legs again .
We are 1/100 of the size we were and we have more layers of government and politicians than most anywhere.
While idiotic political decisions and labor costs played a role in the demise of many of these cities, there was also a much bigger (in my opinion) role played by other factors related to geography, advances in transportation, etc.
It's no mere coincidence that so many of these cities are in the old "Rust Belt" region and located along the Great Lakes or other waterways that served as trade routes in the past. Many of these cities grew as industrial hubs because of their locations on these routes and/or their proximity to key resources used in steel-based manufacturing (iron ore and coal in particular).
Albany, NY is a perfect case in point. That city grew because it was situated near the confluence of the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers, and served as a canal-based "crossroads" of the Erie and Champlain Canals. That city lost this advantage once railroads supplanted the canals and rivers as the primary mode of freight transportation in the region (a long-running process that continues to this day).
Other cities on that list lost their "advantage of place" when plastics began to supplant steel in many manufactured products. Look at all the auto plants that have been built in the Southeast over the last two decades. They can thrive there not only because of lower labor costs, but because the auto manufacturing industry doesn't require close proximity to steel producers anymore.
Recently, we've seen an influx of field workers down here with New York plates. I understand that your coastal overlords won't allow New York to extract natural gas from their side of the Marcellus Shield.
Ours are trying hard to tax the activity to the point where it goes away, but it is not an easy thing to do with the Rendell regime winding down, a minority in our state senate and only a narrow majority in the state house.
Many of these cities have problems that were simply written by history - things change.
And, either inherent and natural inability (too little to offer) or inabilities from a lack of coherent local business and political will, left the “dead” cities unable to “re-invent” themselves, in terms of what could either sustain (as it once was) or drive local economic development.
Corporations often have similar histories - things change drastically and the need for major revisions of the business plan arise; and the worst ones die while the best ones - like IBM - reinvent themselves and continue to thrive.
Some of it is natural (can’t do anything about it - time to move on) and some of it is lack of leadership.
I think Buffalo is one of those cities that has a lot of natural INABILITY to recover a lot of what it once was.
Without the canal systems joining the east coast and the mid-west through the Great Lakes, its likely Buffalo would never have become as large as it once was. And once that system was no longer paramount to interstate commerce, Buffalo began to decline - a more or less natural history of events.
Could Buffalo have reinvented some strategic, or at least useful importance for itself, equal to its economic past? Maybe; but in all the reports of the long decline of Buffalo that I have read, I have never heard anyone say they know what could have caused things to be better.
“Government” both state and federal have lavished all kinds of “economic development” ideas and funds on Buffalo for decades. Even if it is no longer shrinking, it simply may have reached it’s lowest sustainable limit and is no necessarily poised to “recover”.
I truly believe that unsentimental, objective research might show that if we can’t prevent the politicians from throwing taxpayer money at saving cities that can’t be saved, it would at least be better economics to get them to spend that money subsidizing internal migration from such places.
Yes, I know, the smart people already understood that and left, and keep leaving. And, I am not in favor of every tax-payer funded effort that is mounted for this issue. I’m only suggesting that if we prove ourselves unable to prevent the incumbent politicians from mounting their “economic” rescue plans, then at least let’s not waste money trying to “rescue” “dead” towns, let’s “rescue” the remainder of the citizens still stuck there and help them internally migrate to the economic prosperous areas of the country.