My BuffaloNiagara by Design professor, Bob Shibley who I’ve mentioned a couple of times before and is the uber planner of this region, presented UB’s downtown plans to BuffaloPlace yesterday.
That article pumps me up like whoa. Up to $28 million in construction for 20 acres of a UB Downtown Campus?! Hopefully it actually does happen and when it does, its going to be amazing.
It’ll be pretty much impossible to build anything ugly there either (sorry North Campus), the standards are pretty high with the Bio-Informatics center and the award winning Hauptman-Woodward.

During my “Buffalo-Niagara by Design” class today, our professor and uber local planner, Bob Shibley gave us an interesting statistic…

There are 3,000 people living downtown (yeah, yeah, we all know)
About 1,500 of them are in the detention center.

Certain blogs I know might not want that info to spread…

If you have the chance, read today’s “Prospectus” in the Buffalo News. After reading the 60 pages of information regarding the current business climate and the future of business in the Buffalo-Niagara region I feel pretty good about what is going on.

I’m much more of a pessimist about Buffalo than I let on with this blog and the fact that mid January has been proven to psychologically be the most depressing part of the year doesn’t help much.

With that said, the construction boom downtown is real. It’s not huge, but its something that hasn’t been seen in Buffalo in decades. The port of Buffalo increased its tonage by 4 times almost. The Buffalo-Niagara airport keeps increasing its total passangers by the year and is looking to add more flights. Tech jobs are growing here…not a lot…but they’re growing.
Subtract the manufacturing sector of the economy and you see that our economy has actually grown since the recession (still-very very slowly but at least it is growing).

Buffalo has so many problems and so many things on the “to do/to fix” list but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. The first steps are being taken to get this city out of the seemingly eternal rut it has been in since the 70’s.

To the honest eye, you will see that this region is slowly turning it around, slowly catching up, and slowly getting back on its’ feet.

An Urban Planning Senior at UB is extremely dissapointed with the Planning program at UB. He and his associates have made a petition. So far I have no problem with the program. The planning department has opened up my eyes to a lot of great things I never understood or even saw before then. To a certain extent, just taking PD111 with Beth Tauke forever changed my outlook on UB, Buffalo, and myself.
The school of architecture and planning seems to be one of the few innovative and progressive programs at UB so I’m suprised to see that a decent amount of students have some serious problems with it. Regardless, they do and here is the petition…

FIX UB’S URBAN PLANNING SCHOOL:

Improving UB’s Environmental Design Program
Student Petition – December 2006

As students pursuing excellence in the undergraduate planning program at the University at Buffalo, we request that the faculty, staff, and administration of the Planning Department consider the following suggestions for the improvement of the Environmental Design program:

- Please offer more electives. Of the twenty-seven undergraduate 300- and 400-level elective courses listed in the Environmental Design program catalogue, only ten were offered this year (#1). Similarly, coordinate course offerings with related programs, such as Geography, Political Science, and Environmental Studies, to provide students with diverse educational opportunities.

- Please boost faculty involvement in the undergraduate program. Of the thirty-seven professors and affiliated faculty listed on the Planning Department website, fewer than half (15) taught courses in the undergraduate program this year (#2).

- Please ensure that experienced faculty members teach the major studio courses and the senior capstones. These critical courses should not be taught by graduate students or unqualified adjuncts.

- Please ensure that the three studio courses teach skills integral to practical planning, including information analysis, geographic information systems, neighborhood and site design, physical planning, economic and community development, environmental assessment, and fieldwork. Currently, two of the three studios focus primarily on poster creation and aesthetic concerns; content should not take a back seat to fonts, color palettes, and line hierarchies.

- Please ensure that the undergraduate program adequately prepares students for entry-level planning careers following graduation. Many of last year’s graduates were unable to find jobs in planning and related fields (#3). While theoretical and abstract concerns are important, many students feel that practical planning skills are much more useful. Because many students cannot afford to pursue graduate study, the undergraduate program must provide skills that offer graduates a competitive advantage in the job market.

- Please offer more opportunities for fieldwork and community outreach. Many undergraduates wish to contribute to the Buffalo Metropolitan Region, which is a fiscally, socially, and environmentally troubled region. Interaction with the community boosts our knowledge, creativity, and motivation.

- Please integrate critical planning literature into our coursework; as planning students, we are somewhat surprised that we are rarely required to read the works of Jacobs, Mumford, Calthorpe, and others. In addition, we would like to learn how to use, adapt, and implement planning ideas of current import, including New Urbanism, Smart Growth, comprehensive planning, disaster planning, affordable housing, accessibility, and sustainable design.

- Please offer clearer advisement concerning the program’s requirements and restrictions. Several undergraduate students, after receiving poor advice, were forced to spend an extra semester at the university in order to complete the necessary degree requirements.

Listening to Bashar Issa makes my heart melt inside. I keep telling myself not to believe what he says because honestly, its like a dream came true-an outside developer comes here to
1. renovate an iconic downtown building
2. build the city’s tallest skyscraper
3. put more than enough thought into urban design and a careful respect for its surroundings

Now that the elevators in the Statler are being fixed and he is having a suite built inside for his own use whenever he’s in town leads me to believe the Statler project is for real but I refuse to let myself embrace the thought of having a real, new, and very tall skyscraper.

He talks the talk and in Manchester he kind of delivers…but delivers verrrrry slowwwwwly. But that can work easily here. Everything in Buffalo is slow, thats not a compliment at all but at least when we wait for the City Tower we can just remind ourselves of the wait for Bass Pro and it won’t seem so bad.

I opened up this weeks Artvoice to see an ad for Coles on Elmwood that says if you bring in your McGahee jersey, they’ll turn it into bar rag and you’ll get $20 worth of drinks.

Nice.

I like to think I’m a pretty tough person…I can handle the nastiest of elements. I’ve walked through Buffalo blizzards before without too much pain but today I met my match. The five lengthy trips outside today were absolute torture.

-9 windchill.

You finally showed me I’m not as tough as I thought I was, Buffalo.

I always hated school throughout life, even my freshman year of college until I started taking Planning and Architecture classes. This semester my two big papers are about the “Canal Side” development downtown for my Planning class, and then the other one is comparing the Public Safety Campus and the Hauptman-Woodward building for my Architecture class.
Oh and not to mention that planning extrodinaire, Robert Shibley teaches my Buffalo-Niagara by Design course.

It’s like UB was thinking about me all along!

“People are going to cars and knocking on windows,” said North Council Member Joseph Golombek Jr. “They’re even hanging out around churches and hitting up senior citizens for money when they leave Mass.”

Is that Eastern Europe? No, its Buffalo.

Glad to see that the City Council is trying to do something about the panhandler problem in Buffalo although I’m not sure about ID’s doing the trick.
As someone who has spent time in DC, Toronto, NYC and 9999999999 other places I gotta tell you that Buffalo has the toughest panhandlers in America.
Where as in NYC or DC I might have a panhandler do a freestyle rap or some juggling trick, I have really upsetting experiences with the ones in downtown. I had one guy follow me and my friend for literally half an hour all over the theatre/enterainment districts trying to explain some wierd financial plan that required our investment. I have had the “Gold Chain Dealer” make me miss a metro because he wouldn’t let me pass him until he explained to me how awesome his gold chains are.
I have too many more stories to share but I’ll spare you.
It’s funny because I always assumed that since Buffalo is a poor city that the panhandlers woulnd’t even bother whereas in DC or NYC they know they can find a sympathetic and wealthy person.
I think (at least with downtown) the main problem is that so few people walk around town so when a homeless guy finds you, he clutches on to you and just keeps following you until you dissapear.

My friend was talking about the Buffalo Braves and couldn’t think of the name of our star player so he just kept saying Magoo and I just kept thinking about this guy dribbling around the Aud in a Braves jersey…

Obviously it made my night