A response to Glazer
I’m sure many of you remember Ed Glazer’s article about how Buffalo is dead and it should stop trying. A couple of my planning professors at the time really hoped for an equally thorough and intelligent response to it and it looks like it finally happened…from Richard Florida (!)
Its a great response but maybe slightly optimistic. I’m not sure how powerful a great waterfront and other cultural assets can make young people stay as opposed to simply providing jobs that college graduates are looking for but I do believe that Buffalo can be an overflow-type place for people and businesses that are priced out of Toronto or even Canada completely. High-speed rail would help accelerate such a potential trend. A Schengen-Zone type agreement would really help but that is an impossible feat.
With the aforementioned parks and waterfronts and museums etc etc Buffalo could indeed be attractive to businesses in Canada who want a US presence but see a bad image being attatched to having set up shop in Buffalo but to individuals I find that hard to be a population-adder
Anyways I’m not the expert so enjoy his very thorough look at Buffalo’s positive future…let me know what you think of it.
June 15th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
I found Florida’s article long on optimistic generalities and very short on realistic specifics.
For Canadian companies who want a U.S. presence, I’m not sure that Buffalo’s physical proximity is necessarily all that important. It depends a lot on the type of company and industry, of course, but in general there’s a lot of reasons a Canadian company might want their U.S. presence to be near a more of a top-tier city, or in some cases in a U.S. region with lower labor costs and/or lower taxes than Buffalo (even though of course Toronto has even higher costs and taxes than Buffalo, it doesn’t mean companies wouldn’t want a better business environment for U.S. presence).
Labatt is an unusual case in that the Buffalo area is their major U.S. customer base which motivated having their 30-person U.S. marketing office be located here. No doubt there’s some Canadian companies who could be convinced to put a presence here, but with enough jobs to make a significant boost?
His article speculated about Toronto creative class types locating in Buffalo due to lower costs. But if they just want somewhere less expensive than Toronto, there’s plenty of Ontario possibilities closer than Buffalo - Hamilton, or Toronto’s exurbs.
If there’s a lot of economic benefit to Buffalo resulting from it being near Toronto, then why hasn’t more impact been happening over the past 20 years as TO has grown and WNY’s job growth stayed so weak? Florida might say that’s because government down here hasn’t taken proper advantage, but I’d be very skeptical of that excuse. Economic spin-off effects usually happen much more naturally, leaving governments to play catch-up and then find a way to take credit.