Wal Mart is adding a new store to the suburbs. Bad.
But they’re occupying a practically abandoned strip mall. Good.
But they’re abandoning their current location 2miles down the street. Bad.

Even when Amherst does something right in the development game, they still end up doing it the wrong and traditional way anyways.

PS. Wal Mart wants to expand in the region. Wha? They have a lot more stores than I ever saw in the DC suburbs.
PPS. My friends from Williamsville were bored at 1am so we…went to the 24 hour Wal Mart!
And it was fricken JAM PACKED. AT 1 AM. WTF? Perhaps because they had a man in a santa hat and khaki shorts on top of a ladder singing Country music? Perhaps.

Today’s BuffaloNews reports on the extensive and extremely impressive list of new stores and shops coming to the Galleria Mall in a urban streetscape setting. On the list is a lot of trendy stores that are seen in upscale areas, cities included.
Well not in Buffalo though. Cheektowaga continues to become a mini-city while the actual city that makes Cheektowaga what it is…struggles…mightily.

It’s great to have a lot of these new stores in the Buffalo area, I know I’ll be frequenting Urban Outfitters especially but it’s sad to see that this project pretty much kills any non-heavily subsidized retail project come downtown.

Soooo basically we need the casino and BassPro to happen. Its downtown’s only shot at attracting future retailers.

PS Urban Outfitters would have been perfect on Elmwood, even in the University Heights…I wonder if these stores have ever even seen the city, maybe they would have given it the chance.

Here’s BuffaloGeek’s two cents

Suburbanites who trash talk downtown to death.

Look…
-Downtown is not a death sentence.
-I have never been close to being mugged, assulted, or killed downtown. East side of Downtown, West Side of Downtown, Cobblestone, PERRY PROJECTS. NOWHERE. NEVER.
-The subway is not filled with black men whose only goal in life is to rape and/or murder. Perfectly safe system.
-Downtown is NOT ugly. Beautiful architecture all over mixed in with some hideous buildings.

Notice that the ones who trash talk our downtown to death are the ones who have almost never been there. Sorry we can’t be a downtown that only has wealthy white families with upscale shopping all over. I’ll be the first person to tell you the many things wrong with Buffalo, but i’ll be the last to trash talk it with lies and misperceptions

AUGH!

For the first time in my life, businesses are LEAVING the suburbs and moving INTO downtown. This is a cause for celebration, right? A time for the people who live in the Buffalo area to be happy that their downtown, the city that is the reason for their suburb’s existence-is filling vacant office space, right? Absolutley not. Cheektowaga, Clarence, West Seneca are complaining about how the Empire Zone benefits are killing them while giving Buffalo an unfair advantage. First of all, the Empire Zone was not created to do this-it was created to draw in new businesses from outside the county, but downtown Buffalo is a place to work and it lost too many jobs to the suburbs to count. Living in a DC suburb for a while, I saw what was once a sleeper town (North Bethesda) turn itself into a city with a huge performance arts center in the middle of a quaint residential area, a humongous conference center and hotel where there was once trees and parking. Towns like Clarence are places for families to live and shop, and for their kids to go to school. There will always be suburban businesses, but Clarence will do just fine without the businesses they lost. Buffalo, however (no matter how optimistic you are) is struggling mightily, and needs new businesses and new life. In this Buffalo News article, most of these companies came to the city because they wanted to be here, because they needed the extra space, or they wanted to be in an urban setting because it reflected their business-the tax credits were only icing on the cake.
Buffalo lost a lot of its life to the suburbs, and still does to this day (albeit at a much slower rate). Buffalo is the reason why Amherest, Clarence, West Seneca, Cheektowaga, and Orchard Park exist and function the way they do. Cities were meant to be the place where the companies function, suburbs were meant for houses, schools, and later on-shopping malls. The suburbs have reaped plenty of benefits from the City of Buffalo, its only fair that Buffalo get a little of its life back.