Warnings of sprawl come true

More than 500 vacant buildings clutter Cheektowaga’s landscape. Violent crime doubled in the Town of Tonawanda the past five years and spiked in Cheektowaga. Kenmore’s main drag is pockmarked with empty storefronts. Tonawanda lost a larger percentage of people since 2000 than Buffalo. West Seneca and other older suburbs weren’t far behind.

We knew it was coming. The pity is we didn’t do anything about it.

Nine years ago, we heard that – unless we slowed sprawl and turned development into the city – the woes of Buffalo would spread to neighboring suburbs.

Welcome to the future.

"This is a direct result of pushing resources farther away from the center city," civic leader Kevin Gaughan said.

Gaughan founded the 1997 Chautauqua Regionalism Conference, where urban experts described the price of doing nothing: Buffalo would keep falling. Its closest suburbs would become more like the city – plummeting property values, more absentee landlords, more crime, fewer people. Distant, outer-ring suburbs would grow, straining tax loads as more roads, sewers, water lines, schools and fire houses were built.

Think of the region as a doughnut. The hole in the middle is shallow-pockets Buffalo. The hole gets bigger as folks leave the city and older suburbs for Clarence, Newstead, Orchard Park or East Aurora.

Welcome to Erie County, the geographic equivalent of Tim Hortons.

By DONN ESMONDE

Full Story: http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20060816/1001082.asp