rdaner
Senior Member
FYI: I just read that there are 8,000 abandoned buildings just in the City of Buffalo!
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- Thread starter AlbertC
- Start date
RGB_11
Active Member
Buffalo NY has also lost a lot of industry etc. The income levels of those who choose to live there these days are not as great as they once were.
It's too bad.
RGB_11
Active Member
GEEZ! If it's still not an abandoned building, what's with the abandoned laneway @ 1191 Bathurst? Monster sized pot holes and all! They're really not taking care of the property. It needs a repaving badly.
Same with the parking area. $3/hr to park on that pile of slop?? What? So it would be $4/hr if they ever repave properly? Is that the message here?? Sorry for the rant, lol just some observations.
Wish they would take better care of their property.
Northern Light
Superstar
That's likely in the ballpark; I believe the 2020 US Census came up w/that number for long-term vacant properties, assessing them to contain just over 14,000units, of housing.
From Wikipedia, this is the historic population of the City of Buffalo (proper, not metro area)
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo,_New_York
You'll notice the City has actually started growing again, for the first time since 1950. But it will have to grow some more to absorb some of that vacancy.
RGB_11
Active Member
Buffalo needs something BIG, and not just a furniture store to replace the late great FWS either. Something bigger and better. The return of a factory of some sort making something useful to Americans. (and Canadians, but obviously Americans first)
rdaner
Senior Member
I think what is required entails a lot more than something big. Abandoned buildings are a symptom of structural problems in how US metros are organized and unless demographics suddenly change in a massive way I don’t see that reality changing. Btw Buffalo’s numbers pale in comparison to other cities such as Cleveland!
This demographic difference between US (and maybe SA) and basically the rest of the world explains it all. Be thankful we don’t have that to deal with!
ShonTron
Moderator
FWS?
Buffalo was never dependent on a single industry like Detroit, but it had the huge Lackawanna steel mill just south of the city limits (steel companies liked to set up their own towns), the elevators (largely made redundant by the completion of St. Lawrence Seaway), Larkin Soap, Curtiss-Wright, and Pierce-Arrow. They’re all gone.
junctionist
Senior Member
The metro area also had (and still has) the massive Hooker Chemical plant, now OxyChem, whose chemical waste dumping sites included Love Canal and other EPA Superfund sites in the area. While Love Canal got all the notoriety, it's also disturbing that one of the waste sites, the 102nd Street landfill, was located directly adjacent to the Niagara River.
Unsurprisingly, the highly toxic waste that was buried there started to seep into the river, spurring the construction of a concrete bulkhead. I wouldn't be surprised if the company had wanted the chemicals to wash away into the river over time without anyone noticing, so that they wouldn't be on the hook for cleaning up the contaminated land.
What is surprising is that despite the environmental disaster that resulted at Love Canal, the shock and public outcry, and all the litigation, the area is still contaminated. It was never fully remediated and redeveloped, unlike most contaminated sites in the GTA. It's just capped and monitored now as a large expanse of empty land.
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ShonTron
Moderator
I know all about the Love Canal. The construction of the LaSalle Expressway (part of a never-completed outer ring road) and the Blizzard of ‘77 only made the catastrophe occur as bad as it did, when it did.
AlbertC
Superstar
It's been 6 to 7 years since I've spent time in Buffalo. There's several cases of urban renewal such as the Richardson Olmsted Campus which was a former mental health asylum that was converted to a hotel. And there's pockets of decent urban congruency like Elmwood Village and Allentown, along with a handful of craft breweries. But I can't help but notice the air of emptiness throughout most other areas, especially their "downtown core" during a weekend. I felt that majority of the areas I went through were safe, but were quite dead. The city had a vibe of a place that's treading water, and gradually further declining. As an urban and architecture history enthusiast, it's an interesting place to check out. But niche tourism like this doesn't draw enough wider general public appeal. Also for a city that has several colleges and universities, it didn't really have the energy of a college/university town that even some places in Ontario have.
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busybeaver
Active Member
24 Baldwin Street, Toronto
baffled as to why the house where Yung Sing Pastry Shop was situated has sat empty and abandoned for years on the otherwise vibrant Baldwin Street strip in downtown Toronto.
baffled as to why the house where Yung Sing Pastry Shop was situated has sat empty and abandoned for years on the otherwise vibrant Baldwin Street strip in downtown Toronto.
AlbertC
Superstar
Yes, I am puzzled as well as to why this unit remains languishing in such a state. If the initiative was there to do a reno and bring it up to date, then there shouldn't be too much of an issue to find a new tenant. The property owners here must be really absent or lackadaisical to let this happen.
LUVIT!
Senior Member
It's always been my impression that much of this area Baldwin/Spadina and the lake area around have been a zone of neglect for reasons I can't quite explain. It's one of the more interesting areas that have many beautiful victorian houses etc. It's smack downtown and I suppose many property owners just don't care. Plus the city of Toronto's laissez faire attitude to offshore and/or local owners who let their properties fall into disrepair.
DSCToronto
Superstar
Frequently property becomes 'abandoned' because the owners are old, abroad or dead and manage to organise someone to pay the taxes but nothing more. In the 1980s I tried to buy an 'abandoned' house in Montreal but it was 'tied up in a family inheritance case'. It was finally sold about 5 years ago, either the case was resolved or more people died!
LUVIT!
Senior Member
Yes those may be factors of course. However the issue of homes and buildings in general being neglected seems more acute in this particular neighbourhood.