Buffalo city skyline
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But Buffalo needs to abandon the idea of bringing the city “back” in the way that is commonly understood.
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Attorney Preet Bharara has opened an investigation into the bidding process for contracts connected with the project.) Even so, this city of 260,000 continues to play an important role as a regional center, and some good things are happening here. Is it true? Is Buffalo back? Sadly, no, and what’s more, Cuomo’s Buffalo Billion is “the hugest dose of corporate welfare upstate has ever seen,” Jim Heaney, editor of the Buffalo news organization Investigative Post, rightly observes. “You see cranes in the sky again in Buffalo.” Mayor Byron Brown celebrated the initiative as “very effective.” “The signs of progress are undeniable and they are everywhere,” he says. Thanks to the so-called Buffalo Billion-a pledge of $1 billion in state aid-Cuomo believes that the city is poised for a revival. That was then, and, at least as New York governor Andrew Cuomo sees it, this is now. “Probably not-and government should stop bribing people to stay there.”
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“Can Buffalo ever come back?” asked Harvard economist and City Journal contributing editor Edward Glaeser of this perennially struggling region in 2007, in these pages ( Autumn 2007). It seemed almost as if fate had decided, once again, to punish this long-suffering postindustrial city best known nationally for bad weather, chicken wings, and four straight Super Bowl losses-a place on which many have given up hope. This record-breaking storm was caused by a band of lake-effect snow a mere 20–25 miles wide. In November 2014, newspapers in the Northeast filled their pages with astonishing images of a blizzard that buried Buffalo under seven feet of snow.