Buffalo: Retrofitting a Rust Belt Capital

"Between 1950, when the population stood at 580,000, and 2000, Buffalo lost about half its residents, hollowing out entire neighborhoods and large parts of downtown. (Locals rejoiced when the estimated 2012 census showed that the exodus had slowed to a trickle.) Deindustrialization and outsourcing account for much of the disaster. But so does metro Buffalo’s ever-widening loop of suburban sprawl, set in motion by mid-twentieth-century subsidized housing and commercial property policies that amounted to de facto affirmative action for second-generation white immigrants. By 2000, Buffalo’s metro footprint had expanded to three times its 1950 size, but the population remained relatively constant. This meant (among other things) that the same number of people supported three times the infrastructure—including schools, roads, sewer and water lines, and police and fire protection—in a fiscally reckless, politically divisive, agriculturally improvident pattern known as 'sprawl without growth.'"