Buffalo’s new mayor… of a small fraction of what we call “Buffalo.”
Buffalo just elected itself a self-described socialist, India Walton. Here’s a liberal perspective on her AOC-ish surprise victory, and here’s one from a conservative. You will not be surprised that one is more optimistic than the other.
The thing is, though: Walton isn’t mayor of a very big piece of what people mean when they say “Buffalo.”
Oh sure, she can claim leadership over the roughly 256,000 denizens within the city limits. But she cannot claim leadership of the rest of the 1.1 million people the Census lists as being in the wider Buffalo-Niagra Falls metro area — and yet, here’s the thing: if you ask any of them where they’re from, all will say “Buffalo.”
After all, they don’t destroy tables to root for the Orchard Park Bills, now do they?
Buffalo is like the vast majority of mid-sized American cities like this. There’s the legal definition of Buffalo… and then there’s what the rest of us mean by Buffalo.
All of these cities, from New York State to Ohio to Missouri to Oregon, break down the same way. They all look like this:
The city proper hosts the urban core defined by the legal city limits. Completely dominated by Democratic one-party rule, each and every politician is publicly dedicated to turning this core into the next New York City, while ignoring how this is as impossible as flying by flapping their arms for reasons we’ll get to later.
After World War II, the city had been drawn and quartered by Robert-Moses-inspired highways crisscrossing in or near the geographic center. Whatever their intended benefit, these highways became an unmitigated disaster. Besides dividing up old neighborhoods and tearing down whole blocks, the highways make it simplicity itself for people to up and relocate to the suburbs and commute to work, thus choking the city of its tax base.
This core has failing schools calcified and rendered useless by the teachers’ union. This union dictates who may or may not serve on the city council, and the council members in return collect donations from the union. The city-union relationship is defined by the passing back and forth of favors and money, with little interest given to the actual students. Nobody has any solution for the core’s educational equivalent of Superfund sites besides demanding more and more taxpayer money from the state. Nothing will ever, ever change for these dropout academies. Any family has two options for escaping these schools: fleeing to the suburbs, or enrolling in one of the hated charter schools. And families with any kind of stable income will choose the former.
This means that the main people left in the city core are poor families and the childless. The latter falls into two main groups: the old fogies who’ve lived in the same home for many decades, and the young seeking their urban adventure.
The young will cluster in and around the city’s fashionable, tourist-friendly, and relatively tiny entertainment district. If the city has a waterfront, it will be there. All the best legitimate clubs are there, as are the galleries featured on the monthly First Fridays. (There will be First Fridays.) They will all live in studio or one-bedroom apartments in buildings with at least five floors, the more the merrier, as of course this is the only way one may truly experience city living. These apartments will all have artistic renderings of the city’s neighborhood names. There will also be at least one drawing of the skyline of either Los Angeles or New York City, depending on which side of the continental divide this city lies. Every last one of these people will describe themselves as “creative,” even if they work as managers in one of the regional banks. Many will be completely supported by their affluent parents, although you won’t be able to tell whom by asking about student loans — it is the fashionable thing to complain about student loans whether you have them or not.
There may also be another part of the city that still keeps its old charm and relatively high property values and retains a more suburban feel. You do not want to mess with an HoA of this area.
Much of the city’s police force’s attention will focus on keeping these two zones that are always featured by its tourism bureau safe, at the behest of city leadership. The rest of the city is a warzone, whose not-exactly-race-neutral cops are better at clubbing heads than closing cases. Ironically, it will be the young white progressives of the nice and safe district who will campaign to #defund the #acab police, while the more conservative people of color in the rest of the city want cops who just do their jobs better. Of course, as with the schools, the problem is the relevant public-sector union that wants anything but that, and as with the schools, it is the public-sector union that has final say on these things.
The local professional sports team may still play in this urban core, if the stadium is old enough. More likely, however, the owner has built himself a nice, shiny new stadium in one of the suburbs, most likely with taxpayer assistance. Perhaps this is fitting, as the vast majority of people live in this constellation of suburbs and exurbs, even if they tell out-of-towners that they’re “from” St. Louis, or Denver, or Buffalo.
The ‘burbs tend to fall in one of a few flavors. Some inner, older towns will host lower-income people of color, and inherit many of the same problems as the urban core as with Ferguson. Other inner ‘burbs will be home of the Old Money. These patricians will live in breathtaking prewar houses or mansions surrounded by expansive, water-thirsty lawns. Their forebears did not leave the original city in the white-flight waves of the midcentury; rather, they decided in the 1920s or thereabouts to go looking for acreage enough for a proper Estate.
You’ll have to look past the inner ring to find the landing pads for the white-flight types. These towns generally have bland names that usually have “park,” “wood” or “farm” somewhere in the title. This is where you finally start to find the cul-de-sacs. These areas will also host the best public schools (other than the few still serving the Old Money), which will therefore inflate housing prices… and which will therefore encourage the empty-nesters into selling and moving to the Villages. These places will be described as the true political battleground by pundits nodding authoritatively on cable TV. The strip-malls all host the same national brands like Target and GNC and Panera Bread. The houses are all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4KfJztaJ5I
And beyond the outer suburbs, of course, we get to Trump Country. As the influence of the urban core fades away into the rural counties, we find pickups with more flags than wheels, billboards about abortion and the Second Amendment, and bearded men in sunglasses who have some thoughts on whether the 2020 election was stolen. These people probably would prefer anything than identifying with the godless libtards of the urban core, so we can question whether they are still part of the “metro area” even if they are economically dependent on it. Just don’t tell them that they share many of the same social issues such as failing schools and addict kids as those people of the inner city — they don’t want to hear it and Tucker Carlson doesn’t want them to hear it.
Earlier, I mentioned how civic leaders all want their towns to become an idealized New York City: an arts center and dynamic town where the ultrarich live instead of fleeing to the burbs.
The fallacy lies in how they all lack NYC’s absolutely unique legal structure, or at least unique to America. Back in 1898, the city annexed vast swaths of what were then its suburbs, including Brooklyn and Queens. Among other things, this fortuitous act came just before the advent of the subway, and which is the primary reason the city’s arteries were able to get built. It is impossible to overstate just how dependent this town is on its subways, and how it’s the subways that unify the boroughs — well, four of them anyway — into the beast that’s still the envy of every last Democratic mayor. (Never mind that most of our mayors, including the next, since the ’80s have been far more conservative than the garden-variety city mayor.)
And I believe it is the subways that are a major part in why NYC continues to grow population in general and in defiance of trends afflicting both most urban cores and the state of New York, blips such as the pandemic notwithstanding. Both immigrants and young people fresh out of college can buy a roundtrip to work and back for just $5.50 and with no monthly car payment. Yes, the rent may be too damn high; but if you don’t mind lots of roommates and living in the outer boroughs, things which neither immigrants nor young people find dealbreakers, this town might actually start making economic sense.
In addition, whereas the term “inner city” connotes dire things in most towns, the inner city here hosts some of the most desirable real estate in the world. This may be why some of our public schools remain good-to-excellent despite the teacher’s unions’ and Richard Carranza’s worst efforts.
Anyway, the biggest problem India Walton faces isn’t falling wages or the teacher’s union. The biggest problem is that she has absolutely no authority over towns a short drive away beckoning her citizens with better schools and better homes. It would be like if the city limits of New York City included only Manhattan and The Bronx, as it did pre-1898, and hosted either only a weak and inefficient light-rail system, or none at all. The island of Manhattan would’ve been like Buffalo and countless other Democratic Party bastions throughout the country: crisscrossed by highways and best avoided after sunset. That is, other than the one fashionable neighborhood.
