Remembering the boom

At the time it just seemed like Buffalo was about to start getting it’s piece of the pie but as it turned out Buffalo was experiencing unsustainable private sector wealth and growth; the national boom was so gosh-darn big that it even trickled down to little old Buffalo.

It is now 2009, in the last throes of a national recession, and Buffalo is back to its reserved spot of consistent decline in private sector job growth, small to decent public sector growth, and few development projects on the table outside of the occasional silver bullet.

Looking at basic labor statistics from 2003-2007:

The number of people employed in Buffalo increased in ‘03, ‘04, ‘05, ‘06 and ‘07

Unemployment rate dropped from 5.9 to 4.9 during that same span of time.

Labor force grew from ‘03-’05, dropped by 5,000 between ‘06 and ‘07, then increased 12,000 by 2009. That would probably be due to people leaving for major boom towns like Vegas, Phoenix, and Charlotte with some coming back after the bust along with more people looking for jobs that weren’t working during the boom (students and people now taking on a second job)

Development is a bit harder to look at on a year-to-year basis since projects take sometimes years to go from concept to completion. However, let’s look at the city’s 2006-2009 development data:

Money on private-sector construction projects was a little more than half the amount of public sector construction ($4.7mil to $8.4 mil)

In 2009, current under-construction projects add up to $159,594,420 for private-sector projects and $1,106,750,000 for public sector projects; which means money spent on private-sector construction is at 10% of public projects as opposed to 55% during the “boom”.

Planned projects give in to more optimism however with total cost of private projects being $1.4 billion as opposed to $2.0 billion from public projects.

Even just from an observation of the cityscape it is clear we saw a boom for Buffalo standards. A $100,000,000 new office building for Blue Cross Blue Shield, an $85,000,000 transformation of the Dulski Building into the Avant with an Embassy Suites, Class A office space, and condos that go for up to $1 million. We also saw a new condo tower on the waterfront with the penthouse going for $1mil. We just barely got our $137,000,000 Courthouse signed off on by Bush before DC starting saying no to excess pork. And these are only the big projects that impacted the skyline. We also saw a proposal for a $50,000,000 condo tower on Gates Circle, a proposed $300,000,000 casino and luxury hotel, a proposed $80,000,000 renovation of the Statler and a $300,000,000 40-story tower on S. Elmwood during the same period.

Thankfully some of the momentum is still leftover. Projects like the Avant and assorted residential projects downtown have created a consistent demand for a better downtown building inventory. The strongest sectors of development right now are medical-campus related and downtown residential projects. Genesee Gateway is the only significant class-A project underway and that is thanks to millions in grants from charitable contributions. But this happens as the Avant still only has one office tenant and Ellicott Development has really let the dust pile up on the 50 Court renderings because the demand for office space right now is paltry. Residences at Avant are officially 50% vacant and Ellicott has put the third and final waterfront village tower on the shelf.

There is a theory that planner William Whyte mentions in “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces”;

“Forms of transportation and their attendant cultures have historically produced their most elaborate manifestations just after they have entered the period of their obsolescense. So it may be with megastructure and the freeway era that bred them. They are the last convulsive embodiment of a time passing…”

I apply this theory to almost everything since I saw it. In this case, economic growth models being used in the private sector were creating more and more unsustainable wealth…it became so widespread that by the time it was realized by experts that things were going to collapse, it got big enough to trickle into Buffalo. We got to experience this period of unsustainable economic prosperity in our own small way at the very end of the national boom.