Emptiest NY neighborhood is in Buffalo

By CAROLYN THOMPSON

BUFFALO, N.Y. – As she raked trash from the lawn of a boarded-up house to keep it from blowing into her yard, Cindy Olejniczak was not at all surprised to hear that her city neighborhood is among the emptiest in America.

She’s been watching the life drain from it for years.

"I’d move in a heartbeat if I had somewhere to go right now," she said, frustrated at what the decline has done to the worth of her home and quality of life. Not even pizzerias will deliver here now.

Government figures say about one of every three houses around Olejniczak are vacant. The homes across the street and on one side have been torn down, along with the house on the diagonal corner.

     The house on the other side of hers is standing but boarded up, its lawn a tangle of overgrown weeds, pizza boxes, liquor bottles and wrappers. It’s an eyesore she got so tired of looking at on a recent afternoon that she grabbed a shovel, rake, broom and a box of trash bags and, with her 81-year-old mother, got to work.

"I couldn’t stand looking at this any more. I look out my window at it every day," she said, nodding across to her own neatly kept home where daffodil shoots were sprouting after a long winter.
"It’s almost like you wish they would just level the whole neighborhood and start rebuilding again from scratch," she said.

There are as many as 10,000 vacant, abandoned homes in Buffalo, where suburban sprawl, an aging population and manufacturing losses have left the city with a population under 300,000 _ about half what it was during the 1950s.

Olejniczak’s U.S. Census district is the emptiest neighborhood in New York state and four adjacent tracts are in the top 10, according to an Associated Press analysis of data collected by the U.S. Postal Service and federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Many city families have found it easier to walk away from the 1920s and 30s-era wood-frame structures than to maintain and sell them. Even banks have washed their hands of houses they have determined are not valuable enough to foreclose upon. Two winters without heat generally render a house unsalvageable here _ but it doesn’t take anywhere near that long for thieves to strip them bare of copper piping, hot water tanks and siding. In 2007, 215 vacant homes were torched by arsonists.

Demolition has been a priority for Mayor Byron Brown, who in 2007 set a goal of taking down 5,000 houses in five years, using $100 million gleaned from the city, state and federal governments and a unique city-community fund in which the city has agreed to match a goal of $2.5 million raised from community donations.

The idea is to remove the blight, even if nothing ever goes up in its place. So far, 1,107 homes have been demolished.

City officials have said there is no reason to try to save the buildings: There aren’t enough people to fill them.

William Backert’s daily stroll takes him past one boarded-up house after another, beginning the moment he leaves his door.

The three two-family houses directly across the street from his are vacant and the lawns and driveways are littered with broken glass and discarded furniture. Nearby, piles of hundreds of junk tires and garbage fill lots where vacant homes have been torn down.

"I have to look at it year after year after year after year," the 74-year-old retired merchant seaman said.

Still, Olejniczak has noticed fewer squatters and less drug and gang activity since the abandoned homes around her have come down. And there are signs of commitment to the city among those who remain, suggesting taking down the empty houses is having a positive effect.

Three workmen were recently constructing new front steps at a home next to the row of vacant structures across from Backert. If the empty homes are torn down, the homeowner will have space and privacy usually only seen in the suburbs.

But progress cannot come soon enough.

Backert pointed to a cat sunning itself on his front porch. It’s a stray, but Backert feeds it. He hopes it’ll stick around and start its own kind of neighborhood cleanup.

"We got rats around here that’s like cats," he said.