Power Failure: Politics, Patronage, And the Economic Future of Buffalo, New York Review

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Power Failure: Politics, Patronage, And the Economic Future of Buffalo, New York ReviewThis relatively short (218 pp.), concise dissertation of fifty years of the decline of Buffalo, New York from its position in 1900 as one of Americas' leading cities, to its inability to adapt to the post World War II economic shifts (40,000 jobs lost in one fell swoop from one firm alone in the late 1940s), and its following fifty years of turmoil, provides a sad litany of urban decline.
Confession and full disclosure: I lived in Erie County from 1951 to leaving for college in 1969; my family stayed until 1978. My dad was a steel superintendent. Having lived through much of her time line, every scary story and sad anecdote Dillaway uses rings true. To some extent, this book is a distilled history of newspaper headlines and pictures that have lingered in my mind, well after I left the Buffalo area.
Her first chapter provides "five factors of decline" that do a good job of capturing Buffalo's demise: transportation, steel, absentee management, militant labor, and competing agencies of influence. And the bottom line can be singled out to be a lack of leadership. The story of Bethlehem Steel alone offers a case study of management-union mutual destruction, providing a metaphor for the decline of the city.
Buffalo boomed too some degree because of geography: the gateway to the American west, the Erie Canal, Lake Erie water and transportation resources, electricity from the Niagara, a rail hub. A city heavily Catholic (76%) and - in the past fifty years -- increasingly African-American, Buffalo's WASP-centric lawyers and bankers presided over a city whose population halved and manufacturing disappeared in fifty years. Key struggles over a new campus for the University of Buffalo (a private university until 1962), a railroad-to-nowhere light rail system, and a new football stadium are perhaps the most "popular" or at least visible instances of "the powers that be" frittering away opportunities, and Buffalo often seems positioned as a developing country, dying - as the late urbanist Jane Jacobs noted - with each new subsidy, bailout, and tax break. No one would expect manufacturing to remain as dominant today as it was fifty years ago, but the absolute inability to manage the transition to a global, knowledge-based economy Dillaway laboriously records in excruciating detail, decade by decade.
The academic abstract approach to each chapter produces some confusion, such as "production output in 1972 dropping to .05 percent," (p. 106) corrected three pages later with "Buffalo's growth rate in production output had slowed to 0.5 percent," along with the extensive use of unattributed interviews (anonymity is necessary when the judgments are so harsh) and titles and pronouns to describe key leaders, most often without naming people. This produces an academic treatment without a strong narrative and no central characters, although "characters" abound in every decade.
This is a tragic but useful summary of clear value to any native of Buffalo or person who simply loves the possibility of urban renewal, and wants to learn from the mistakes of others. And the saddest part is that perhaps some of Buffalo's best candidates for leading a revival have left town, and the mistakes don't seem to be in decline. Will regionalism help solve the problem? Can the schools turn Buffalo around? Can Buffalo tap water, cheap electricity and hard-working labor to mount a revival? Let's hope it's not like Hall and Oates sang: "Because the strong give up and move on, while the weak give up and stay." Let's hope they're wrong.Power Failure: Politics, Patronage, And the Economic Future of Buffalo, New York OverviewAt the turn of the 20th century, Buffalo, New York, was one of the world's great industrial cities. In 1901, it played host to the prestigious Pan American Exhibition, which attracted millions of visitors to the city; its thriving downtown area was graced by buildings and mansions designed by some of the country's best architects; the city was the third largest producer of steel and, with the largest inland port, was a hub of commerce at the end of the Erie Canal. Today, due to financial distress and decades of mismanagement, the city has been put under the supervision of a financial control board. Population drain and an inability to attract new business have brought the city to the brink of financial collapse. The question on everyone's lips is, 'What went wrong?' Community development expert and Buffalo native Diana Dillaway analyses the history of planning and decision making in Buffalo that led to the current malaise.A member of the Wendt family, whose great grandfather founded one of Buffalo's oldest manufacturing businesses, Dillaway has used her access to the city's most powerful political, economic, and community leaders to reconstruct the factors that created the city as it exists today. She examines the most divisive debates of the past, including strategies for downtown and neighbourhood development, planning for a rapid transit system, and battles over the location of a proposed university campus and a professional football stadium. A consistent theme is the protection of the status quo and turf battles among the WASP business and financial elite, ethnic Catholic communities centred on neighbourhood parish life, and the Democratic machine with its entrenched patronage system. She finds that the only people interested in change were African Americans, whose efforts were consistently thwarted by a multi-term mayor who diverted community development funds for his own pet projects. At a time when Buffalo is trying to build a brighter future, Dillaway's insights, revelations, and prescriptions for change comprise urgent reading for community leaders and citizens alike."Power Failure" speaks to issues of leadership and power facing every city and local government today.

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