Voices from the Rust Belt

by Anne Trubek

  On Saturday nights, Gracie stays with her grandmother. She stays with me Sunday night through the end of the school week.

  FEBRUARY 2013

  Jane leaves the halfway house early, and ODs in the bathroom at her mother’s house. She lives. I don’t find out about the overdose until almost a year later.

  Jane moves back in with her grandmother.

  Everything is calm until November. When I get a Facebook message from this guy Steve, an ex of Jane’s, who goes on a rant about Jane getting high and all kinds of shit I wish I didn’t have to take seriously. He keeps asking to buy me lunch in Butler. I decline. I tell Jane she needs to take another drug test. For the first time, she doesn’t argue about it. She pisses clean.

  SUMMER 2014

  Someone is sharing about gratitude or God or triggers. With fifteen minutes left in the meeting, the kid in the teal polo shirt comes back from the bathroom and sits down next to the jittery girl he met in rehab. He leans over and kisses her on the mouth. Then he turns bluish gray and falls to the floor in the middle of the meeting. It is the only time I’ve seen someone overdose.

  I go outside and smoke while the woman working the counter comes in and shoots the kid full of whatever that stuff is you’re supposed to shoot junkies full of when they OD.

  It took getting sober for heroin to affect my life.

  I met Jane in 2006, outside the meeting room with the disco ball where they’re trying to pump life back into that poor fucking kid. An ambulance arrives. I get out of the way.

  PRESENT DAY

  Technically, Jane is still not allowed to be alone with Gracie.

  It took months after getting out of the halfway house, but Jane eventually got her shit together. As far as I know she’s been clean for over a year. In many ways, she’s a great mother. She figured out Gracie needed glasses and got her eyes tested. I thought she just liked sitting too close to the TV.

  Gracie and I still have our weekday routine. The roughest times are Sunday nights, when Gracie first leaves her mom.

  I put Gracie to bed, and she says, “I miss Mommy when I’m not with her. Is it okay if I cry? I can’t stop the tears.”

  I hug her and I tell her of course it is.

  There’s nothing I can do to stop them either.

  *Author’s note: All names have been changed, but everything else is true to memory.

  HENRY LOUIS TAYLOR JR.

  Will Blacks Rise or Be Forgotten in the New Buffalo?

  IN BLACK NEIGHBORHOODS SCATTERED ACROSS Buffalo’s East Side, residents must be wondering what all this Buffalo Happy Talk is about. Buffalo is not a happy city for most of them. It never has been. When black folks look around Buffalo, they see the city being re-created for whites: college-educated millennials, the creative classes, refined, middle-aged urbanites, and retired suburbanites.

  As a black historian and urban planner, looking through a glass darkly, I can see Buffalo rising. Yet, I can’t help but wonder for whom the city ascends. If you visit Buffalo’s so-called hot spots—Harbor Center, the waterfront, Allentown, the Elmwood Strip, Chippewa Street, and the Theatre District—you will see mostly hipster, latte-drinking whites. When you visit those neighborhoods where housing prices are rising and where swank rental apartments are found, you will find the same hipster, latte-drinking whites living there. Even in upscale apartments, like the Bethune and Elk Terminal lofts, which are located in the black community, you will find latte drinkers.

  Yeah. I hear the rhetoric. The new buzz words are “equity,” “inclusiveness,” and “diversity.” For example, Greater Buffalo’s regional plan, “One Region Forward,” states, “Woven throughout the planning framework are two critical issues that define where we’ve been and where we want to go—our relationship to our fresh water resources and our desire to grow our economy in a way that is more equitable [emphasis added] and locally rooted.”

  Yet, I am troubled.

  I can’t stop thinking about that old African proverb, “What a person does speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what they say.”

  I believe that Black Buffalo will be marginalized in the rising city, just as it was in the shrinking city and in the prosperous industrial city. The plight of Black Buffalo has never been important to Buffalo’s leaders. At every stage in the city’s history, black neighborhood development has been an afterthought in city building. Buffalo and its Erie County suburbs were never meant to nurture and provide a healthy place for blacks or Latinos to live.

  In the 1930s, when Buffalo leaders imagined a new metropolis—a combined city and suburbs—it was designed as a place for white, higher-paid workers and the professional classes. The most desirable housing and neighborhoods in the city and suburbs were reserved for them. These places enabled whites to obtain the highest-paying jobs, the most desirable recreational areas, and the best education, health care, and police services. In their fancy, segregated neighborhoods, whites lived longer, healthier, and happier lives than their black, Latino, and immigrant cohorts. My friend Carl Nightingale, the University at Buffalo historian, says this segregated world was the consequence of political action, not economic realities or simple racial hatred.

  Don’t get caught up in this race hatred thing.

  This was mostly about white privilege; it was about whites using the neighborhood edge to get the economic and higher-standard-of-living edge. This was about whites being given an advantage over blacks, which was rooted in the economic organization of the city. Whites did not get this socioeconomic edge by accident or simple merit. They had help. City leaders consciously and deliberately designed an urban metropolis anchored by mass homeownership, race-based suburbanization, and neighborhoods stratified by housing cost and type. Whites were empowered to use guaranteed Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loans to purchase homes in the suburbs or along the city’s leafy West Side parkways and avenues.

  Blacks, meanwhile, rented in the grimy East Side. To keep them there, Buffalo’s leaders used urban planning, zoning laws, building codes, subdivision regulations, and eminent domain. They forced blacks to live in houses situated in the shadows of factories, railroads, and commercial establishments. These were the worst places to live in Buffalo and Erie County. The racist FHA gave money to whites, but denied blacks access to home-buying dollars. And when blacks did manage to get mortgages, the location of their neighborhoods caused housing values to fall rather than to rise. For them, homeownership produced debt, not wealth. African Americans were stuck in place.

  Whites and blacks experienced metropolitan Buffalo differently.

  The 1950s and 1960s were the most dynamic period in metro Buffalo’s history. Whites and blacks experienced it differently. Thousands of whites moved to the suburbs, where they found the American Dream. Blacks, on the other hand, found the American Nightmare. As thousands of black newcomers poured into Buffalo City, the urban bulldozer roared through their neighborhoods, destroying homes, playgrounds, churches, shops, stores, and fraternal organizations in its wake.

  * * *

  Black neighborhoods were collateral damage in the remaking of Buffalo and Erie County. Remaking the city and suburbs meant that black neighborhoods had to be knocked down to make way for downtown expansion, institutional development, interstate highway connectors, and wider roads. These “unbuilding” activities merged with plant closings and outmigration to hit the East Side with sledgehammer force. This urban disfiguring process left the East Side with miles of vacant lots and empty structures; it’s a physical setting so scarred and foreboding that Robert M. Silverman, University at Buffalo urban planner, has called it Zombieland1. Today, the most distressed and blighted properties in Erie County are found in this part of Buffalo.

  The mutilation of the East Side is not benign.

  It robs people of the value of their homes. An East Side homeowner said to me, “Dr. Taylor, the house next door to me is empty, with a tree growing through the roof. It is worth sixteen thousand dollars. My house is in good condition,
and I have big investments in it; and it is only worth eighteen thousand dollars. I don’t get it. I’m still going to put another twenty thousand dollars into my house, even though I know I will never recoup it. So, I am making this investment in my family and my children.” This is how housing market dynamics operate on the mutilated East Side.

  Cities don’t grow like weeds.

  The city’s shape and form are the result of political decisions, not the invisible hand of economic determinism. Yesterday, Buffalo was built for white higher-paid workers, professionals, and business elites. Today, the city is being built for the white creative classes, or the latte group, as I call them. This is a broad group of whites, including folks in the arts, educators, researchers, doctors, and other professionals. To make them happy, urban leaders are refashioning the city with hipster neighborhoods, recreational areas, and public spaces where the latte group can converse, bike, jog, work out, attend outdoor concerts, and congregate in restaurants, bars, and coffee shops. The latte group bathes itself in liberalism and issues a clarion call for diversity and social justice, while simultaneously condemning the black and Latino masses to a blighted and disfigured urban dystopia.

  * * *

  The hard-core reality is that Buffalo’s latte city, when stripped of its fanciful color-blind mask, is nothing more than a neoliberal white city—a place where millennials and the creative class claim the most hedonic houses and neighborhoods for themselves, where they live longer, healthier, happier, and more prosperous lives than Buffalonians of color, who are forced to live in the most undesirable and unhealthiest neighborhoods in the metropolis.

  Black Buffalo is invisible.

  Black Buffalo is Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Whites see blacks, but not really. Whites hear blacks, but not really. In preparation for a presentation at a recent forum on blight in New York state, I read numerous reports and newspaper articles on blight in metropolitan Buffalo, and the terms “black” and “African American” were rarely, if ever, mentioned. For example, even though blight concentration is synonymous with the East Side black community, Blueprint Buffalo, an action plan for reclaiming vacant land, said, “At the beginning of the 21st century, Buffalo has an unprecedented opportunity to identify, assemble, and reclaim vacant parcels for start-up businesses, new families, artists, entrepreneurs, and major commercial partners to join in the region’s renaissance.” Most of that vacant land is on the East Side, but there was not a word about black neighborhood development. There was not a word about urban leaders uniting with the black masses to transform and change the East Side.

  Not a single word.

  In the 2015 “One Region Forward” report on housing and neighborhood strategies, the challenges facing the black community are barely discussed, except in a veiled language that suggests “… for areas where disinvestment has left few of the assets, anchors and actors that are needed to power successful neighborhood revitalization … the time for conventional neighborhood development might be decades away.” The authors never use the terms “black” or “East Side,” but any person knowledgeable of Buffalo understands the code, and knows they are talking about the East Side black community.

  My point is city leaders know about the challenges facing Black Buffalo, but they constantly feign ignorance and surprise. But they know. More than two decades ago, I teamed up with a group of scholars to produce the most comprehensive study of Black Buffalo ever undertaken. This blueprint for change, written by a team of scholars from the University at Buffalo, Buffalo State College, and Fordham University, along with support from the Buffalo Urban League and the City of Buffalo Common Council, was never implemented. Later, my center conducted an investigation of the health status of Black Buffalo, funded by Kaleida Health and the Black Leadership Forum. The study was celebrated and then put on a shelf.

  * * *

  In 2000, I led a team that outlined a strategy for the redevelopment of the east-side Fruit Belt community and demonstrated how tax increment financing could fund the plan. The study was funded by the City of Buffalo’s Office of Strategic Planning. City and medical campus leaders praised the report, ignored its findings, and then launched their own redevelopment strategy, which displaced 65 percent of the Fruit Belt population.

  Yes, Buffalo is rising and happy talk abounds; simultaneously, thousands of blacks are being displaced from their traditional neighborhoods along Main Street. They are being pushed out of every neighborhood of opportunity in the city. But no one seems to care or notice. Black Buffalo is invisible. Black needs, hopes, and desires are systemically ignored; promises are made, but never kept.

  Yeah. I know some white person in Amherst is saying, “But Mayor Byron Brown is black. I don’t get it.”

  Let’s be clear. Black faces in high places don’t mean a thing if they have the same agenda as white faces in high places. From a city-building perspective, the sad reality is there is no difference between Byron Brown, who’s been in office for the past ten years, and Jimmy Griffin, who was mayor from 1978 to 1993.

  Yeah, yeah. I know the mayor does hire more blacks and he makes better speeches than his predecessors, but his approach to city building still marginalizes and deems black neighborhood development unimportant.

  It pains me to say this, but the mayor is fiddling while blacks are being displaced from neighborhood after neighborhood in Buffalo. He is fiddling while underdeveloped neighborhoods are spewing undesirable outcomes in housing, education, employment, and health. He is fiddling. The mayor knows about black suffering and pain, but the solutions to these nasty problems do not fit into the economic growth model he celebrates.

  So black neighborhood development is chronically placed on the back burner. Yes, black faces in high places can support systemic structural racism.

  But we, the people, have a choice. We have a right to the city.

  Don’t get me wrong. The white latte group moving back to Buffalo is a good thing. I get that; but the choice we face is not between the white hedonic latte city and blacks living in blighted, disfigured, and slum-like neighborhoods. That’s where the mayor gets it wrong. The real choice, my friends, is between the hedonic latte city and the just city.

  Hear me, Buffalo.

  Our city does not belong to those powerful faces in high places; it does not belong to the developers, the bankers, and all those folks profiting off the latte city. We have a right to this city. The masses of black, brown, yellow, red, and white faces have a right to build the just city. We can make that choice. The future is “uncreated.” It is not some type of preordained, futuristic place that is immutable and fixed. No! The future is “uncreated,” and we have a right to build the just city, a good place, where we find liberation and the higher freedoms.

  * * *

  Buffalo! The time has come for us to answer Rabbi Hillel’s question: If not us, who? And if not now, when?

  AARON FOLEY

  Can Detroit Save White People?

  OKAY, SO, ALL YOU WHITE people coming from Brooklyn (or L.A., or Portland, or Austin, or Chicago, or London, or whatever) to Detroit looking to “save” yourself: What, exactly, are you saving yourself from?

  I’m curious! What is it like being born into the most spoiled classes on the planet and wanting to move to a city full of black folks who have been ruined by centuries of your tyrannical rule? Serious question here.

  All right, maybe that’s being a little harsh. I didn’t mean to call you folks spoiled. Because as we all know in New Detroit, we have to get along and pretend racism doesn’t exist anymore. Just ignore all those elderly black people being pushed out of downtown. It’s really just a class issue, don’tcha know.

  What is this obsession? What is this desperate need for people to fix themselves in a city that’s broken? You may heal, you may find your emotional center, but your surroundings remain the same.

  Why is it that the Detroit I know is so drastically different from what all these starving artists think it is? The city that made
me, that made us, who we are: driven to succeed, dressing to impress, never saying die, forever against the odds, is now becoming the Island of Misfit Toys? Is this your pilgrimage to Mecca? A journey through the universe to the softest place on earth? Who are you misguided strangers who aren’t even close to having your life together in a city where we’ve constantly been told that we’d never be worth anything if we weren’t on your level?

  Yes, we were told that. Us east-side and west-side kids were always told to not even think about going to the parks in Grosse Pointe, to drive slow in West Bloomfield, to just ignore those stars and bars on the back of Taylor pickup trucks, and to outperform the kids in all the rest of the suburbs so that we might have a chance to get a scholarship to a U of M, an MSU or a CMU, only to be told on the first day of orientation that we were only there as pitiful affirmative-action cases and that our Detroit/Highland Park/Southfield/Inkster educations would never be enough to make it in the real world, so we go back home to make sure that the next generation would never have to deal with the kind of stuff we had to put up with, only now we have to deal with not only these overcrowded schools, these abandoned houses, these unpredictable summers, but on top of all this, these armies of confused Williamsburg rejects who simultaneously have all the answers on how to make it in Detroit after living here for five weeks but don’t even know how to fix their own lives because they need to be “saved.”

  What are you looking for here that you can’t find elsewhere? Can’t you just admit that you came for the cheap rent? Because that’s what it all boils down to, right? And that’s fine. Perfectly fine, and I’m not being cynical or sarcastic. I love the fact that there are still places in Detroit that rent for the same as what my mom paid in Lafayette Park in the nineties. I don’t love how the “cheap rent” excuse is fine for the newcomers but not the longtime business owners. But I’ve seen Brooklyn prices, and you’d be a fool not to take advantage of what we’ve got here. And we could certainly use more (live) bodies here. But can you at least be up front with your intent, and not cover it up with this hippie malarkey about “finding yourself”?