It’s all Buffalo to me
Buffalo Hodgepodge is a relatively new blogger, but it’s good to see another intelligent person emphasizing a point near and dear to many of us “fringe Buffalonians”…
Conflict between Amherst and Buffalo, Clarence and Amherst, Orchard Park and Buffalo, etc. etc. only masks THE big whopping, massive problem – which I’ll call “global economic uncompetitivenessâ€. Fancy way of saying that things ain’t too good when the economic growth of China, Russia, and India are about 800 gazillion times higher than that of WNY.
Most people in Atlanta live in the suburbs. Most people in Washington, DC and the Silicon Valley live in the suburbs too. So too do the Buffalo expats inhabiting North Carolina, Arizona, Texas, and other states red. These regions are growing and are prosperous. The sad reality is that ours is not.
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We need a whole new mindset around city-suburb in Buffalo if we truly want to collaborate regionally and get on a different train that’s headed in the right direction economically. But alas, mindset change is far more difficult to achieve than throwing around a few catch-phrases on the stump. And extremely difficult to achieve when living in Clarence apparently constitutes the ultimate of insults.
The “you don’t even live in the city” meme holds no weight with me. If I have an interest in an issue or want to help with a cause that’s not in “my own” randomly divided geographic area, whether or not I live in that area has no bearing. I can guarantee that I devote more time to improving Buffalo than many of it’s residents do, but I should have no voice because my taxman hails from Hamburg?
If there were enough city residents to do all the work that’s needed to help fix Buffalo’s ills, then us suburbanites could stay on our side of the tracks and deal with more “local” issues. But anyone who puts in the time and effort to improve anything gets a say. Whether someone lumps an issue into a local, town, city, county, regional, state, country, continent, hemisphere, planet, or solar system category means nothing. If it affects me in some way, you can be sure that I will have a say in it. I might even do something about it too.
You know, those city residents that bitch about people who don’t live in the city having something to say about city issues are probably the same ones that scream about the suburban IDA’s sucking business out of Buffalo, spraw stealing their residents. You can’t have it both ways. The reason for that is simple. Buffalo does not exist in a vacuum. What goes on in the city has a very close relationship to what happens in the suburbs. It’s really not about Buffalo, or Hamburg, or Clarence, or Amherst, or West Seneca, or Tonawanda. Not individually, anyways. It’s THE WHOLE REGION. We sink or swim together. If Buffalo fails, do you think the ‘burbs are going to be better off?
So when I go to a rally downtown to promote a hotel, or so some other thing that involves the city, I think my voice should count just as much as the guy that lives in the city. I don’t think it matters that I live in Hamburg. The whole area matters to every one of us, and the sooner we get that, the better.