A Billion Dollars for An Expressway; Zero Dollars to Alleviate Homeless

By Betty Jean Grant

Betty Jean Grant

So, I see we have so much redevelopment and so little need in Buffalo’s minority communities that we can afford to spend one billion dollars to put in a highway project that will do nothing to reconnect neighborhoods that were destroyed over 60 years ago! Like General Colin Powell said: “Once you break it, you own it!”

The small minded city leaders of the past didn’t care about dividing neighborhoods and communities when they tore up a perfectly designed Olmsted Park to assist the suburban commuters, who had escaped to the ‘burbs,’ to avoid the Black folks who were moving into their communities and integrating their schools. Some of these lily white communities, one of them in Tonawanda, had Sun Down Laws and secret Covenants that prohibited or restricted People of Color from being able to rent or buy a house there.

The population for Buffalo was at its highest around the 1900s and the time of the the Pan American Exposition when over 600,000 residents lived here. It has been steadily decreasing yearly since then and reached a low of 269,000 several years ago. The recent influx of immigrants and former Buffalonians, giving their home city a second look, the city’s population is growing by leaps and bounds!

Then the 33 Expressway was put in, Buffalo was losing population and the number of lanes was adequate to assist the people who worked in Buffalo, but lived elsewhere, in getting the heck out of Buffalo real fast. However, now with a big migration of people from the Ukraine, Asia, Africa and south of our borders, the development of Canalside, Larkinville, and the availability of affordable and luxury rental units and condos, many suburban residents are relocating to Buffalo to live.

And, suddenly an Expressway that could accommodate the outgoing traffic fairly well, is now experiencing traffic jams similar to those in large cities such as Atlanta, Los Angeles and Daålas. So, what do our elected leaders come up with? Well, they come up with a plan to widen the Expressway to accommodate the increase in cars, but they sell the community a Bill of Goods that they are doing it for those minority residents who had no say so then, when the Expressway was put in and certainly none now!

There are over 5,000 vacant city lots that will still be vacant when the one billion dollars have been spent to make the out-of -Buffalo crowd more comfortable leaving the city. Just imagine that billion dollars being used to build modest, affordable homes on those lots to give the children and grandchildren of those long time Humboldt Parkway residents a chance to become homeowners. That solution will be more beneficial to the residents than looking outside their windows at trees that will serve as ill-conceived band aids to a problem that should not have happened in the first place.

I have talked to many of the residents and property owners on Humboldt Parkway and most of them are complaining about the project regarding the lack of involvement. Some of them are worried about the excavation that could do structural damage to their homes. A few, with health or respiratory issues, are concerned about the amount of dirt and dust they will be exposed to.

A billion plus dollars is a lot of money. It can do much to help the many, poor children who are now living in substandard housing or in homeless shelters. I believe, for them, the better use for the money would not be for homeowners to look at a few trees planted on top of a dirt and concrete tunnel, where close to 100 thousands cars and trucks are arriving and leaving the city as they come to and then leave the billion dollar Expressway our leaders built for them.

Oh, just for the record, the part of the 33 Expressway that is slated for redevelopment has been designated the Dr. Martin Luther King Expressway. Let us give respect by calling it by its proper name.