Buffalo’s East Side was a food desert. Now it's worse.

[msmerymac]

TW: shooting at Buffalo Tops


I'm glad, in a way, that this tragedy is shining a light on geographic racism, though it will be so hard to fix, even though attempts are being made. And similar things are true throughout cities in the US - feel free to rail on Robert Moses, etc here, this is a safe space to do so!

PS, my grandfather was born on the east side of Buffalo (Jewett Ave) but his family moved to the "country" (Williamsville, now part of the largest suburb of Buffalo) during the Depression when they lost their house due to medical bills. Also, the park system that Humboldt Parkway connected was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead and ruined with the freeway culture of the mid 20th century.  


Original article: www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2022/buffalo-shooting-tops-food-desert/?itid=ap_jacobbogage

Republished on Yahoo for those who can't access WaPo: www.yahoo.com/news/buffalos-east-side-food-desert-195253596.html


The Great Migration brought Black families to Buffalo shortly after the Civil War, then again in massive numbers after World War II. They settled on the East Side, said Taylor, the urban studies professor, because that was the city's industrial hub. They worked and lived alongside mostly White European immigrants, sometimes in the same boardinghouses. There's evidence, Taylor said, that Blacks taught themselves to speak and write German to better communicate with their neighbors and co-workers.



Eyeing the postwar suburban boom in the 1950s, area political leaders planned a highway - Route 33 - connecting downtown Buffalo to a new airport built in the White suburbs. They chose to run it through the East Side because it had the lowest property values, Taylor said, a common metric urban planners use when deciding where to place major infrastructure projects without disrupting civic life.



The choice may not have been racially motivated, Taylor said, but disproportionately harmed Black Buffalonians nonetheless; Blacks were largely concentrated on the East Side because of existing financial and legal restrictions on housing. City leaders dug out part of Humboldt Parkway, a historic and scenic green strip that connected the city's park system, for the highway's route.



"It slices through all of those neighborhoods creating a path of destruction and devaluation," Taylor said.



"The tearing up of the parkway ... would not have happened if that had been in a White community," added New York State Assembly Majority Leader Crystal D. Peoples-Stokes, D, who represents the East Side.



White workers fled to the suburbs: Amherst, Williamsville, Clarence, Orchard Park. Black families faced steep obstacles to move into those areas, either because of the price of homes or discriminatory financial structures. Funding for schools followed White families out of the city. Businesses did, too. Over time, as property values fell around the highway and rose in the suburbs, it became harder for families to sell their homes and buy in more affluent areas.



By 2020, Buffalo was the 17th-most-segregated city in the country, according to data collected by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley.



"I live in front of a chasm," said Emere Nieves, a food security activist whose home borders Route 33. Weekly, she scrapes solidified scum from exhaust pipes off the windows on her oversized porch. "It was colossal what they did, and it was idiocrasy."

[ggirl]

This was one of the things I thought about when the shooting happened. There’s no where else to get groceries in that area. And like you said- this not the only in city in America this is an issue in. I would guess probably all of them

Also the 33 sucks and is basically a death trap.

[buffalogal]

Jun 6, 2022 10:26:51 GMT -5 ggirl said:

This was one of the things I thought about when the shooting happened. There’s no where else to get groceries in that area. And like you said- this not the only in city in America this is an issue in. I would guess probably all of them

Also the 33 sucks and is basically a death trap.

i agree that the 33 sucks especially for the residents so i hope that the makeover will improve things in that area. i've never know a time before the 33 so restoring some of the greenspace would be a welcoming sight.

spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/buffalo/news/2022/05/06/buffalo-s-kensington-expressway-set-for--1-billion-makeover