Reimagine Buffalo’s East Side for the People Living There

by UB Center for Urban Studies · 04/24/2026

*Buffalo East Side community members organizing for affordable housing, community control, and people over profit.*

Build communities for the low- to moderate-income people already living in those neighborhoods. A recent call to build hundreds of new “affordable” housing units on Buffalo’s more than 7,000 publicly owned vacant lots is not a solution—it is a call to intensify the racialized, profit-making gentrification of Buffalo’s East Side. Under the current market-driven system of neighborhood development, new housing — especially owner-occupied housing — is always built for the upwardly mobile and middle class. Developers do not build for low- to moderate-income groups. They build for those who can pay market rates, with a small number of below-market units included only to unlock subsidies and tax credits. That is how the racialized, profit-making system of neighborhood development works. On Buffalo’s East Side, this means one thing: publicly owned land—one of the last remaining collective assets in Black neighborhoods—will be transferred from public ownership into private ownership and incorporated into the profit-centered housing market to generate profits and wealth at the expense of Black Buffalo. In Buffalo and across the nation, this type of neighborhood development has led to a decline in the Black share of major-city populations. Everywhere, Blacks are being displaced from central cities, with the most significant losses in Washington, DC, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, and New York City. This type of neighborhood development places profits over people. It resets land values, raises property taxes, and reorganizes the neighborhood life and culture around a new class of residents—mostly White and mostly middle class. This is the predictable outcome when neighborhood development is driven by efforts to increase population, bolster the tax base, and make communities desirable for the upwardly mobile White population. The alternative is to reimagine and rebuild neighborhoods for the actually existing population in those communities, turning places of arrested development into healthy, prosperous, and joyful communities. That is the goal of the Upper Broadway-Fillmore Neighborhood Transformation Project. Resist racialized, profit-making gentrification on Buffalo’s East Side. Life is Good.

by Henry-Louis Taylor, Jr. | 23 April 2026