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Inner Harbor of Buffalo, New York on Lake Erie.Universal Images Group / Getty
This piece was originally published in CityLab and appears here as part of our Climate Desk Partnership.
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When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, Maria Robles saw such heavy rains that she drilled a hole in her roof and flooded her home in San Juan. “We lost everything inside the house,” she said. “Everything, everything, everything.”
The storm marked the beginning of a long trip that led the San Juan Convention Center to a Florida hotel to an airport in Philadelphia, ending with an 11-hour bus ride to Buffalo, NY – Her husband had already visited the city as a teenager and remembered to love him. She arrived with two of her four children in tow. It did not take long for Robles and his family to move into their new home. She landed a job in a facial cream manufacturing plant, lip balm and other personal care products, while her husband found a job in a plastic factory. Robles said that she was still struggling with the freezing weather, but that she would be delighted to take a snowstorm on a hurricane any day.
Robles may not have known when she moved in, but Buffalo is exceptionally well insulated against climate change. The rising temperatures have not yet produced extreme heat waves or precipitations in western New York. Experts believe that the region’s cool climate and abundant fresh water could make it an attractive destination as the planet warms up. And Buffalo has room to grow – the city’s population has halved in the last 70 years of industrial decline.
These facts did not go unnoticed. In his address on the state of the city in 2019, the mayor called Buffalo a “city of climate refuge.” Civic leaders hope the next wave of climate refugees will revive Buffalo, filling its vacant lots and abandoned storefronts.
“Buffalo is stepping up and preparing to welcome this new type of refugee,” said Mayor Byron Brown. “We believe we can accommodate people who have been displaced by harsh weather and natural disasters.”
As Buffalo becomes a more attractive place to migrate, can it remain a haven for refugees like Robles, who come in search of affordable housing and a decent job? Or will Buffalo become a paradise for the professional class in cold weather? With enough space for newcomers, Buffalo does not look like cities usually at risk of gentrification. But what if the high wages of vulnerable cities like Miami and New York flock to the shores of Lake Erie? Will Buffalo be prepared?
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In 2016, SUNY Buffalo’s state climate scientist, Stephen Vermette, attempted to show how climate change had made life more difficult in western New York in the hope of galvanize people to take up arms against the carbon crisis. He scoured the weather records going back to 1965 and found that temperatures had risen to just over 2 degrees Fahrenheit during this period, roughly consistent with the rest of the Lower 48.
But that’s where the similarities ended. While warmer weather has fueled fires in California, hurricanes along the Gulf Coast and flooding in the Midwest, climate change has left western New York virtually intact. Vermette has found no evidence that rainfall has become more severe or that heat waves have become more frequent – Buffalo has only had one day at 90 degrees in 2019. He said the Lake Erie breeze acts as a natural air conditioner, helping to keep the city cool.
“When I was presenting this data, I was a little sorry because I could not find some of the trends that we expected to see in western New York,” said Vermette, author of The Face of WNY’s Weather. “It’s bad news if you try to show that the climate is changing.”
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Vermette thought that there had to be a gap in the data or a flaw in his analysis, so he crossed the numbers again and again, each time to arrive at the same result – a flat line. This is only after repeated attempts to find evidence of a deterioration in the time that Vermette began to think that the west of New York could react to rising temperatures differently than the rest of the world. rest of the country. It was a revelation, and one that he will see corroborated by other experts.
“The way I described it at a meeting was:” With climate change, the world will suck, but Buffalo may suck less, “he said. “We can not only be able to adapt. We can actually prosper as a region in a world where the climate is changing. “
In a city that now has only two seasons – winter and July 4 – climate change will mean longer summers and shorter, milder winters. And where other cities like Los Angeles and San Diego will be plagued by drought, Buffalo will have a steady supply of water. The Great Lakes region is home to about 20% of the world’s surface freshwater, much of which passes the Buffalo sill along the Niagara River, which connects Lake Erie with Lake Ontario.
The experts are waiting for these facts to push people to relocate to Buffalo, and they say the city will have room to accommodate them. Since the population of Buffalo peaked in the 1950s at about 580,000 people, residents have regularly left the city, bringing the current population to about 260,000. As a result, Buffalo has enough land, homes, homes, and houses to live in. sewer infrastructure and water infrastructure to support hundreds of thousands of additional people.
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Vivek Shandas, professor of urban planning at Portland State University, is currently undertaking an extensive analysis of factors such as temperature, sea-level rise, historical migration patterns, and other variables. to predict how the populations of 82 US counties will move the planet is warming up. He said that Erie County, where Buffalo is located, is one of the counties that is expected to grow the most.
“By the end of the century, we will see massive relocation and redistribution of urban populations,” he said. “Buffalo is really well located in many ways.”
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“You can not just declare yourself a climate refuge, you know.”
In September 2018, Harvard climate adaptation expert Jesse Keenan told the Guardian that while the planet was warming, Americans could find refuge in northern cities, naming Duluth and Buffalo. The article drew the attention of Mayor Brown, who referred to Buffalo as a “climate refuge city” in his February 2019 state of the city address.
Notably, this speech contained no mention of what the city was doing to prepare for the anticipated influx of climate refugees – no new blue ribbon committees, no new political announcements.
“I heard that sentence, and I was waiting for something else to come out of his comment, and there was nothing,” explained Vermette. “There is no initiative from the city. It is impossible to embrace what we have done here. It was just a thing to say. “
In April, the New York Times picked up the lead by describing how Duluth and Buffalo were positioned as climatic havens. While Vermette and his collaborator, sustainability expert George Besch, spoke to the Times for history, the mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment because, according to one door – Speaking, the mayor had no progress to report.
Downtown Buffalo.
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“I did everything possible to meet the mayor just to prepare him,” explained Besch. “He never even bothered.”
Asked for this story in October, Mayor Brown had several accomplishments to list. He praised Buffalo’s recent designation as a climate smart community for cities taking action to reduce carbon pollution and prepare for extreme weather conditions. He said that Buffalo installs LED street lights, places solar panels on city buildings, plants trees and upgrades the sewer system to better protect against floods – laudable goals, of course, but not the kind of initiatives that experts say necessary to take Buffalo a climate refuge in good faith.
Vermette, for example, is seeking funding to implement a high-resolution climate model, which takes into account the effects of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, to better understand what the increase in temperatures will mean for the west. from New York. Although Buffalo can be protected from the worst ravages of climate change, it is not invulnerable, he said, and the city must know what to expect.
The Liberty Building in downtown Buffalo features two replicas of the Statue of Liberty.
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Besch wants to make sure that Buffalo continues to be a haven for people with modest means and not just a haven for high earners. He and other experts interviewed for this story recommended planning more affordable, high-density housing in areas with access to public transit. They also said the city should plan to preserve green space, including many currently empty lots, to help keep Buffalo cool.
“If they say rhetorically,” Yes, come here, come here, “I would like to see what is really happening on the ground,” said Shandas. “I think it might be too premature for us to say that it’s a great place, partly because we have not really seen the preparation needed for a larger number of people. “
Besch was more categorical.
“You can not just declare yourself a climate refuge, you know, you have to work and win,” he said, “I could declare myself a millionaire, but the bank would not cash my checks accordingly. I would need to win it. “
“Are we going to recreate what I call the” white city “?”
In the weeks following the arrival of the Robles family in Buffalo, their new neighbors greeted them with presents. They received coats from a local dry cleaner and food from a nearby pantry. WIVB, the local CBS affiliate, reported on Robles and his children on their first Thanksgiving in Buffalo. After that, she said, people began calling the station to ask how they could help. Some donated food, clothes or gifts for the children. A woman even bought them a brand new washer and dryer. “New, new, new, I tell you. New, “she said. “I was the first to use it.”
Maria Robles (middle) with her four children.
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It’s the spirit that permeates Buffalo. “Buffalo is a very generous, very compassionate city,” said Casimiro Rodriguez, head of the Hispanic Heritage Council of Western New York. After Hurricane Maria, he went to Puerto Rico to help with relief. During his stay, he broadcast radio and television programs to encourage people to move to Buffalo. He has helped many newcomers, including Robles, find housing and enroll in schools upon their arrival.
For Buffalo to remain affordable and accessible for people like Robles, the city may have to adopt smart housing policies to help support climate refugees. Besch draws a distinction between climate refugees and climatic migrants. The first would include those like Maria Robles, who came to Buffalo with what she could pack in a suitcase after a natural disaster. The latter would include those like software developer Lindsay Tropf.
Tropf has moved into the city as part of 43North, a New York-funded initiative that is giving money to some startups that are relocating to Buffalo. The program has attracted entrepreneurs in growth areas such as clean energy and biotechnology. Tropf is the CEO of Immersed Games, which manufactures educational software to teach students about climate change.
“We had to leave Florida and find a new home for our startup, and I did a little research to try to determine what would be the safest place in the country to live in the future,” she said. “It was one of the first things they told us about – research on Buffalo being recommended as a refuge for climate change.”
Lindsay Tropf in the offices of 43North.
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After experiencing Hurricane Irma, Tropf said that it was important. “I do not have to shut down my office for two weeks every year, fleeing to save our lives from hurricanes,” she said.
The only thing more attractive was the cost of living. As she likes to tell recruits, someone who earns $ 100,000 in Manhattan could enjoy the same standard of living in Buffalo for around $ 39,000 a year, according to NerdWallet. This fact sent many young white-collar workers like Tropf to pack for Buffalo.
Mayor Brown said that at the census next year, for the first time in decades, the city expects to see a small measure of population growth. Many hope that new workers and businesses will help revitalize the local economy. But a growing population could also present new challenges – the recent influx of millennials would have stimulated gentrification and led to a rise in property values.
Brown believes that gentrification has not yet taken root in Buffalo, claiming that the challenge for the city is not the high cost of housing, but the low incomes, which is why the town hall is focuses on initiatives that create jobs and raise wages. But experts fear that such policies are not enough to protect the Buffalo working class in the longer term, especially as climate change is attracting more and more workers to the city. They say that civic leaders need a plan to prevent future gentrification.
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“Let’s say Buffalo becomes this magnet that attracts anyone looking for a good place to live. It will become the East Coast version of San Francisco, “said Henry Louis Taylor Jr., director of the Center for Urban Studies at the University of Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning. “Can we basically recreate what I call the” white city “? The white city is a city for whites and other groups that can afford to live there.”
Keenan, Harvard’s climate adaptation expert, said Buffalo could become another example of climate gentrification, a phenomenon already underway in Miami, for example, where property values are rising faster in high-rise neighborhoods and low-income who are better protected against the sea. level increase. Keenan said climate gentrification exists at both small and large scale.
“It’s not just people moving from one neighborhood to another. It is a kind of trans-state state and, one could even say, a transnational proposition, “he said. “You can either take in advance, or sit back and watch it.”
A Buffalo mural in downtown Buffalo.
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Taylor said parts of downtown Buffalo with new offices and apartments have already seen an exodus of black residents. He thinks that, rather than focusing on the attractiveness of developers to build lofts and office buildings of character, what he called “the San Francisco model,” the city must be willing to preserve affordable housing.
“The San Francisco model, the Chicago model, the Washington, DC model, the New York model – that’s the model they’re using here.” And they’re stuck between this idea that’s what’s going on. there is either this model that they use, or death, “said Taylor.” They are frustrated because they can not find how to introduce this square ankle called “equity, equality, justice” in this round hole called “the market”. “
“They have this right-wing mentality.”
There may be no better moment that captured the spirit of Buffalo than the Super Bowl XXV on January 27, 1991. The Buffalo Bills, which were favored to win by seven points, followed the New York Giants in the last minutes. With eight seconds to go, kicker Scott Norwood had the chance to win with a difficult 47-yard field goal. In a heartbreaking bend, he sent the ball to the right. The Bills have lost this game and the next three consecutive Super Bowls, and the phrase “wide right” has become synonymous with the team and, to some extent, the city.
“One of the things I’ve said about Buffalo is that they have this” wide right “mentality,” Taylor said. “They have that mentality where they are always a little there, but never there.” The defining feature of the city, he says, is that it never seems to live up to its potential.
That being said, Buffalo is nothing but resilient. After losing the first Super Bowl, Bills head coach Marv Levy woke up his players with tenacity, displaying the text of the 14th century poem “Sir Andrew Barton” in the locker room.
“Keep going, my men,” said Sir Andrew,
“A little I am hurt, but not yet killed;
I’m just going to lie down and bleed a moment,
And then I’ll get up and fight again. “
Levy spoke about the character of the team, but he might as well have talked about the city and its people.
“You can not have a working-class city like Buffalo without a strong trade union tradition, without the workers fighting for their rights, a place where the soil is soaked with the blood of the native people fighting for their lands and their rights, where the Metro The railroad has moved blacks from slavery to freedom, “Taylor said. “This is the foundation on which the city is built.”
The challenge for Buffalo, he said, is that it must not be inspired from San Francisco and New York, attracting white-collar workers who are displacing the natives of the working class. If it’s a climate refuge, he says, he must do better than the golden coastal metropolises.
“Do you want to imitate them? Or do you want them to imitate us? Do you want to walk their way to greatness, or do you want to take another road to greatness? “, He said. “It will not happen naturally, we will have to fight for it to happen.”
This work is supported by a grant from the International Center for Journalists funded by Microsoft News.
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