We’ve occasionally wondered whether the Buffalo News is jaw-droppingly stupid, or if its editors simply demonstrate a willful ignorance. In the case of this past Sunday’s Business page, we can only assume the latter. There, prominently featured on the front page, reporter Matt Glynn wrote a well-researched piece entitled, “Area escapes U.S. home-building slump” (Sunday, October 7, Page D1). The headline, while technically accurate, seems to herald that fact as good news. The fact of the matter is, though, with our population steadily declining, we shouldn’t be building any homes. At all. In other words, rather than wiping our brows and sighing in relief that we’ve escaped the slump, we should be collectively scratching our heads in disbelief and saying, “How the hell did that happen?”

Continued physical growth with negative population growth is what advocacy group VOICE Buffalo refers to as the “sprawl of stagnation.” As UB law professor Sam Magavern wrote in these pages only two weeks ago, and attendees of VOICE Buffalo’s Tuesday night Sprawl Meeting learned, this kind of sprawl is weakening every part of our region. County Legislator Maria Whyte has called sprawl “hands-down, absolutely the number one long-term problem in Erie County.” From an economic standpoint, the cost of expanded infrastrure falls continually on the shoulders of fewer taxpayers. From a quality-of-life stance, commutes grow longer, pollution problems get worse and society grows increasingly stratified.

Here’s what has already happened. In the 50 years between 1950 and 2000, Buffalo’s population fell from 580,132 to 292,648. At the same time, the county’s portion of the population outside of the city increased from 319,106 to 657,617. This urban flight disproportionately affected Buffalo’s lowest-income neighborhoods, prompting a cycle where vacant structures lead to declining property values and further disinvestment in the city. While the region’s median income is $42,831, Buffalo’s median income is only $27,850. From 1990 to 2006, as the city’s vacant housing units increased from 15,535 to 32,647, the housing stock of the rest of the county expanded by 29,026 units. The wealthy and middle-class folks who fled to the “greener pastures” of the surburbs created a “donut hole” of affluence in our region, where the population, and so the tax base, is concentrated in a suburban ring around the city.

But now the problem is not just Buffalo’s. Recent trends show the inner ring suburbs suffering, too. Of 46 municipalities in Erie County, only five towns and one village have experienced a population growth since 2000 (by percentage increase)—Clarence, Lancaster, Orchard Park, Grand Island, the Village of Lancaster and Amherst. That fact has important implications. One, the inner ring suburbs of West Seneca, Hamburg, Blasdell, Cheektowaga, Kenmore and Tonawanda are all shrinking along with Buffalo. Proof of that can be seen in Cheektowaga, where 1,000 houses now sit empty. Two, the pattern of abandoning population centers is happening not just in Buffalo. It’s also happening in the affluent villages of Hamburg, Williamsville, Orchard Park and East Aurora. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, since all of those new-home buyers have to come from somewhere.

Even as the population dips, our developed footprint increases. According to the Framework for Regional Growth, in the second half of the last century, even as the regional population grew by only seven percent, the urbanized area nearly tripled from 123 to 367 square miles.

Lynda Stephens, a boardmember for the League of Women Voters, says that in 1970, when the population of Erie-Niagara was roughly 1.3 million, there were 5,410 miles of highways in those counties. Thirty years later, after the population had dropped by almost 200,000, we had 750 more miles of road.

All of this growth costs us, the taxpayers, a whole lot of dough. Stephens estimates that in Erie County, nearly $5 will be spent this year on roads for every $1 spent on public transportation. Further, the Framework estimates that if our built environment continues to expand at current rates, Erie and Niagara County taxpayers will spend a total of $911 million on infrastructure between 2000 and 2025. If we can keep the developed footprint at its current size, those costs can remain as low as $112 million. Imagine what we could accomplish with $800 million if we’d just rein in our development.

But despite all this, we continue to build. In a report entitled Vacating the City, the Brookings Institution said that from 1990 to 2000, housing construction in metro Buffalo exceeded household growth by nearly four to one. And still we build, outpacing the slumps experienced elsewhere in the country. It makes no sense, except when seen from the standpoint of the developers.

That’s exactly the point-of-view the News told the story from. Pictured smirking were developers, John Manns and Victor Martucci, two vice presidents of Marrano/Marc Equity, the area’s leading homebuilder. They’ve made big money building cookie-cutter suburban developments with names like Pleasant Meadows (cited by the News), Springbrook Shores and Flushing Meadows (okay, so I made that up), that reach further and further into what was traditionally farm country and forests, all at the expense of our population centers. That idea, one of the biggest ills of the free enterprise system, is mentioned in the conclusion to the Brookings Institution report. It says, quite succinctly, “Builders build what they can sell—irrespective of actual or projected growth.”

The News is well aware of the aforementioned information, but still it published this congratulatory service piece for the building industry, touting the very sprawl that is crippling our region. And for that, we doff our caps to them…our dunce caps, that is.

—peter koch