BUFFALO HOUSING OPPORTUNITY

Buffalo, NY

how can buffalo's housing market be rebalanced to support opportunity for low-income households?

SUMMARY

Buffalo is one of America’s great cities—and one of its most challenged. Important neighborhood and housing issues have gone unaddressed or poorly addressed for decades, creating an environment today where a resurgence of civic price, development activity, and vitality in parts of Buffalo are juxtaposed with some of this country’s largest concentrations of distress and neglect.

czb arrived in Buffalo in 2016. Over the course of nearly a year, we worked to give stakeholders a clear understanding of the housing problems that Buffalo is trying to solve, how those problems differ between markets within the city, and how those differences should influence the actions of the city and others who intervene on behalf of healthier and more inclusive neighborhoods.

BUFFALO HOUSING OPPORTUNITY

Assessment & Analysis

Using proprietary methods, czb performed a marketability and condition survey of all residential structures in Buffalo and put the data through a rigorous analysis that helped us clarify the city’s challenges, identify the city’s sub-market types, and understand the implications that conditions in each type have on decision-making in an environment with limited resources.

Framing stakeholder conversations with an understanding of "why"

The act of investing public resources must be established by a well-reasoned and plausibly attainable aim.

"We have to make very hard decisions, with surgical precision, so that when we spend money it's having the greatest impact on the greatest number of people possible."

- Byron Brown | Mayor of Buffalo

Housing Opportunity Strategy

Our report for Buffalo is an elastic decision-making tool designed to accommodate the ever-shifting landscape of real estate markets, demand, pricing, private sector risk tolerance, and public sector fiscal capacity.

We helped stakeholders at the neighborhood, civic, and non-profit levels achieve the clarity needed to think critically about the issues being confronted, goal attainability and sustainability, and the act of investing public resources in solutions.