Matters of Opinion

How you look at life may depend on what magazine article you just read.

In Forbes, Buffalo is on the list of "America's Fastest-Dying Cities" [complete with pictures]. It's a point that's hard to argue with -- though Mayor Byron W. Brown certainly tries. But the way Forbes writer Joshua Zumbrun explains it, it seems almost rote: Buffalo has long been synonymous with city-in-decline. In the early 1900s, Buffalo was one of America's 10 largest cities, a burgeoning industrial center. It's been on decline ever since, despite a location that takes advantage of trade with Canada.

In The New Republic, author Alan Ehrenhalt [right] allows himself to get downright optimistic about the trend of many North American cities to emulate the long-successful cities of Old Europe, with young, well-off, energetic people -- including the crucial demographic of families with children -- returning to central cities:
We are not witnessing the abandonment of the suburbs or a movement of millions of people back to the city all at once. But we are living at a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end. For several decades now, cities in the United States have wished for a "24/7" downtown, a place where people live as well as work, and keep the streets busy, interesting, and safe at all times of day. ... Only when significant numbers of people lived downtown, planners believed, could central cities regain their historic role as magnets for culture and as a source of identity and pride for the metropolitan areas they served. Now that's starting to happen, fueled by the changing mores of the young and by gasoline prices fast approaching $5-per-gallon.

Buffalo, so far, is not on his list of success stories. But there are hints of downtown rebirth here. If the entire Buffalo-Niagara area is to have a chance at economic stability, the center must hold.

--George Pyle/Editorial Writer