Investment of the BNMC in the Fruit Belt

Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus Revitalization Plan for the Fruit Belt (East Side, Buffalo)

This is a really big read, but what it boils down to is this:

The Fruit Belt has been historically one of the most impoverished areas of Buffalo. If you didn't know, the new Downtown campus of UB is going to be centered around Roswell Park and this massive health compound known as the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus (BNMC). The BNMC is situation directly next to the Fruit Belt.

The BNMC has tapped the Fruit Belt as an area ripe for investment so as to accompany the growth of UB's Downtown campus. Basically, this plan has pointed out the mass amounts of vacant properties in the Fruit Belt (a function of the areas extremely depressed economic state) as prime opportunities for investment.

How this relates to what we're doing is in what we talked about in class regarding to the downward spiral of an area's economy. With the depressed income, tax base and land values of the Fruit Belt, investors have completely abandoned the area. This then contributes to the degradation of these economic factors even more; a self-fulfilling downward spiral.

With the creation of UB Downtown and the massive investment in the BNMC there is opportunity for all land around it to prosper massively. The East Side of Buffalo hasn't seen investment like this in decades.

The only problem is that people fear that the workers at UB Downtown and the BNMC will not LIVE downtown. They will simply live in the suburbs and commute downtown everyday. This investment in the surrounding areas of the BNMC has the opportunity to get people to move downtown, maybe even into the East Side.