Ah great, infamous know-nothing contrarian David Stockman publishes a fiction-promoting piece by a peak oil fear-monger who hates all modern development since the invention of the paved road. A must read!
Granted, the East Side of Buffalo, where the author chose to focus, is rough. But one of Buffalo's biggest recent failures was its waterfront, which is now finally thriving.
http://www.canalsidebuffalo.com/
The Erie Canal slip was rebuilt, an area that connects the waterfront to the First Niagara Center.
And to spend this entire piece talking about the ruins of the Larkin Building??? The spot of one of the most exciting new turns of the last 5 years?
http://www.larkinsquare.com/ Larkinville is an exceedingly popular destination with the area around it soon to be developed with a new hockey facility for junior hockey, hotels, food... This is all happening now.
But that's Kunstler, who betrays his misanthropy with this statement: "It will be especially interesting when the suburban matrix around it enters its own inevitable cycle of abandonment." You see, not only is Buffalo proper doomed but suburbia itself is going to collapse when the anarchy comes! Except that if he wasn't looking through fecal-colored glasses, he'd see first that Buffalo is on the upswing from even five years ago; and second, Buffalo proper, aside from its rough areas (like every city has), is still the kind of thriving local area that he suggests no longer exists. People I know from Buffalo are some of the most civic and community-oriented people you'll ever meet. They know their neighbors, they watch each others' kids. Again, the kind of people Kunstler suggests won't exist again till the fall of the USA.
Of course he doesn't mention UB. It would run counter to his thesis of doom. There's the Medical Corridor, a
state of the art medicine and bioresearch — spearheaded by UB — all in a hub, with major hospitals already having been relocated there or soon to be and that corridor borders the (gasp!) east side, much like the downtown area that now thrives.
Abandoned grain elevators turned into spaces for art installations and concerts and a rock-climbing wall? That also doesn't fit Kunstler's idea of urban decay into chaos.
Here's a story in the Economist which paints a brighter picture.
http://www.economist.com/node/21557797
