ADAMCZYK: Greetings from the first ring

The Tonawanda News

July 10, 2008 11:47 pm

— It’s been said that 20 percent of this land’s population lives in the “first ring” that surrounds America’s urban centers, those suburbs immediately over the city line of whatever city you care to consider. In the case of Buffalo, that would include Kenmore and Tonawanda, among others.
In an important way, it has always struck me as an ideal place to live. A Kenmore resident can turn one way down Delaware Avenue and quickly be in the city. Turn the other way, he or she is in suburban strip-mall shopping heaven. It’s the advantages of both without being trapped by either. And with the benefit comes the lessening of anxiety and the gain of understanding; I’ve met people from the Town of Akron, for example, who presume that venturing south of Kenmore Avenue into Buffalo is an invitation to trouble, that being somewhere other than the suburbs is a guarantee that something will mess up one’s mental being, car, digestive system or worse. They attend the occasional theater production or Sabres game, but otherwise, they proudly claim they never go downtown.
There are those, though, who live far out in the second and third rings, and do head into the city regularly, to work. They live in highly-taxed suburbs with terrific school systems and little else. They live in houses with two-story living rooms, and with three or more cars in the driveway. They admit to spending too much time driving, in SUVs and minivans, and their children can’t get near other children without a ride.
They regard their lives as glamorous. The recent run-up in fuel prices is severely cramping their styles.
It’s beginning to dawn on us that the new cost of energy is not a temporary thing. The migration to the suburbs, a
60-year cultural phenomenon, is being threatened, as is the practicality of constructing oversized and isolated housing for non-stop commuters.
Parked on the northern boundary of the big city, where does that leave the charming and high-density Village of Kenmore? To use Alabama-born sportscaster Red Barber’s delicious phrase, in the catbird seat.
The upcoming reordering of attitudes toward urban and social sprawl, what economist Joseph Cortright calls “a reversal of desirability,” suggests that life on the far edge of things is no longer as attractive as it once was, largely because of the cost of getting there and staying there. “Typically, Americans have felt the periphery was the most desirable, and now there’s going to be a reversion to the center,” he said.
Kenmore is three miles from downtown, a half mile from the consumer’s nirvana of Sheridan Drive, has bus routes galore, and that “walkable community” aspect that many high-end suburbs planned under the guise of the “new urbanism” movement find so appealing. All this with reasonably-priced (though appreciating) housing and a remarkably efficient public works department. Not bad for a suburb laid out in the 1890s.
As four dollars-plus for a gallon of gasoline offers an incentive for rethinking what qualifies as an attractive lifestyle, it might be time to reconsider those timeworn places in Buffalo’s first ring — Kenmore, Cheektowaga, Tonawanda, West Seneca and the rest — as an alternative to city living and to deep-suburbs living. While a place like Kenmore might not have it all, “all” may be available a convenient commute away. Try that in Newfane.
Of course, not everyone works downtown. Not everyone requires an automobile to get to work and back. And yet, try to find a place to park in an urban core that is supposedly 40 percent parking space, in a city that has lost half its population since 1960. On any workday morning the parking lots in downtown Buffalo are filled with vehicles, and many came in from East Amherst and Orchard Park and Hamburg to be there. The oversized houses they left will need to be heated in the winter, and it might occur to them that a solution to all of this might be found immediately over the city line.

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