Billions of dollars of infrastructure investment are needed to stop untreated sewage from Great Lakes cities that flows into the Lakes, according to a study released earlier this month.
From January 2009 through January of this year, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Milwaukee and Gary, Indiana, discharged 41 billion gallons of untreated sewage and storm water into the Lakes, according to data analyzed by the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition.
“The Great Lakes are under siege from sewage overflows,” Jeff Skelding, campaign director for the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition, …

Today, the Great Lakes Cities: Urban Laboratories conference kicks off in Cleveland. The program promises a mix of policy discussions, neighborhood tours of Cleveland and lots more.
Read what Bruce Fisher has to say about it in his column in Buffalo’s ArtVoice. He’s very enthused about “the hopeful, the engaged and the talented” who will convene in Cleveland. And he gives Rust Wire a shout out!
-KG

There’s a group of young people living in a boarded-up mansion in Buffalo.
They don’t pay rent. In fact, they try to avoid using money altogether.
This group is part of an ideology known as Freeganism. They live lives of scavengers, convinced that society wastes too much.

What better place, then, than Buffalo, with its surfeit housing stock?
“It has a beautiful backyard with a lot of blackberry bushes!” a young resident tells the New York Times. With a handful of other misfits, Kit lives in the three-story house, which boasts 1,224 square feet …

The Urbanophile is carrying an absolutely beautiful essay on the struggle and the purpose of remaking Buffalo and Rust Belt cities.
“It hurts. When a bigtime Harvard economist writes off your city as a loss, and says America should turn its back on you, it hurts,” writes the author of the passage, which originally appeared in Buffalo Rising. “To choose to live in the Rust Belt is to commit to enduring a continuous stream of bad press and mockery.”
But Buffalo is worth saving, the author writes.

“The idea of disposable cities is …

From Buffalo Rising: Read Urbanophile Aaron Renn’s pep talk to Buffalo.
(Though many people in Buffalo already know how cool it is!)
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That’s Bruce Fisher’s question, posed in this piece for Buffalo’s alt-weekly Artvoice.
What do you think?
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Here’s a good visual on what sprawl looks like - and its economic impact - from the folks at Buffalo Rising.
It’s a bit old but I wanted to link to it anyhow. I can’t say it better than they did - “Three times the stuff - fewer people.”
-KG

You may have already seen this USA Today story on a suburban Atlanta congregation that wants to purchase a closed Buffalo church, take it apart, ship it to Georgia and rebuild it there.
Some groups say it is a great way to preserve an otherwise vacant and unused structure. (The Diocese closed the church in 2008 because of declining enrollment - an issue many of our cities have faced that we’ve written about on this blog before.) You can see the web site for the parish that wants to bring the …

Read here what one Buffalo woman misses after moving to Florida.
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Take a look at this column, published in Buffalo’s weekly Artvoice.
It reviews a book, Hope and Despair in the American City by Gerald Grant (Harvard University Press 2009), which examines school desegregation through metropolitan-wide school reorganization.
The premise? This work “compares the sorry recent history of Syracuse, New York with the glad success of Raleigh, North Carolina. One town tried desegregation within the boundaries of the old city and failed, and is dying, while the other town regionalized schools, and has been growing by leaps and bounds,” writes reviewer Bruce Fisher. (Fisher is …