Tag: community

One Region Forward Community Congress Workshops: This Week

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This week, “One Region Forward” will be holding a series of workshops, soliciting public input regarding planning for a sustainable future for Buffalo and western New York. 

One Region Forward is working to create a long-term vision for making Buffalo Niagara a more sustainable and equitable region by helping inform decisions on how we use our land, coordinate housing and transportation decisions, prepare for climate change and grow and distribute food locally.

Community engagement is critical to this initiative, and One Region Forward has stressed the importance of one-on-one interactions by traveling across the region this year to hear how Buffalo Niagara residents view sustainability in their lives (a full list of engagements to date can be viewed here).

Starting tonight and continuing on through Saturday the 16th, One Region Forward will be hosting five Community Congress Workshops across the region. These workshops will involve a hands-on mapping exercise where small groups of people will be asked to work together to map what they think the future of Buffalo Niagara should look like while answering questions like: How will we get around? Where will we live? Where will we work? Where will our food come from? What will we protect?

To provide some context for the Community Congress Workshops, preview the “What the Data Tells Us” data story, which explores the trends of the past and projects what Buffalo Niagara might look like in 2050 if we keep doing things the way we have in past decades. Also, check out an update on Regional Vision & Values, which summarizes the feedback we heard from citizens at the initial Community Congress meetings in early 2013.

One Region Forward Community Congress

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Workshops will be held as follows: 

11/12/13: Amherst Central High School 6pm – 8pm

11/13/13: City Honors Buffalo 6pm – 8pm

11/14/13: Parkdale Elementary School East Aurora 6pm – 8pm

11/15/13: Starpoint Central High School, Pendleton: 6pm – 8pm

11/16/13: Niagara Power Project Visitor Center, Lewiston 12 – 2pm

 

Not Just Parking Lots Anymore

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Washington, DC is a thriving, bustling city filled with people and money. Even after business hours, the streets are filled with cars, the sidewalks are filled with people, and there are street-level businesses doing good business. 

One of the things to remember about historic preservation is that many of these older buildings don’t have underground parking garages, and to make them even remotely economically feasible, you need to provide parking for tenants, guests, and residents. New builds can hide the parking underground – old buildings can’t, and we have nothing in place to require it to happen. So, we maintain a sea of surface parking that we complain about endlessly, but we seldom come up with ideas to actually change that around. 

Our city municipal parking garages are inadequate, antiquated, and ugly. Forget smart parking – in most lots, you can’t even pay without cash. We don’t have a comprehensive civic, urban plan to turn the surface parking into shovel-ready lots while concentrating the daily influx of cars into designated, well-designed, modern parking garages. 

But here’s a homework assignment for Buffalo. DC’s Mount Vernon triangle was, until recently, a blighted shell of a neighborhood made up largely of cheap parking for commuters. Now? It’s re-making itself into a thriving community thanks to its proximity to downtown businesses and attractions. It’s “not just parking lots anymore“. 

So, that’s Buffalo’s homework assignment – to learn a lesson from places like Mt Vernon triangle; to take its blight and turn it into something attractive and exciting. It doesn’t matter if a building is new or old – what matters is what’s inside them.