Buffalo Built America
In 1825 the Erie Canal opened with Buffalo as its western terminus, and a frontier village became the hinge between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic. Grain from the Midwest poured through the harbor. In 1843 a local inventor, Joseph Dart, and engineer Robert Dunbar created the steam-powered grain elevator here, and Buffalo became the largest grain port in the world.
Railroads followed, then steel. Hydropower from the Niagara River lit the 1901 Pan-American Exposition. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux gave the city a system of interconnected parks and parkways, finished in 1876 and widely regarded as the oldest in the nation. Louis Sullivan, H.H. Richardson and Frank Lloyd Wright left masterpieces here. By 1950 Buffalo had 580,132 residents and was the fifteenth-largest city in the United States, with roughly eight in ten area jobs in manufacturing.
The Long Decline
Then the world changed faster than Buffalo did. The St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959, and ships no longer needed our port. Shipbuilding wound down in the 1960s. Bethlehem Steel cut thousands of jobs in Lackawanna in the 1970s and closed the plant in 1983. The region lost at least 70,000 jobs between 1970 and 1984.
Choices made it worse. Expressways were driven through Olmsted’s parkways: the Kensington Expressway replaced Humboldt Parkway, and the Scajaquada Expressway cut through Delaware Park. Population and investment moved to the suburbs and beyond. For six straight decades, every census counted fewer Buffalonians than the one before.
The Turnaround Begins
Buffalo never stopped believing in itself. Neighborhoods like the Elmwood Village and Larkinville drew new investment. Canalside rose on the site of the old canal terminus and now draws more than 1.5 million visitors a year, and its success helped lead to Buffalo Harbor State Park in 2014. In 2017 the city adopted the Green Code, its first comprehensive zoning overhaul since 1953, and became the first major U.S. city to end minimum parking requirements citywide. Grain silos became venues, warehouses became lofts, and the medical campus north of downtown grew into an engine of research and jobs.
Then came the proof. The 2020 census found that Buffalo had grown by 6.5 percent, to 278,349 residents: the city’s first population gain in seventy years.
The Leadership Void
A comeback is not the same as a boom. Buffalo’s recovery is real, but it is uneven, and it is fragile. Too many neighborhoods have not shared in it. Too many big decisions are still stuck.
Part of the reason is structural. Erie County alone has 44 cities, towns and villages, plus separate economic development agencies, authorities and districts. Major projects depend on Albany. In 2025 the state’s transportation commissioner acknowledged that plans for the Skyway, the Scajaquada and the Kensington Expressway never got a shovel in the ground, mostly because there was no consensus on how to do them.
No single institution has been setting a bold, shared direction for the whole region and building the public support to carry it out. That is the void Change Buffalo PAC was created to fill.
The Next Chapter
Our Turnaround Agenda is a plan to turn recovery into lasting prosperity: build more homes, make government leaner and more accountable, lower the tax burden through growth and efficiency, reconnect neighborhoods divided by highways, reclaim the waterfront, and put citizens at the center of decisions.
Buffalo has been the future once before. It can be again. Join us.
Historical facts on this page are drawn from public sources, including U.S. Census Bureau data, New York State and Erie County records, and published histories of Buffalo.
