Power Failure: Politics, Patronage, and the Economic Future of Buffalo, New York

by Diana Dillaway

At the turn of the 20th century, Buffalo, NY, was one of the world's great industrial cities. In 1901, it played host to the prestigious Pan American Exhibition, which attracted millions of visitors to the city; its thriving downtown area was graced by buildings and mansions designed by some of the country's best architects; the city was the third largest producer of steel and, with the largest inland port, was a hub of commerce at the end of the...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1591024005
• ISBN13: 9781591024002
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: Prometheus Books
• Length: 266 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A cautionary tale for cities facing challenges

This is another book on the lessons to be learned from the decline of Buffalo, NY over the last half of the 20th century and the first part of the 21st century. As one who cares a lot about this old city, I can only express my hope that the future is better than the recent past. The author of this book, Diana Dillaway, is a child of Buffalo's elite. This fact allowed her access to many movers and shakers, to interview them about Buffalo's decline and how it has addressed the many challenges facing it. This provides interesting insight. On the other hand, as the price for those interviews, she does not attribute comments to individuals and leaves a lot of actors in the drama nameless. This undercuts the power of her argument and let's some people off the hook, remaining unaccountable for the results of their actions (or, in many cases, nonactions). This book is what social scientists call a "case study," an in depth analysis of one example. Dillaway lays out her purpose at the outset (page 13): "This case study tells the story of the leadership failure that left Buffalo in the difficult situation it is in today." She notes how three key elements intersected to produce the challenges Buffalo is currently facing: (a) power and its use (and misuse), (2) planning, (3) initiatives undertaken. Five factors interacted top produce the decline: transportation issues (the St. Lawrence Seaway allowed shipping to bypass Buffalo altogether); the steel industry (its stunningly rapid decline and disappearance from the Niagara Frontier, with the subsequent loss of thousands upon thousands of jobs), absentee management (large corporations moved headquarters elsewhere or were acquired by outside owners), militant labor (labor-management relations were often poisonous in the area), politics (a reluctance for the power centers to work together to address the challenges). There are so many examples of how things went wrong. Let's take a look at just a couple. The State University of New York at Buffalo was set to develop a new campus, which would include economic development spillovers. One location was downtown Buffalo. However, the movers and shakers resisted, perhaps because they did not want rabble rousing and minority students downtown. Whatever the rationale, they lost a major engine of development to the suburbs in a stunningly stupid defense of an indefensible status quo. Another example was light rail transit. After much back and forthing, all that remained was a line from the Main Street campus of the University to downtown. A railway to nowhere, in a sense. Instead of being an engine of economic development, it did little to advance downtown and neighborhood interests. Old style political leaders, following the politics of patronage and ethnic favoritism, helped the city's decline. Machine politics in late 20th century America was not the road to a healthy urban economy. There are some errors in the volume (one candidate for mayor is c

Her insights and analysis holds value for any medium-sized American city

Power Failure: Politics, Patronage And The Economic Future Of Buffalo, NY analyzes the history of the urban planning process in her native Buffalo: a process which ultimately failed. Dillaway is a community development expert as well, with long-time family roots in the area: her survey of the city's political and economic process traces the evolution of Buffalo, themes in turf battles and ethnic conflicts, and more. Her insights and analysis holds value for any medium-sized American city and for any who would better understand the urban planning process as a whole.

Failure of too much power without leadership

This relatively short (218 pp.), concise dissertation of fifty years of the decline of Buffalo, New York from its position in 1900 as one of Americas' leading cities, to its inability to adapt to the post World War II economic shifts (40,000 jobs lost in one fell swoop from one firm alone in the late 1940s), and its following fifty years of turmoil, provides a sad litany of urban decline. Confession and full disclosure: I lived in Erie County from 1951 to leaving for college in 1969; my family stayed until 1978. My dad was a steel superintendent. Having lived through much of her time line, every scary story and sad anecdote Dillaway uses rings true. To some extent, this book is a distilled history of newspaper headlines and pictures that have lingered in my mind, well after I left the Buffalo area. Her first chapter provides "five factors of decline" that do a good job of capturing Buffalo's demise: transportation, steel, absentee management, militant labor, and competing agencies of influence. And the bottom line can be singled out to be a lack of leadership. The story of Bethlehem Steel alone offers a case study of management-union mutual destruction, providing a metaphor for the decline of the city. Buffalo boomed too some degree because of geography: the gateway to the American west, the Erie Canal, Lake Erie water and transportation resources, electricity from the Niagara, a rail hub. A city heavily Catholic (76%) and - in the past fifty years -- increasingly African-American, Buffalo's WASP-centric lawyers and bankers presided over a city whose population halved and manufacturing disappeared in fifty years. Key struggles over a new campus for the University of Buffalo (a private university until 1962), a railroad-to-nowhere light rail system, and a new football stadium are perhaps the most "popular" or at least visible instances of "the powers that be" frittering away opportunities, and Buffalo often seems positioned as a developing country, dying - as the late urbanist Jane Jacobs noted - with each new subsidy, bailout, and tax break. No one would expect manufacturing to remain as dominant today as it was fifty years ago, but the absolute inability to manage the transition to a global, knowledge-based economy Dillaway laboriously records in excruciating detail, decade by decade. The academic abstract approach to each chapter produces some confusion, such as "production output in 1972 dropping to .05 percent," (p. 106) corrected three pages later with "Buffalo's growth rate in production output had slowed to 0.5 percent," along with the extensive use of unattributed interviews (anonymity is necessary when the judgments are so harsh) and titles and pronouns to describe key leaders, most often without naming people. This produces an academic treatment without a strong narrative and no central characters, although "characters" abound in every decade. This is a tragic but useful summary of clear value to any native of Buffalo or person who