sarahmichelef

Our neighborhood was built in the late 1940s and early 1950s - our house dates to 1950. Like lots of post-war development, there are a handful of types of homes in the neighborhood. It’s not as bad as the street that TRex’s daycare was on - take a walk down Tudor Road using Street View and see what I mean - but there are a LOT of houses that look very similar to each other up here, too.

( Thoughts on the houses in our 'hood, and the ways in which they have been expanded )

Crazy old dude T. Boone Pickens, oil man who dumps exorbitant amounts of money into Oklahoma State University athletics, is building a wind farm in the Texas Panhandle (NPR story, which is where I heard it).  His big thing is our dependence on foreign oil; his argument is that wind power should replace the 20% of the electricity-generation that currently comes from natural gas and the natural gas should be repurposed for transportation because it's domestically available.  I'm not sure I'm down with that part of the logic, but I'm all about the wind power, so hey.

The city of Buffalo has the third-highest home vacancy rate in the country, behind Detroit and New Orleans.  Yeah, you read that right - I'd say we should leave NO out of the equation because that's clearly an abnormal situation.  So we are in second place in two esteemed categories: vacant housing AND the poverty rate (where Detroit is also in first).  The single largest home owner in the city IS the city, and they are knocking down vacant housing rather than rehabbing it - even historic, architecturally unique buildings (though there is a happy ending to that particular story). 

I want to love the city, I really really do.  I do love our part of the city, where the vacancy rate is practically 0 (a quick database search turned up no vacant homes on any of our surrounding streets, and only a handful in the "bad" neighborhood between us and south campus).  Buffalo is a place of contrasts - the city is in such dramatic decline, and yet Amherst, NY (first-ring northern suburb - the houses that back up onto the houses across the street from us are Amherst rather than Buffalo) is routinely listed as one of the best places in America to live.

And finally, gas prices and transport changes.  We're sitting at an average of around $4.25/gallon here - our prices tend high because so many Canadians come over the border to shop and gas up (on an average Saturday, the parking lot of our Target will have about 50% Ontario plates).  Locally, public transportation use has gone way up - apparently enough to offset the impact that the gas prices are having on the fleet (which does include a handful of hybrid buses).  I'm also noticing a LOT more people biking and walking - at first I thought it was all in my head, but now I'm less convinced.  I had NEVER seen a moped on the streets of Buffalo before this summer - now I see them nearly every day.  We have a raincheck from Target for a cheapo mountain bike for M and I need to get online and order a seat for TRex.  We would love to be able to walk to the grocery store - there are two that we COULD walk to (each within about 1.5 miles), but we have been spoiled by Wegman's, which is definitely NOT within walking distance.  But habits are changing, and it's not just us.