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

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 Erie Canal.

Today, due to financial distress and decades of mismanagement, the city has been put under the supervision of a financial control board. Population drain and an inability to attract new business have brought the city to the brink of financial collapse. The question on everyone's lips is, "What went wrong?"

Community development expert and Buffalo native Diana Dillaway analyzes the history of planning and decision making in Buffalo that led to the current malaise. A member of the Wendt family, whose great grandfather founded one of Buffalo's oldest manufacturing businesses, Dillaway has used her access to the city's most powerful political, economic, and community leaders to reconstruct the factors that created the city as it exists today. She examines the most divisive debates of the past, including strategies for downtown and neighborhood development, planning for a rapid transit system, and battles over the location of a proposed university campus and a professional football stadium.

A consistent theme is the protection of the status quo and turf battles among the WASP business and financial elite, ethnic Catholic communities centered on neighborhood parish life, and the Democratic machine with its entrenched patronage system. She finds that the only people interested in change were African Americans, whose efforts were consistently thwarted by a multi-term mayor who diverted Community Development funds for his own pet projects.

At a time when Buffalo is trying to build a brighter future, Dillaway's insights, revelations, and prescriptions for change comprise urgent reading for community leaders and citizens alike. Power Failure speaks to issues of leadership and power facing every city and local government today.

Publishers Weekly

Buffalo native and community development expert Dillaway chronicles the sad story of Buffalo's decline from vibrant American port and industrial center to rust belt poster child. She lays the blame firmly at the feet of the city's white Protestant business elite, an old guard who, she claims, mismanaged the city because of their arrogance, bad judgment, racism, overconfidence and infatuation with their own power. The book tells of how beginning in the 1960s, this cabal refused to cooperate, with the rest of Buffalo's citizenry to adapt to changing economic and cultural conditions, such as the declining steel industry and the spreading Civil Rights movement. Missed opportunities to revitalize the city abound, including the failure to develop a light rail system and the equally shortsighted decision to reject the building of a new State University of New York campus in the downtown district. Strangely, Dillard rarely names those she is accusing, preferring to refer to them generically as, for instance, "one banker." As a result, this treatise is antiseptic and rarely humanized, an irony given the very human sources of the decay she cites. Although Buffalo's story is a powerful cautionary tale of the dangers that can accompany valuing turf and power over a city's well-being, the dry, case-study approach is most likely to appeal to city planners, academics and Buffalo residents. (Apr.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.