By the 1960s, the lower river was an open sewer: no oxygen, no fish, a channel that carried off whatever the steel mills and chemical plants along its banks didn’t want, sediment twenty feet deep in PCBs, lead, mercury, and the tarry poison the chemists call PAHs. A jeweler from the East Side named Stanley Spisiak fished that river as a boy and couldn’t stand what it became. In June of 1965, he took Robert Kennedy out on the water to see it for himself. That August, he set a bucket of the river’s black sludge in front of Lyndon Johnson — “They’re dumping 175,000 cubic yards of this slop right out in the lake every year,” he told the President — and two weeks later Johnson signed an order banning the practice. They called Spisiak Mr. Buffalo River. It still took another fifty years to clean it up.

His great-niece is the one who got it done. Jill Jedlicka runs Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper now, and over about fifteen years and roughly $100 million, her organization and its partners pulled a million cubic yards of contaminated sediment out of a six-mile stretch, and made Honeywell, corporate heir to one of the original polluters, help pay for it under a federal law written for exactly that purpose. Trout spawn in Scajaquada Creek again. Turtle eggs hatch on the rebuilt banks. Herons work the shallows, peregrines nest on the old grain elevators, and a kid paddles across water that once couldn’t hold a fish.

That is every argument I have ever made about this city, compressed into one river. A thing can be given up for dead and taken back. Anything can be reclaimed.

I Was Thinking Too Small

In “The First City Back”, I argued that Buffalo should try to be the first major American city to reverse a seventy-year decline on purpose: 300,000 people by 2040, 400,000 by 2060, a Grand Bargain funded by the region’s own billionaires, a reactor on the Huntley site, a city that finally teaches its kids to read. I stand behind all of it. But I framed it as a race Buffalo runs against its own past, for its own sake, and that was too small.

Because a comeback nobody can copy is not a model, and that’s what so many cities need.

Every older industrial city in America is carrying some version of Buffalo’s plight. The Buffalo River was one of 43 toxic Areas of Concern that the United States and Canada flagged around the Great Lakes, and most of them are still working to address it. A highway bulldozed through a Black neighborhood in the name of progress. Thousands of vacant lots that escape any taxes. A diocese closing churches by the dozen. A downtown that emptied at five o’clock and a talent pipeline that boarded planes for greener pastures. These are not Buffalo’s peculiar failures. They are the standard-issue damage of the American twentieth century, and dozens of cities are staring at the same list right now with no idea what to do.

So the real prize was never just our own recovery. It’s for the city to prove that recovery is possible and then hand over the roadmap. Not the first city back. The city the others copy.

And before anyone files that under charity, being the example is Buffalo’s best economic development strategy. Attention, capital, and talent go where something is being proved. The city that’s the case study gets the site selectors, the summits, the foundations, the reporters, and the thirty-year-olds who want to be part of the thing everyone is watching. Being copied isn’t a bad thing. It’s leverage.

Buffalo is the right place to prove it, precisely because our version of the damage is the hardest. We are poorer than Pittsburgh, more segregated than most others, colder than the Sunbelt refugees expect, and a long way from anywhere the people who fund these things like to fly. Solve the reclamation here, in the hard case, and you have not solved it just for Buffalo; you have solved it for everyone living the same struggle.

Reclaimed has more than one meaning, and this series of articles has so far worked only the obvious one — the people: the population math, the diaspora, the newcomers, and the money it takes to bring them. There are three more, and they are the ones Buffalo has to do for itself. Then we focus on the thing all four add up to, which is the point of this piece.

Take back the ground.

The river isn’t a nice story. It’s a set of instructions.

Two things made it work. First, the polluter paid. The Great Lakes Legacy Act allowed the government to split the cost of dredging with the companies whose names were in the mud, and Honeywell didn’t volunteer out of conscience — it was brought to the table, and it brought others along. Second, the cleanup didn’t stop at clean water; it restored the shoreline, making it a place. Where there was rust, there is now Silo City, where the largest collection of grain elevators left on Earth is becoming an actual neighborhood — concerts and a bar among the silos, apartments in the plans, in the shadow of the machines that made Buffalo the biggest grain port in the world. Downriver at RiverWorks, somebody put a brewery inside the silos themselves. Make the guilty pay, then give the ground back to people.

But the harder reclamation is above the waterline, and it’s the one that matters most, because it’s the one that was done to us.

Frederick Law Olmsted gave Buffalo Humboldt Parkway, a wide green boulevard, one of the finest features of the first coordinated park system in America, and by the 1950s it was the spine of Buffalo’s Black middle class. Then the state ripped it out and sank the Kensington Expressway into the trench where it had been, and for sixty years the East Side has breathed exhaust in a ditch that Olmsted’s grandchildren were supposed to inherit as a park. New York now has a plan, for roughly $1 billion, to cap a stretch of the Kensington and rebuild the parkway on its lid. A judge has ordered the full environmental review the state tried to skip, and the state has agreed to do it. Read that delay correctly. It isn’t a defeat. A neighborhood that has had things done to it for three generations is right to insist that the thing being done for it be done right, in the open, with its own hands on the plan.

This is the single most copyable thing Buffalo has, because everybody has this highway. Syracuse is tearing down I-81. Rochester filled in its Inner Loop and sold the land. New Orleans wants Claiborne Avenue back from the interstate that killed it. Congress created a federal program called Reconnecting Communities to pay for exactly this challenge, and it will be fought over for a generation. The city that restores Olmsted’s parkway with the neighborhood that lost it, and proves you can un-build an urban-renewal highway without evicting the people it wronged in the first place, writes the plan every one of those cities will follow.

Then there is the plainest ground of all: the lots. Buffalo owns about 7,400 vacant parcels, 84 percent of which are on the East Side. I previously called them the raw material for 10,000 homes. They’re also the raw material for a question no shrinking city has honestly answered: what do you do with land you cannot fill yet, without lying about it? The wrong answer is demolition to nowhere, which was the only housing policy this city had for a generation. The better answers are less heroic and more permanent — side lots deeded to the neighbor, urban farms on the East Side that put our absurd freshwater and our real growing season to work, stormwater greens, community solar. Reclamation isn’t always a building going up. Sometimes it’s admitting a block is smaller now, and making it beautiful and productive anyway, and meaning it. The honest test, every time, is whether the people who live there chose it and own it, or whether “green space” is just the polite word for the city giving up on them again.

Take back the ownership.

Every piece I’ve written recruits. It recruits companies, capital, immigrants, boomerang expats, billionaires with a conscience, and tax reform. All of it imports owners. And a city that imports all of its owners has not been reclaimed. It has been bought — nicely, maybe, tastefully, with good coffee — but a comeback the residents don’t own is just gentrification with a better press release. The people who stayed through the whole seventy years end up renting in the city they never left. I’ve spent essay after essay on how to get people and money to come to Buffalo, and almost none on making sure Buffalo’s own people own a piece of what comes.

So the third reclamation is equity, in both meanings of the word.

Start where the union town forgot itself: worker ownership. Cooperation Buffalo — the local arm of a national fund called Seed Commons that lends without taking equity or demanding a personal guarantee — helps workers on the East and West Sides own the businesses they already run. It’s small. That’s exactly why it’s worth naming now: Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperatives started small in 2008 and became the model that a hundred cities cite by name. Buffalo ran on labor for a century and then acted surprised when the labor left. It should be the next proof that the people who do the work can hold the equity, at a scale that embarrasses the pilot.

Then the surest economic-development dollar there is, because it’s already being spent. The University at Buffalo, Kaleida, Roswell Park, and the hospitals on the Medical Campus spend billions of dollars a year on food, laundry, construction, and supplies, and most of that money leaves the region to go to a national vendor. Move a fraction of it — deliberately, with contracts and targets — to businesses owned on the East and West Sides, and you have grown a local economy without recruiting a single outside company or cutting a single ribbon. The Medical Campus has started on food. The whole “anchor mission”, the eds and meds spending their own money at home on purpose, is the reclamation nobody notices because it never comes with an announcement.

But reclamation can play a cruel trick—it rewards rising rents; the people already there have to be able to stay through their own success. A community land trust holds the ground in common so the house on top stays affordable while the block appreciates. A tax circuit breaker, which I argued for in the land-value piece, keeps the retired homeowner on Fillmore from being taxed out of the corner she held down when nobody else would. That’s not charity. They’re the difference between residents capturing the value they created and watching someone else cash it in.

Then the churches — and this one I don’t write lightly, because I’ve spent some time this year thinking about Catholic education in this city. The Diocese of Buffalo, in bankruptcy over a roughly $150 million abuse settlement, is closing something like seventy churches. They are the losses everyone sees. They are also, on most of their blocks, the most solidly built structures for a quarter mile, put up by the great-grandparents of the people still living around them. The rest of the country is watching the same thing happen — the planners have started calling it the tsunami of church closings — and Buffalo, as usual, has the most of it in the smallest space. The reclamation question is simply who gets the keys. A developer who makes twelve luxury lofts and a gate, or the neighborhood that gets a community-owned anchor: a food hall, a clinic, a co-op’s headquarters, senior housing the parish builds for its own. A closed church that becomes the beating heart of its block, rather than a liability or a boutique, is about the most Buffalo thing I can imagine. We should be the city that shows everyone else how.

I’ll be honest: it’s the least certain of the four. Co-ops fail. Anchor procurement is a bureaucratic slog measured in years. Land trusts are slow and unsexy. This is the reclamation with the worst highlight reel. It is also the only one that decides whether the reclaimed city belongs to anybody who actually lives in it.

Take back the story.

In 1950, Buffalo tore down a Frank Lloyd Wright building to make a parking lot. That single sentence has done more to define this city’s last seventy-five years than any statistic. So notice what happened in 2023: the Albright-Knox reopened as the Buffalo AKG after a $230 million transformation designed by OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu, anchored by $65 million from a hometown bond investor named Jeffrey Gundlach, whose name is now on the new building. In its first year it drew more people than it had in nearly half a century, and Time put it on the list of the world’s greatest places. The city that demolished a Wright building for parking spent a fortune to reclaim a museum instead. That is a story deciding to change its own ending.

Culture is two things at once — the reason people stay in a place after a job first brings them, and an industry in its own right — and this city has never treated it as either. Shea’s and the theater district. The film tax credit that now fills Buffalo streets with productions and their payrolls. The grain elevators lit up at night. The music: this is the city that gave the country Rick James, the Goo Goo Dolls, and Ani DiFranco, who was so Buffalo about it that she built her own record label here rather than move to be near someone else’s. A city that only imports its culture is a shopping mall with good intentions. A reclaimed city grows its own, and lets it stay strange and local and not built for tourists first.

The caveat here is sharp, because culture is the easiest fig leaf in the world to hang over displacement. An “arts district” that prices out the artists who made it has reclaimed nothing. A world-class museum on the edge of a neighborhood that can’t afford membership is as much a warning as a trophy. The story only counts as reclaimed if the people who kept the city alive during the bad years can still afford a ticket in the good ones.

The demonstration city

Now add the four together — the people, the ground, the ownership, the story — and what you get is not a nicer Buffalo. It’s a method. And a proven method is worth far more to the country than any single city could be.

There is a warning buried in that word, and Buffalo of all places should hear it. In 1966, the same Lyndon Johnson who signed Spisiak’s dredging order signed the Demonstration Cities Act — that was its real name — and Buffalo was one of the cities that got the money. Some of it went to Hamlin Park, to repair what urban renewal and the new expressway had just done to it. Model Cities, as the program came to be called, became a byword for federal money poured into federal ideas about other people’s neighborhoods, and the parkway remained a ditch. So we must be precise about the ambition. A model city is told what it is. A city that gets copied is asked how it did it. The second one is the only kind worth being.

So Buffalo should do the one thing no comeback city has done: show its work.

Publish the whole playbook. The parcel study, the permitting clock, the scorecard I put out with the last piece, the co-op conversions, the anchor-procurement contracts, the church reuses, both the ones that worked and the ones that didn’t, and what each one cost. Every legacy city in America is running the identical experiment right now, blind, each paying full tuition on the same mistakes. Buffalo can be the one that open-sources the answers. Transparency has been the quiet spine of this entire series of articles — post the number whether it flatters you or not — and this is where it pays off nationally: the city that documents its own reclamation becomes the one everybody else reads. That starts with Mayor Ryan adopting the scorecard and putting it on the wall.

Host the network. The National Talent Attraction Summit came to Buffalo this spring because the people who do this for a living have started treating us as the case study. Invest Buffalo Niagara brought it here; make it permanent and make it bigger — a standing table for the Great Lakes and Rust Belt cities, a Reclaimed Cities compact, where Cleveland, Detroit, Syracuse, and St. Louis trade what’s working instead of underbidding each other for the same warehouse. The Great Lakes basin holds a fifth of the planet’s fresh surface water and more than thirty million people who are about to matter more than they did a century ago. They should be caucusing, not competing. Buffalo should hold the gavel, not because we’ve done the most, but because we’re the ones proposing to write it all down.

Be the laboratory. UB runs the state’s Empire AI supercomputer, and the region has the research muscle to measure what it’s doing rather than guess. Which vacant-lot treatment actually raises the value of the house next door? Does a published permitting clock change how many permits get pulled? Which co-op model survives its third year? Run the tests on the real city, publish the results, and export what survives contact with reality. The difference between a comeback and a model is that a model keeps the receipts.

And write the federal ask nobody else can. In “The First City Back”, I said Buffalo should hand Sen. Chuck Schumer a Receiving Cities bill — money for the places that will take in the people the Gulf Coast can no longer insure. Add its twin: a program that funds the reclamation itself; the river cleanups, the highway removals, the church conversions, and the land trusts, for the dozens of cities that will need to do all four. Whoever writes that manual shapes the money for everyone who follows. And only the city that actually did the reclaiming can credibly hold the pen.

The model or the museum

Here is where this all shakes out in thirty years.

If Buffalo does all of this, its gift to the country isn’t a city. It’s the proof, copied from Cleveland to St. Louis to a hundred other places — that a dead river comes back, that a highway can be unbuilt without exiling the neighborhood beneath it, that the people who stayed can own what they saved, that an old city can become new without ceasing to be itself. The kid on the paddleboard grows up in the place that taught the country how, and the mayors who fly in to study it leave with a binder instead of a souvenir.

If Buffalo gets a little nicer and teaches no one, becoming a private recovery that dies quietly with the people who pulled it off, then it becomes the other thing an old city is allowed to be: A museum. Beautiful, curated, well-reviewed, visited on long weekends, and instructive to absolutely nobody, because a museum is where the past is kept, not where the future is created. The failure I worry about isn’t collapse; we’ve lived next door to that one for seventy years, and we know its face. The failure I worry about is a good outcome that helps only us.

The river already chose. It went from biologically dead to a channel a child paddles across, and it did it out in the open, on purpose, with the neighborhood at the table and the polluter made to pay — which is to say it did it as a method, and not as a miracle. Everything else in this city can go the same way, because we’ve already run the experiment once, in the water, and it worked.

The highest thing a city can be isn’t great. Great is for the postcard, and Buffalo has been great before; it didn’t save us. The highest thing a city can be is emulated; copied. To solve the hard version of the common problem so completely that solving it becomes the obvious thing to do everywhere else.

We already took back the river. Take back the ground, the ownership, and the story — and then hand the whole country the roadmap.