Here is an article about the location aspect from the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle...
Buffalo advocates push for a downtown Bills stadium, but residents want city investment:
https://www.democratandchronicle.com...DC-E-NLETTER65
From the article: "When he was a boy, the Rev. Mark E. Blue attended Buffalo Bills games at the stadium, then situated on Buffalo's East Side.
Decades later, Blue's face still lights up as he describes going to the games and being enveloped in the excitement that's standard for diehard Bills fans.
For 12 years, the Bills played in the city for which they are named, bringing fans from across the country and world to the second-largest city in New York. Then the team relocated to Orchard Park, a suburban community 15 miles outside Buffalo, where they still play at Highmark Stadium.
The Bills recently inked a $1.4 billion deal with the state to build a new stadium, across the street from their current home. With that agreement, Buffalo's hometown team solidified its spot outside city lines, planning to play there for at least the next 30 years.
The Bills’ move from the city left blight and a gaping hole in the East Side community, said Blue, a lifelong Buffalonian and the president of NAACP's Buffalo chapter. He wishes the team never left downtown. Now, his dream is to bring the Bills back.
"Some of the blight that we have in Buffalo would have been diminished and the city would again thrive to be one of the premium cities that it’s supposed to be," Blue said, adding that a new downtown stadium could bring construction jobs and redevelopment to the surrounding neighborhoods. "That’s been a big issue and concern which we have been trying to look at: How can we help our city recover?"
But Blue's vision pits him against residents living in the footprint of a possible downtown stadium site that was nixed from design discussions last year after the team decided it was too expensive to build there.
Residents say they were never included in discussions about the possible new venue, even though their homes would have been razed to build it. And they say there are other ways the city of Buffalo can lift their community — ones that don't involve planting a new stadium in their backyards.
'We should have a say'
On a rainy mid-April day, Juan Vega is stocking shelves at the Family Dollar off South Park Avenue.
The 30-year-old is not only a worker in the South Park community, but he has lived in the nearby Commodore Perry housing for over two decades. The housing complex would have been demolished to make way for a new stadium if the downtown plan had gone forward.
Vega acknowledged he'd change some things about his neighborhood, but said he disagrees with the notion that he and other residents should be displaced. When he found out the Bills were likely going to stay in Orchard Park, he was relieved.
“I’m just happy they put it across the street because I honestly wasn’t ready to move,” he said.
Most concerning to Vega: to his knowledge no one discussed the potential displacement with residents. This realization underscored his belief that residents are subject to the whims of those with power.
“It just proves that the government rules,” he said. “We had no say because the people in government, politicians — they’re going to do whatever is best for them. ... We should at least have a say.”
If residents had been asked, Vega believes most would have had the same answer: no.
“You got the old elderly people that been there all the time that live in the high rises," he said. "They’re comfortable where they at. ... Even if they would’ve asked us, everybody would’ve said no, and they still would’ve found a way to say, ‘Lets build it anyway.’”
Built in 1940, Commodore Perry housing, also known as the “Perry Projects,” is made up of multiple housing units around Perry and Louisiana streets near downtown Buffalo, managed by the Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority. Almost two decades later, in 1955, Commodore Perry expanded to include housing on the west side of Louisiana Street.
In the last several decades, the site has been a point of contention and controversy. For some, Commodore Perry is home. For others, it is a dilapidated eyesore. Many of the buildings are vacant, with boarded up windows. On Youtube, the area has been used several times for “ghost town” walk throughs.
However, there are still people who live in the neighborhood, the primary site that the Bills and advocates for building in Buffalo considered as a possible downtown stadium home.
Feet from where Vega works, it is a busy day at Big Basha Mini Mart. Drivers jockey for spots to pump gas as customers trickle in and out of the convenience shop.
The question of whether the stadium should have been built here in this area sparks heated conversation.
“We don’t want that down here anyway, hell nah,” said Kimberley Hayward, a former resident of the area who still has family and friends in the South Park community. “We don’t need that down here. They ain’t been down here in over 50 years. Let them stay in Orchard Park where they at.”
Alawi Ahmed, the gas station owner, disagrees.
“They should’ve brought it down here,” Ahmed says. “Or do something with these houses down here.”
Hayward agrees that the houses should be renovated, but not that people should be displaced.
“They need to re-gut these houses,” she said, blaming the area's general disrepair on Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown's leadership.
“Byron Brown should’ve been renovated these projects," Hayward said. "Twenty years, these projects been looking like this for over 20 years and ain’t nothing been done ... Look at all these streets, all these potholes ...Come on.”
Like Vega, Hayward takes issue with the fact that many residents were not even informed that their home turf was up for consideration as a stadium site. She says residents are being "run over."
Though ultimately the Bills don’t seem to have their sights on South Park, many residents and former residents are still living with the potential of displacement. If not the Bills, they wonder what will finally be the thing that causes them to have to move.
“What they’ll probably try to do is move everybody out of these projects and knock everything down including this store,” Hayward said. “It’s about people’s mothers and grandparents that live over here in these buildings, the elderly. It’s a base income rent that people can afford.”
Cynthia Rush has lived in one of the Perry buildings since the mid-1990s. Patches has lived in the building since Rush adopted her this year. Rush wishes the Bills had built in Buffalo.
Not every resident is against moving.
“I’d love for them to displace me,” said Cynthia Rush, laughing. She has lived in the community for almost three decades. “I hate it here. They let it run down. They’ve been needing to improve this place for a long time."
Recently, Vega says, residents had a meeting with officials who said they were redeveloping the area. As a long term resident, though, he knows not to get his hopes up.
“We’ve been through this before," he said. "A few years back, they had a program and it fell through, so I don’t know if they’re feeding us BS again. Only time can tell.”
Keeping the Bills in Buffalo
The South Park site was considered by Bills management long before citizens were informed that they were ultimately going with Orchard Park. In their official document, the Bills also considered the people living in the area while highlighting the number of vacant buildings.
"Currently, the existing site is a largely dormant and underutilized area of downtown, dominated by several vacant public housing buildings," the document said. "... The stadium and associated development could contribute to a positive urban redevelopment of South Park and the First Ward, much of which has been identified as targeted economic redevelopment areas."
And while advocates for building in Buffalo understand that displacement is difficult, they felt that going with the Bills’ initial potential plan to build at the South Park site had the most overall good.
“We wanted this project to always be bettering people’s lives,” said Ryan Miller, a Buffalo physician and co-founder of Build in Buffalo, a grassroots effort to bring the team back to downtown.
“Nobody wants to have to leave their home, but … I think there was a way to do it thoughtfully," he said.
He believes building the stadium in the city could lead to both citywide and regional benefits.
The stadium might have been a catalyst for expanding transportation, Miller argued. The rail tracks that are located near the South Park site could have been expanded to the airport, further improving public transportation. There are bus and train hubs downtown, he said, so light rail development would have been a no-brainer — therefore connecting Rochester, Toronto, Cleveland and New York City.
In 2014, the New Stadium Working Group formed as an advisory committee to explore options to construct a new Bills stadium at the current site or at a new site in Erie County, or to renovate the current stadium instead of developing a new one. The committee comprised 21 members, equally representing the Bills, the State of New York and Erie County.
Many public citizens were under the impression that the group was working towards building the stadium in Buffalo proper, said Miller and Blue, of the NAACP.
Lack of transparency about the group's inner workings further clouded its agenda. When the team's owners, Terry and Kim Pegula, released their findings last year, some Buffalonians were shocked to find that the plan was to build the new stadium in Orchard Park.
Miller was hoping the project would be thoughtfully laid out to serve the community at large, he said, and felt that "Orchard Park is just the furthest thing from that."
Requests for comment from Pegula Sports and Entertainment on the planning process for a new stadium were not immediately returned.
Buffalo Rising, a popular Buffalo-based blog, began publishing some of Miller’s writing about the stadium. Through this, he connected with Bill Siegel, with whom he started “Bills in Buffalo.” Eventually, the group made a petition and a GoFundMe to show the number of people who wanted the Bills in Buffalo and to gain more supporters.
As the Orchard Park stadium deal appeared inevitable this spring, Miller and Blue redoubled their efforts, releasing statements and aggregating data underscoring their arguments for why a stadium belonged in Buffalo.
Their current work on the stadium is “a last-ditch effort to get things to where they’re supposed to be," Blue said.
Advocates argue they never got a chance to express their concerns with the current stadium's location and make an argument for a new one, due in part to the New Stadium Working Group working in obscurity, they said.
“We weren’t as involved because if that committee would have worked the way it was supposed to, I believe we would have been in a better state as to how and why the stadium would be built,” Blue said.
How the Bills could support Buffalo
Even as the Bills continue with the plan to build in Orchard Park, Buffalo's residents and community groups agree on one thing: Buffalo, the third poorest city in the nation, still needs reinvestment.
Blue's sights are now set on ensuring the Bills agree to and fulfill a Community Benefits Agreement — something he believes will help combat disparity throughout the city.
Community Benefits Agreements are signed contracts between community groups and developers that stipulate specific benefits for the good of the local area.
The contract for the new stadium stipulates that the Bills "shall provide various community benefits" through such an agreement, but it's unclear what those benefits will be and how much money will be allocated for them.
“We need to make sure that Community Benefit Agreement is as binding as the stadium lease, to where it can be generational, (in) perpetuity to compensate for what was lost," Blue said.
Like many Rust Belt cities, Buffalo fell victim to suburbanization and the subsequent disinvestment from urban centers following the nationwide economic expansion in the 1950s, after World War II.
People used public roads to drive into cities, making money and extracting resources from urban areas as they spent their income in the suburbs. Many who fled cities were white, while those who stayed were people of color — giving rise to the phenomenon known as “white flight.”
The Bills, Miller and Blue say, had a hand in that damaging history. The Bills’ move from the city left blight in its wake, while having the stadium outside of the city diverted resources away from Buffalo.
Miller cites Canalside, an indoor-outdoor entertainment district in Buffalo developed, in part, by the Pegulas, as a symbol of the team owners' investment in restoring Buffalo to what it once was.
“There’s so much potential here, and I just thought we were finally going to right this wrong,” he said. “This could have been done and it should have been done.”
Blue says the fight is not over.
“Now that it appears that it will continue to be built in Orchard Park, it’s a little disheartening, but it’s something that we’re going to overcome,” Blue said. “I’m not giving up because a shovel has not been put in the ground yet. I’m still hopeful that something can happen.”
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