Rod Watson: Plan taps radical idea for East Side transformation: trust the people

With the vision laid out in the Gettysburg Address rarely implemented in large swaths of Buffalo, some scholars and activists make a compelling argument for a different approach to transforming the East Side.

It’s a concept both radical and yet older than Abraham Lincoln himself: a community truly run by the people.

Following up on its damning 2021 report, “The Harder We Run,” which documented the lack of progress since a similar report three decades earlier, the University at Buffalo’s Center for Urban Studies has produced a new analysis whose name captures its focus: “How We Change the Black East Side.”

The new report advocates establishing a demonstration project and includes a prescription for remaking that targeted area with seven key concepts. All seven are interconnected, yet fundamental to the entire framework is the first: community control.

“Everything will be done in conjunction with the residents of the targeted neighborhood,” said Henry-Louis Taylor Jr., founding director of the center and author of the report.

The plan recommends establishment of a neighborhood council of both democratically elected residents and appointed members like leaders of block clubs, community organizations and businesses. That neighborhood council would “oversee and guide the community’s growth and development.”

That, alone, would be a dramatic departure from the current top-down model in which residents too often are left on the outside looking in. The new approach reflects a trust that residents themselves know best what they need to improve their living conditions and that they can accomplish it if provided the needed assistance.

Chief among those conditions, the report notes, is an East Side rental market “characterized by substandard housing and rent gouging.” Such conditions result from the…