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Narratives of Decline: Race, Poverty, and Youth in the Context of PostindustrialUrban AngstMeghan Cope a; Frank Latcham b

a University of Vermont, b University of California, Berkeley

First Published on: 19 March 2009

To cite this Article Cope, Meghan and Latcham, Frank(2009)'Narratives of Decline: Race, Poverty, and Youth in the Context ofPostindustrial Urban Angst',The Professional Geographer,

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Narratives of Decline: Race, Poverty, and Youth

in the Context of Postindustrial Urban Angst∗

Meghan CopeUniversity of Vermont

Frank LatchamUniversity of California, Berkeley

We use the term narrative in this article in reference to a city’s own story; that is, the social, political,and economic stories that are created and maintained, both locally and nationally, about its history andgeography. Our goal here is to engage with some problematic aspects of the narrative of decline thatkey actors and institutions in Buffalo, New York, create for and about the city. To do this we takeaim specifically at one of the foundational empirical claims of Buffalo’s self-description: The city isshrinking and aging. Although we do not dispute the objective reality of the population numbers per se,we suggest that the narrative of decline that has been spun around Buffalo over the past fifty years isto some extent a racially based perspective. Evidence is also drawn from the cuts sustained locally in arecent county-level budget crisis, which disproportionately placed burdens on poor communities of color.Ultimately, we critique the ways that neoliberalism has saturated cities’ collective narratives of past declineand potential redemption, and suggest that these serve to justify increasing burdens on local residents, espe-cially poor youth of color. Key Words: Buffalo, New York, children and youth, neoliberal, race, urban decline.

En este artıculo utilizamos el termino narrativa con referencia a la propia historia de una ciudad; es decir,los relatos sociales, polıticos y economicos que se crean y mantienen, a la vez local y nacionalmente, sobresu historia y geografıa. Nuestro proposito es abordar algunos aspectos problematicos de la narrativa sobre ladecadencia de las ciudades, creadas por actores e instituciones claves en Buffalo y Nueva York. Para hacerlo,nos concentramos especıficamente en uno de los reclamos empıricos basicos de la auto-descripcion de Buffalo:La ciudad se esta encogiendo y envejeciendo. Si bien no disputamos la propia realidad objetiva de los guarismosde poblacion, sugerimos que la narrativa propalada en el pasado medio siglo sobre una supuesta declinacionde Buffalo se basa, en cierta medida, en una perspectiva racial. Tambien se extrajo evidencia de los cortesapoyados localmente en una reciente crisis presupuestal a nivel de condados, que de manera desproporcionada

∗We gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation, Grant BCS 99–84876, and our former colleagues in the GeographyDepartment at the State University of New York–University at Buffalo. We thank David Wilson for organizing and supporting this project,anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions, and the other members of the Children’s Urban Geographies project for strength in timesof need.

The Professional Geographer, 61(2) 2009, pages 1–14 C© Copyright 2009 by Association of American Geographers.Initial submission, May 2007; revised submission, March 2008; final acceptance, May 2008.

Published by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

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grabaron comunidades pobres de color. En ultimas, criticamos la manera como el neoliberalismo ha saturadolas narrativas colectivas de las ciudades con declinacion pasada y potencial redencion, y sugerimos que estassirven para justificar crecientes gravamenes sobre los residentes locales, especialmente los jovenes de colorpobres. Palabras clave: Buffalo, Nueva York, ninos y jovenes, neoliberal, raza, declinacion urbana.

U rbanists have long paid attention to theprocesses of boom and bust that launch

some cities into the economic and cultural fore-front as others are seemingly left behind duringbroad shifts in the political-economic milieu.The current shift for cities in the United States(and other similar economies), starting around1980, has been characterized as the move fromthe “Keynesian” city to the “entrepreneurial”city (Short 2006), or indeed, the “neoliberal”city (Leitner, Peck, and Sheppard 2007). Thesechanges have been traced through deindustri-alization and job loss, weakening of organizedlabor and strengthening of local business inter-ests, and the putative need for cities to com-pete for scarce capital to survive (or else facereprisals in the form of poor bond rankings; seeWeikart 2003). The past few years have seen acontinued expansion of scholarly engagementswith this shift, whether focused on the “creativeclass” (Florida 2004), popular media rankings of“best places” (McCann 2004), the racial prismsof the “geography of opportunity” (Squiresand Kubrin 2005), or the “neoliberal turn”(Harvey 2005). As Mayer (2007, 91) states,“cities are today confronting a more compet-itive (global) environment, and local govern-ments have taken to place marketing, enterprisezones, tax abatements, public–private partner-ships, and new forms of local boosterism—buthave also reached out for new strategies of so-cial control and workfare policies.”

In one sense, this article contributes to thisliterature, as many of the previously cited worksdo, by examining one place (Buffalo, New York)and its experiences, actors, and fortunes. How-ever, we would also like to explore this fur-ther by considering the way that a powerfulnarrative has been constructed in and aroundBuffalo, which has strategically internalizedmany of the values and priorities of the en-trepreneurial city and in turn has become thebackdrop for certain political and economicdecisions. In particular, we identify ways thatthe narrative spun locally and nationally aboutBuffalo as a down-and-out Rust Belt city inter-sects with constructions of race/ethnicity andyouth. Toward this goal, we submit several il-lustrations of how Buffalo’s narrative of decline

rests on particular views of race/ethnicity andyouth and how the narrative meshes with thebroader urban discourse of entrepreneurialismand neoliberal policy shifts.

Urban Discourses

Neoliberal policies can be seen as one set,among many, of mechanisms to disciplinecities, rewarding those places with local politi-cal and economic policies that are in line with“entrepreneurial” goals and punishing thosethat are slower to accommodate a new regime.As Short summarizes,

The shift from the Keynesian city to the en-trepreneurial city involves a transformation ofurban governance, involving a reorientation ofpolicy objectives and practices from welfare toeconomic competitiveness, and a broader shiftin political sensibilities from the cities as placesof collective living to cities as sites of compet-itive economic advantage. The reimagining ofcities involves a rewriting of the urban expe-rience and an enthronement of a competitivecapitalism in the polis. (Short 2006, 223)

Urban residents themselves are also disciplinedalong these lines, either through the rewards ofeconomic prosperity or through sanctions ontheir economic, political, and social practices.State devolution—the shift of responsibilityand management of programs from federalto state and local levels—as well as wholesaledismantling of social welfare supports are acase in point: Cities that were able to movemore poor people off of welfare rolls in the1990s are held up as success stories of the neweconomy, even if poverty rates actually rise(Brenner and Theodore 2002).

In the bigger picture, though, neoliberal-ism is in many ways the latest in a seriesof political-economic shifts; places themselveshave much longer histories and stories wovenaround them. Buffalo, New York, has been thesubject of a narrative of decline that began withthe first factory closings and the first years ofpopulation decline after its zenith in the 1950s.Neoliberalism has more recently been woveninto this narrative and, along with globalizationand other forces leading to the entrepreneurial

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Race, Poverty, and Youth in the Context of Postindustrial Angst 3

city, has been seamlessly added to the localstory of why Buffalo is struggling economi-cally. At the same time, bearing in mind thatlocal context matters, the narrative that hasbeen constructed around Buffalo’s decline isone saturated with racial meanings emergingfrom the city’s history and present. One tidytrick of neoliberalism is to shift accountabil-ity for failure simultaneously to the shadowyabstractions of “capital flows” and to the con-crete responsibilities of individuals. In this way,racial segregation, poverty, housing deteriora-tion, violent crime, crumbling schools, and dys-functional public transportation are explainedby a combination of abstract, nebulous “mar-ket forces” and discrete personal shortcomings.Bobby Wilson (2007, 97) points out that thisshift allows a parallel derailment of social jus-tice movements by reframing “the focus of con-cerns [to] the self rather than the collective,”and by recasting “human agency” to mean per-sonal responsibility rather than the capacity tomake progressive social change. Thus, over thecourse of a half-century of telling and retellinglocal narratives of job loss, population declines,and the aging of remaining residents, neoliber-alism has recently served a useful discursive rolefor Buffalo by legitimizing the (elusive) bene-fits of aggressive place marketing; highlight-ing the potential of lean, mean welfare policies;and neatly exculpating the impacts of racismand poverty in favor of “personal responsibil-ity” (Trudeau and Cope 2003).

In his book Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fateof U.S. Cities, Robert Beauregard (2003) notesthat the way urban areas are represented—bothlocally and nationally—is conditioned by longhistories of American ambivalence about citiesbut also has important effects on their futures.Further, he correctly notes the frequent dis-juncture between the representation and thereality: “[T]he discourse is not merely an ob-jective reporting of an incontestable reality buta collection of contentious interpretations. The‘real world’ provides material for discourse, butthese understandings are then mediated sociallythrough language. The ways in which urban de-cline is represented are always problematic” (Beau-regard 2003, 21, emphasis added).

But where does a city’s narrative happen,where and how is it constructed and debated?Who creates and maintains it, and how doesit assume such power over both the concrete

experience of place and its collective social, po-litical, and economic representations? Beaure-gard identifies some of what can be called thelocated performances of urban narratives:

In a variety of social settings . . . people cometogether and assess how they are living, wherethey should live, with whom, and at whatcosts and with what benefits. Similarly, em-ployees of business firms, nonprofit organiza-tions, and governmental bodies participate in avariety of forums designed to help them con-sider appropriate responses to changing urbanconditions. . . . On radio and television and inmagazines and newspapers, commentators re-flect on the state of urban America. Specialreports, editorials, documentaries, and daily ar-ticles probe the depths of the city’s poverty,the revival of urban retailing, and the successfulstruggles of neighborhood groups. Governmentofficials speak out and consultant reports aresummarized and evaluated. (Beauregard 2003,20–21)

Of course, there are many views, commen-taries, reports, and opinions that contributeto the formation and perpetuation of the nar-rative of decline, including boosterism and cri-tique, hopefulness and skepticism, dependingon the positions of the commentators. Theviews contributing to the narrative here typ-ically and repeatedly identify Buffalo’s coreproblems as lying with the local economy andits perceived impacts on population changes.Our own reading of Buffalo’s narrative is in-formed by the various “contentious interpreta-tions” we encountered in many combined yearsof living in and researching western New York,ranging from local media reports, formal schol-arly work on Buffalo and western New York,personal interviews with local social service di-rectors and politicians, meetings with commu-nity activists, and—most recently—intensiveparticipatory research with approximately fiftyyoung people on the west side of the city. Wedraw from these to acknowledge that there aremany “Buffaloes” (i.e., experiences and inter-pretations of the place) and thus many identi-fied causes for decline and possible sources ofredemption. Overall, however, these multipleviews seem to converge around several com-mon themes: a loss of former prosperity, con-cern for the current economy, and a search forsolutions.

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Buffalo’s Narrative(s)

Along these lines, and as an example of oneof many “located performances,” in late 2005,one of us was sitting in a meeting of profes-sors of law, planning, sociology, social work,economics, political science, and geography atthe local university, many of whom did theirresearch in Buffalo itself. The new academicdirector of a campus-based planning instituteset all the heads in the room nodding when shemade reference to the city of Buffalo’s fifty-yearpattern of decline due, in part, to populationloss driven by the loss of major manufactur-ing plants in the 1970s and 1980s and in partto the aging of the remaining residents. Al-though I (Cope) was certainly familiar with thistrope—indeed, I had lectured on it extensivelyin a decade of teaching urban geography at thisuniversity—it suddenly seemed jarring. Thiswell-worn explanation for Buffalo’s woes—thisnarrative of decline—did not sit well with theexperiences I was having in my participatoryresearch project on the West Side of Buffalo.There, my neighborhood-level observationswere ones of population in-migration (bothfrom outside the mainland United States andfrom nearby neighborhoods), local growth ofentrepreneurial businesses, and—because I wasworking with an after-school program—the dy-namic youth of Buffalo. How could I recon-cile these two disparate narratives? Were theysymptomatic of the many “Buffaloes” that dif-ferent residents experience? Were they merelya matter of the scale of observation (neigh-borhood vs. city or metropolitan)? Was theresomething else going on?

We had both come to know several dozenchildren quite well through our involvement asfaculty director (Cope) and graduate assistant(Latcham) in the Children’s Urban Geogra-phies project, which we ran through a West-Side after-school program (http://www.geog.buffalo.edu/research/geokids/). These youngpeople lived in a context of a bustling, althoughoften violent and crime-saturated, neighbor-hood with a shrinking white population ofmixed ethnic backgrounds, growing numbersof African Americans (many moving from themore segregated areas of the East Side), andnew arrivals from Puerto Rico, the Domini-can Republic, and Vietnam, as well as refugeesfrom Middle Eastern and African countries.

Further, although most of the neighborhoodsuffers from some physical deterioration andneglect, there are signs of small-scale economicendeavors, most particularly in the realm of“ethnic” food stores and restaurants, beauty sa-lons, handyman services, and even the infor-mal realm of front-porch enterprises with var-ious offerings such as second-hand householdgoods and Puerto Rican frozen treats knownas limbe. So, although the local housing was ofmixed tenure, and there seemed to be frequentturnover in the rental properties, there was def-initely a sense of swelling in-migration to thisarea. The number of shops and informal signsof economic entrepreneurship in the immedi-ate area seemed to be rising, as well. These arethe stuff of which classic, vital “urbanism” (Rae2003) is made. Ultimately, the lived experiencefor young people of color in at least some ofBuffalo’s neighborhoods is more complicatedthan either the local narrative of the city or thebroader discourse of urban decline would haveus believe.

The objective conditions of life in Buffaloand its narrative of decline are both typical ofRust Belt cities since World War II. Theseinclude such measures as population loss in ab-solute terms and relative to the burgeoning sub-urbs; loss of manufacturing firms and their jobs;demographic changes toward more economi-cally and socially disadvantaged groups; fiscalsqueeze brought on by loss of tax revenues andexpanding social service demands; histories ofweakened or corrupt political leadership; andspiraling deterioration of built infrastructuresuch as roads, housing, schools, and publicspaces (Fox 1985; W. J. Wilson 1990; Sugrue1996; Wright 2001; Beauregard 2003). In com-parison to other cities along social stratificationmeasures, Buffalo also fares poorly. In 2000 theBuffalo/Niagara Falls Metropolitan StatisticalArea (MSA) ranked as the seventh most raciallysegregated metropolitan area (U.S. Census Bu-reau 2004) for black–white segregation acrossmultiple indexes. Buffalo was the twelfth poor-est city in the United States in 2003, worseoff than St. Louis, New Orleans, and Chicago(U.S. Census Bureau 2003). Young people areespecially hard hit by the forces underlyingthese numbers: Nearly 40 percent of chil-dren under age eighteen in the City of Buf-falo lived in poverty in 2005 (Regional Institute2005), making it the second worst city for child

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Race, Poverty, and Youth in the Context of Postindustrial Angst 5

Table 1 Poverty rates by race and age, 2005

Overall White Black Hispanic Age < 18 Age < 18 Age < 18Poverty rates (2005) (%) (%) (%) (%) (%) male (%) female (%)

United States 12.6 9.0 24.9 21.8 17.6 18.3 18.8New York state 13.8 8.6 21.6 25.3 19.4 19.5 19.4Buffalo/Niagara 12.7 8.7 32.3 29.8 17.6 17.8 17.3Erie County (outside Buffalo) 13.8 8.6 20.9 12.6 18.6 19.0 18.2City of Buffalo 26.9 17.2 33.1 43.4 37.5 39.1 35.9

Source: Regional Institute (2005).

poverty in the United States, behind only De-troit at 44 percent (Annie E. Casey Foundation2008). As can be seen from Tables 1 and 2, allyoung people, but especially young people ofcolor, live in poverty at alarming proportionsin the City of Buffalo.

To explore these issues, we collaborated toexamine some relevant data and to documentthe pervasiveness of the narrative of decline lo-cally. We identified two approaches to answer-ing these questions. First, we began reviewingpopulation data for our study site on the westside and for the city more generally and no-ticed some interesting trends that are hiddenby the generic story that is told about deindus-trialization, population loss, and aging of thecommunity. Second, we tracked and criticallyevaluated the budget crisis that was unfoldingin Erie County (of which Buffalo is the seat) atthe time because it occurred to us that the eco-nomic disciplinary strategies of the county weremore heavily borne by those with the least po-litical voice and economic clout: immigrant andAmerican children of color living in the poorerneighborhoods of the city (and specifically notthe suburban areas of the county).

Hand-wringing city and county officials inthe spirit (if not the grip) of urban en-trepreneurialism have for years been trying toreplace long-lost industry with gigantic enter-

Table 2 Poverty rates in Erie County, New York,and the city of Buffalo, New York, among youngpeople (<18), by race, 2000

Poverty rates White Black Hispanic(2000) (%) (%) (%)

Erie County 10.6 31.6 18(outside Buffalo)

City of Buffalo 24.1 45.0 56.7

Source: Authors’ compilations; U.S. Census (2000).Note: Most recent data disaggregated by age and race.

tainment and retail establishments. One suchexample is the seven-year effort to woo BassPro Shops, the sporting-goods chain, to buildan Outdoor World store on the Buffalo water-front, costing the city more than $14 million.We are not arguing that corner empanada shopson the west side are going to lubricate the large-scale renaissance of Buffalo. However, we dosuggest that the powerful narrative of declinethat has developed over the past decades in thecity not only ignores potential spots of light andworthy investment sites, but it also serves to jus-tify grand capital plans of revitalization, in whatQuilley (1999, 188) calls the “alchemy of urbanrenaissance,” such as signature bridges, water-front development, casinos, and destination re-tailing. These strategies are intrinsically tiedto the long-noted shift of cities away from in-dustrial production toward entertainment andservices, resulting in a further bifurcation of the“dual city” (Mollenkopf and Castells 1991), andthey are frequently invoked as part of the neo-liberal austerity measures that are increasinglypervasive, as we explore later in the article.

Think of Buffalo, New York, and what comesto mind? Snow, probably. Maybe Niagara Falls.If you’re a U.S. history buff you might recallthat President McKinley was shot here, or youmight know that Frederick Law Olmstead laidout the city around a huge park and several mu-seums, connected by mansion-lined parkways.Quite possibly, though, you also have an im-pression of a city whose glory days are behind it,whose steel plants are rusting on the waterfrontwith no plans for a festival marketplace, whoseyoung people are migrating to more prosperousregions, and whose racial and ethnic tensionsare still (or perhaps more?) deeply entrenched.What is less well known are those features of aliving, working, playing place: the lively streetscene on the west side by Guercio’s fruit mar-ket, the strong Irish identity expressed through

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window pane shamrocks in parts of south Buf-falo, the community gardens springing up invacant lots of the largely African American eastside, and the strong emotional ties many ofthose out-migrating young people keep withthem, to the extent that many move back toBuffalo and western New York when they havechildren of their own. Thus, part of what weseek to consider is the long-standing tensionbetween cities as places to live and cities as unitsof capital production.

Untangling Buffalo’s Economicand Population ChangesFocusing on the themes of economic and pop-ulation changes as the foundational markersof urban decline, we look here at the sum-mary statistics that form the basis of concernednewspaper articles and policy reports and thenuntangle more subtle shifts that suggest thata critical race and youth perspective can pro-vide important insights and nuanced contextualunderstanding.

In the public discourse locally in and aroundBuffalo there are frequent references to theloss of manufacturing plants and raw materi-als industries like the giant Bethlehem Steelworks, which from 1972 to 1982 shut downplants, costing over 30,000 jobs. For exam-ple, the county executive, in his state of thecounty address in 2005 said, “Steel put uson the map. But those vacant and crumblingcoke ovens have been the symbol of our de-cline for a generation,” as a way to situatethe county’s economic plight during the worstbudget crisis in Erie County history (Giambra2005). It was a reference familiar to every-one present. Indeed, the numbers bear out

such comments. Overall manufacturing em-ployment declined in the Buffalo MSA by 61percent between 1954 and 1997, declining by46 percent between 1972 and 1997; only Pitts-burgh lost more jobs by percentage (Cran-dall 2002). Despite the fact that the late 1970sand early 1980s were the worst for industrialretrenchment, the trend has continued in re-cent years, too: Manufacturing employment fellevery year between 1995 and 2005, shrinkingby 21,600 jobs over the entire decade for a 25.2percent loss (Wial and Friedhoff 2006).

Buffalo’s loss of population is often linked toits job loss, both in the past and present, and byboth national and local observers. For example,twenty-five years ago, soon after massive steelindustry layoffs, the Washington Post character-ized the situation with the headline “Buffalo:Great Dreams, but Greater Needs: City, Los-ing Population and Jobs Fights Back with De-velopment” (Kurtz 1983). In the local publicdiscourse, references are often made to censusdata, which on the surface back up the per-ceived connection between economic restruc-turing (specifically the loss of manufacturingjobs) and population loss. The year 1950 is cel-ebrated as the economic heyday of the city andnot coincidentally holds the high-water markfor population as well, when the city countedalmost 600,000 residents (Figure 1). In 2001 thenews that Buffalo’s population had slipped be-low 300,000 made the front page of the BuffaloNews (Rey 2001). A week later, the Buffalo Newswarned in a headline that “Population Loss inBuffalo, N.Y. Area Makes Region Less Palat-able to Business” (Bridger 2001). This themewas expanded on recently in a report by thestate comptroller, where he described how the

Figure 1 Population of Buffalo, New York: 1820–2000. Source: U.S. Census Bureau (2005).

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Race, Poverty, and Youth in the Context of Postindustrial Angst 7

Figure 2 Population of Buffalo, New York: 1820–2000 for whites, blacks, and Hispanics. Source: U.S.Census Bureau (2005).

loss of jobs and population results in the Buf-falo area facing “the combined problems ofeconomic stagnation and increased service de-mands for the relatively older and poorer pop-ulation that remains” (Hevesi 2005, 5).

Some tricky things are going on here.Many influential voices, including the mainnewspaper, the state comptroller, the (former)mayor, and other local actors bemoan the loss ofjobs and population of the city, blaming largerstructural forces (deindustrialization, globaliza-tion, etc.) rather than either identifying localcontributing factors (such as historically cor-rupt government, racist housing policies, or thelack of large corporate headquarters in the city)or identifying new trends that offer potentialsources of urban (re)growth, such as new cul-tural groups moving in, local entrepreneurship,and so on. Other cities have recently been ableto innovate and move beyond their industrialpast (Beauregard 2003), but common narrativesfor Buffalo have swirled around the dual fic-tions of blaming poor, racialized residents forthe current situation and of pinning its hopeson white-knight projects that will make it theCity of Light once again.

By adding data for race and ethnicity, we be-gin to see a more differentiated pattern (Fig-ure 2). The white population has dropped quiteprecipitously since 1950, but the black popula-tion has almost doubled. Further, since 1980the Hispanic population has risen 2.5 times.Thus, in the broader context of net popula-tion loss, there are still people moving into

the city. Why are there not parades, celebra-tions, and incentive packages? Why the alarmaround the loss of whites? A superficial answermight be that these groups are disproportion-ately poor: In the city of Buffalo 43 percentof Hispanics, 33 percent of blacks, and 17 per-cent of whites live in poverty (Regional Institute2006a). However, considering the intertwiningof racially discriminatory practices in the joband housing markets, a more complex answermight lie in the processes of racism. Not onlyhave blacks and Hispanics not been welcomedas the saviors of the city, but their growingpresence serves, in fact, as a racially discur-sive symbol of the city’s full and final demise.Buffalo’s leadership and public narrative couldhave been engaged in re-visioning the city asa vibrant, welcoming, multicultural place withan entrepreneurial spirit (as some cities, such asChicago, have attempted), but instead the city’slong history of racism and exclusion (Kraus2000) has, at least until recently, been perpetu-ated in narrative and policy through the contin-ued agonizing over the out-migration of whites.And not just any whites, but working-age, ed-ucated, and employed whites (see Regional In-stitute 2006b, which asks “How badly are webleeding young adults?”).

There is a concomitant theme that arisesin this discussion of population loss, which isthe aging of the population. This aspect of thenarrative also has a long history based on twocomplementary elements. One is that there isa perpetual “youth flight” from Buffalo and

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Figure 3 Percent of under 15-year-old population who are white, black, Hispanic.

the second is a resulting aging of the resid-ual population. A 1997 article in Business Firstof Buffalo is typical. Drawing on conclusionsfrom a survey of 302 randomly selected peo-ple who had left western New York that year,the authors concluded that 57 percent of thosewho left were under age thirty-five (Thomas1997). In 2000 the Buffalo News warned thatin western New York “the ranks of the elderlywere growing” (Heaney 2000, A6). This arti-cle noted that the percentage of the popula-tion of Erie County aged sixty-five and olderwas 15.9 percent, whereas the national averagewas 12.4 percent. However, in the city of Buf-falo, the average is 13.6 percent according to2006 census estimates, which is now equal tothe national average and lower than for ErieCounty overall, suggesting some investigationis merited (U.S. Census Bureau 2006). Over-all, we are not suggesting that these narrativesare wrong in their conclusions. Rather, they arenot the whole story, so we decided to exploresome other perspectives to see what other par-tial stories could provide a useful complementto the dominant narrative.

Here again the data are striking. There areindeed fewer children than there were in 1970(Figure 3), but mainly there are fewer white

children. This means that there are fewer whitefamilies, a venerated demographic who histori-cally and into the present signify to city leadersand mortgage lenders “stable” neighborhoodsand economic prosperity (Squires and Kubrin2005). The concern over the expansion of blackand Hispanic neighborhoods can be seen aspartly driven by fears of black and Hispanicyouth, associated with such factors as violence,disorder, blight, disease, and deterioration (al-though how such thorough, long-term urbandestruction could be the sole fault of youngpeople is rarely considered). Furthermore, asin Chicago, “[f]ear is mobilized in public dis-course mainly through referencing the blackpoor and suggesting possibilities for their arealexpansion” (D. Wilson 2004, 777). Thus, thenarrative about the aging of the populationperforms two roles: It foregrounds the expe-rience of the white population (becoming moreelderly) while holding the remaining youngpeople—in particular, young people of color—not only responsible for their own situation butalso for contributing to the downward spiralof the city. For the moment, larger structuralforces (racism, economic restructuring, etc.) areneatly forgotten as explanations for the city’swoes. Could this not be part of the trick of

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Race, Poverty, and Youth in the Context of Postindustrial Angst 9

neoliberalism, in which cities themselves tap into existing axes of social oppression to explaintheir continued economic doldrums?

Fixing the City: Absorbing the Costs

of Retrenchment and Revitalization

Low-income young people of color and theirfamilies serve as more than merely a handy,voiceless, powerless group to conveniently takediscursive blame for urban angst. Their posi-tion also subjects them to a financial squeeze,especially vis-a-vis service provision, in times ofcrisis.

We see this in the resolution to the ErieCounty budget crisis of 2004–2005. At thattime, to close a $100 million budget deficit andhemmed in by the county charter that mandatesa balanced budget (a neoliberal strategy in it-self), the county legislature first laid off 1,500employees and imposed severe spending cutson county-administered or funded programs(Spina 2005). These layoffs and spending cuts(which were enacted five months before theother measures in February 2005) severely af-fected programs for children and families. Forexample, the Erie County Department of So-cial Services took the brunt of these cuts. Thisdepartment, where social work caseloads werealready above the national average, accordingto the Buffalo News, expected caseloads to “sky-rocket” (Tan and Gryta 2005).

In a personal telephone interview (withLatcham, 14 April 2005), the Erie CountyDepartment of Social Services Commissionerdescribed the budget cuts as “devastating” tosocial programs targeting children and fami-lies. The Erie County Community Coalition(2005) echoed this analysis in a study commis-sioned six months after the cuts went into effect.The crisis atmosphere that surrounded thisprocess facilitated a draconian budget becauseit enabled politicians to justify their votes forthe cuts as unavoidable due to the unprece-dented deficit. Such panic politics are charac-teristic of neoliberal governance, which, “likeany other, is elaborately staged to appear in-evitable and irreversible” (D. Wilson 2004, 776,emphasis added). Politicians often cited theneed to be “fair” in the application of these cutsand so they used a self-described “across-the-board formula” meaning that all county pro-

grams were equally likely to be targeted (Spina2005). Either way, because of the size of the citycompared to the rest of Erie County, city res-idents’ heavier dependence on public services,and their relative political weakness, poor urbanfamilies were at the intersection of ideologiesand thus disproportionately subject to the fiscalsqueeze. In this era of state devolution and theunraveling of remaining government-fundedsafety nets, such cuts are especially painful.

A common feature of neoliberal policy isthe outsourcing of state functions to privateorganizations (Brenner and Theodore 2002).Outsourcing allows governments to remain“flexible” in their funding approaches, cuttingor expanding services more quickly than if afull state-funded safety net was in place. Thisis a common practice for the Erie County De-partment of Social Services, which subcontractswith many private nonprofit agencies to pro-vide a wide variety of social services to countyresidents.

According to the Erie County Departmentof Social Services Commissioner (phone inter-view with Latcham, 14 April 2005), the fundingfor these programs was cut by an average of 30percent, but that figure does not count the pro-grams for which funding was eliminated. Basedon data provided by the Department of SocialServices, we calculated that fifty-nine agencies(or programs within agencies) sustained cutsof over 65 percent of their county funds. Ofthese, fifty-four of them were directly involvedin youth and family services, including four-teen for which county funding was eliminatedaltogether. For example, this included elimina-tion of programs providing shelter space forwomen and children escaping domestic vio-lence situations (Haven House), parenting skillsfor low-income families (Catholic Charities),adoption services for youth of color (BuffaloUrban League), and transition services for fos-ter children exiting the system at age eigh-teen (Intensive Youth Independence). Amongthese fifty-four programs or agencies, we calcu-late the total dollar amount of county fundingcut between the 2004 and 2005 budgets wasapproximately $937,900. Separate from thesedata, the Buffalo School District’s school nurseprogram was eliminated and then partially re-instated so that schools, which previously had afull-time nurse, now had one for as little as onehour per day. This was problematic because

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of the number of students with disabilities orchronic illnesses like diabetes or asthma whoneed medication and monitoring (“Get city kidsmore school nurses” 2005).

The Erie County budget crisis and, morespecifically, these cuts, served several key ideo-logical and practical functions. First, they dis-ciplined the city with regard to the rest of thecounty by allowing suburban municipalities toflex their political muscle and shape the bud-get outcomes to minimize their own inconve-nience (closed parks and auto bureaus) whilemaintaining cuts to much more life-sustainingurban programs. Second, because Buffalo hasover 83 percent of the county’s African Amer-icans and 70 percent of its Hispanics (U.S.Census Bureau 2006) the targeting of agencieswithin the city of Buffalo shifted the burdenmostly to racially marginalized communities.Third, we noted earlier that the specific agen-cies and services that sustained the heaviestcuts in funding (including elimination) wereprimarily those that served young people andtheir families. Thus, through the fiscal crisisthe city was “fixed”—pinned down, made im-mobile, identified, neutered, rendered power-less, and solved, yet not repaired.

Simultaneous to the budget crisis in ErieCounty, the city of Buffalo was also trying tofix itself in the “repaired” sense of the word.Buffalo has been well-schooled in neoliberalimperatives to make place for capital invest-ment (Jessop 2002; McCann 2004). Estimatesfor the local contribution to the Bass Pro Out-door World waterfront development projectwere approximately $14 million. Yet RobertFlickinger, a New York–based national retailconsultant, told the Buffalo News “[i]t wouldbe a strategic mistake to pay too much to getBassPro at a time when they are reaching mar-ket saturation. In ten years BassPro will bethe Wal-Mart of the outdoor/sporting goodscategory. They’ll be commonplace” (Lindstedt2006, B7). Ultimately, the question is oneof who absorbs the costs of economic re-structuring, urban revanchism, and plannedrevitalization.

In our view, the city’s low-income childrenand youth of color are bearing substantial costs,not only through lost services due to budgetcuts but through sequential rounds of disinvest-ment in poor neighborhoods, infrastructure,schools, recreation facilities, community pro-

grams, fire and police protection, health care,and housing. They bear these costs in poorerhealth, education, life chances, and opportu-nity (Williams 2007). As a slice of the populace,young people in general hold an ironic position:They are concurrently held up as the future ofthe community (worthy of investment) and vili-fied at the present for their perceived antisocialbehavior (Valentine 1996) and yet they have novoice, no recourse, and virtually no economicor political power.

Conclusion

The decline of Buffalo is a story that the citytells about itself, but it is a narrative that inter-sects in multiple ways with broader discoursesof urban distress and dysfunction includingneoliberal prescriptions for “fixing” the prob-lems, and this narrative then spirals outward tocreate ripples of influence, yet it is rarely crit-ically examined. Our attempt at taking criticalrace and youth perspectives on Buffalo’s nar-rative suggests that the stream of narrative canbe interrupted and redirected but only if keyactors are willing to step out of the mire ofdisciplinary ideologies of neoliberal capitalism.D. Wilson (2004) makes the crucial point thatcities’ engagements with dominant discoursesare always contingent: They are affected by lo-cal context, different political wills, and uniqueconvergences of people, place, and processes.At the same time that declining cities are des-perately searching for solutions to populationloss or capital disinvestment, they are also per-petuating their own sense of powerlessness andthe inevitability of decline in the face of outsideforces that weaken them in the first place by in-voking those very ideologies that punish citiesfor their mere existence.

We have argued that the power of the nar-rative of decline is also rooted in systems ofoppression more broadly. What will it take toshake the city loose from its self-destructivenostalgia? As one popular blog commentatorsaid, “It is not 1959 anymore. Buffalo doesn’thave 500,000 people, and it doesn’t have themanufacturing base either. It’s also high timewe acknowledged that those manufacturingjobs are never, ever coming back—not resem-bling the way it used to be, anyway” (Buffalo-pundit 2006). We propose that the first step is

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Race, Poverty, and Youth in the Context of Postindustrial Angst 11

to critically examine the narrative and its power,first by identifying and dismantling its scaffold-ing of racism and poverty, especially as they im-pact young people, and then by reshaping eco-nomic fortunes by shifting from ‘making placefor capital’ to valuing ‘the capital that placemakes’ (DeFilippis 2003). As Leitner, Peck,and Sheppard (2007, 312) state, “Cities containsome of the more audacious examples of ne-oliberal governance, but at the same time theyare also among the principal sites and stakes forthe generation of oppositional movements andalternative social visions.” Our analysis heresuggests that theoretically engaged, critical ur-ban case studies can form an important part ofboth policy and scholarly studies, especially bypaying careful attention to marginalized socialgroups such as children of color. Questioningthe taken-for-granted political and economicdiscourse of cities has a long tradition in geog-raphy and other disciplines through class, race,and gender analyses but has been less com-mon in critical youth studies. This is where wesee our contribution and hope to see expandedwork in this realm in the future. The reorderingof cities as if (young) people mattered cannotbe put off.

Narrative Redux—Or, Another CityIs Possible1

There is some indication that just such a re-ordering is beginning to emerge under theearly administration of Mayor Byron Brown,the first African American mayor of Buffalo.In his first years in office, Mayor Brown seemsto have broken from the traditional narrativeto some degree, and, not surprisingly, some ofhis initial actions and changes appear to reflecta movement away from the orthodox racial-ized discourse of urban decline. The plannedbuilding of Outdoor World is indeed mov-ing forward, but there has also been a growthin minority-owned businesses that the Brownadministration is encouraging with incentiveprograms. The $1 billion reconstruction andrenovation of Buffalo’s public schools contin-ues, notably with an expansion of contractingwith minority-owned and women-owned busi-nesses and the development of a “Career Path”project to “provide opportunities for minor-ity workers seeking training and employmenton this project” (Brown n.d.). Several signifi-

cant historical sites reflecting African Americanhistories in Buffalo are also receiving fundingand attention from Brown’s office, includingthe Nash House and Michigan Street Bap-tist Church, which were Underground Rail-road sites and the birthplace of the NiagaraMovement (the predecessor of the NationalAssociation for the Advancement of ColoredPeople). Brown, of course, is not without hisown discursive strategies, for example, in his si-multaneous invocation of both the classic nar-rative and a (somewhat dubious) claim to newstrengths: “Buffalo’s reputation as a blue col-lar industrial town is being replaced by that ofa city offering diverse economic opportunitiesfor business creation, development, and careerfulfillment. Our highly educated, skilled, andavailable workforce ranks among the nation’s bestin education levels and job attendance and reliabil-ity” (Brown n.d., emphasis added).

Aside from grand rhetorical claims, though,Brown’s actions have reflected some shake-upsin the status quo that perhaps reflect a shift inthe race and class elements of the traditionalnarrative. In response to a laundry list of “con-cerns” the U.S. Department of Housing andUrban Development expressed about financialand personnel practices at the Buffalo Munici-pal Housing Authority (BMHA; the agency thatcoordinates public housing and housing subsi-dies locally), Mayor Brown appointed a localcivil rights attorney as special counsel to createan “action plan” to resolve the BMHA’s ques-tionable policies (BMHA Action Plan n.d.).Brown also appointed a new deputy mayor tochart an antipoverty strategy (Meyer 2008) andexpanded the city’s summer jobs program foryoung people resulting in a 58 percent increasein participation (Meyer 2007).

What of the budget since 2005? Since thattime, the county has managed to bring in bud-gets for the next three years with small surplusesof around 0.01 percent by keeping the revenuecuts and tax increases in place (Giambra 2007).In fact, in 2007 some of the cut funding was re-stored to the sheriff’s department, where tendeputies were added, and the probation de-partment, which also added ten new officers.The county also restored funding to programsthat, as one county legislator put it, “were hitthe hardest including our libraries and our cul-tural institutions, specifically in the City of Buf-falo, that encourage tourism and promote our

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region” (Kennedy 2007). However, the cur-rent and future fiscal situation is tenuous. InOctober 2007, the county executive providedthe state-appointed Erie County Fiscal StabilityAuthority (EFSA; the control board mentionedearlier) with a financial plan for the years 2008to 2011. This document forecasts continuingdeficits over the four years totaling $29 million(Giambra 2007). The county executive pro-posed several “gap-closing” strategies to closethese deficits. However, the control board, in arecent analysis, determined that “there does notappear to be evidence of structures in place toachieve potential savings/revenues at this time,or that estimates are simply unsubstantiated,given the data provided” (EFSA 2008). Thesegrim prognostications suggest that business asusual has essentially continued for the city andErie County.

Many of Brown’s public comments and ini-tial actions, of course, continue the trajectory ofthe status quo: Housing demolitions are toutedas openings for new investment, improvededucational and training facilities for youth arepivotal for producing an attractive workforce,“strengthening neighborhoods” is framed interms of hiring more police, and—in an inter-esting twist on downtown trends—the failedpedestrianized retail area in the city center isslated to be ripped up and opened to vehiculartraffic once again. Despite these overtures tocapital, however, Brown has astutely pinnedsome responsibility on the Bush administra-tion’s policy of ignoring cities and slashingprograms like community development blockgrants, in concert with state devolution ofwelfare and other social supports. Brown said,“I don’t see a clear urban policy at the federalgovernment level under this administration.There’s no question that funding for poorcommunities and organizations that help poorpeople has been reduced” (Meyer 2007). Per-haps this reflects a new discursive niche withinthe neoliberal reordering of urban decline: Cityleaders (and residents), having been held ac-countable for their own conditions for so long,are so well schooled in the backlash against “biggovernment” that they have joined in speakingout against government and are holdingfederal administrations responsible for urbancrises. The discursive invisibility of capitalcontinues undeterred and without culpability,and young people of color continue to absorb

many of the costs of the reality of Buffalo’sdecline. �

Note

1The term “Another city is possible” is adoptedfrom Leitner, Peck, and Sheppard (2007, 325).

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MEGHAN COPE is an Associate Professor inthe Department of Geography at the Univer-sity of Vermont, Burlington, VT 05405. E-mail:mcope@uvm.edu. Her research interests are in chil-dren’s urban geographies, qualitative research, andcritical geographic approaches to social problems.

FRANK LATCHAM is a Research Associate atCommunity Prevention Planning Program, Insti-tute for the Study of Social Change, University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94710. E-mailflatcham@berkeley.edu. His research interests arequantitative and qualitative research of urban issuesand social policy, children’s geographies, and criticalapproaches using geographic information systems.

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