Principles Regarding How to Appropriately Develop Buffalo's Outer Harbor for Resiliency
Our Outer Harbor
PRINCIPLES FOR OUTER HARBOR DEVELOPMENT
1. The Lake Erie Waterfront is a public trust and belongs to everybody. Do not sell or privatize and maximize public access to water, nature, and recreation.
2. Respect, preserve and enhance the integrity and healing properties of the ecological processes and biodiversity in and supported by the Outer Harbor including international bird migration, fish spawning, existing and incipient eco-systems and pollinator/ regenerating landscapes.
3. Protect public health from historic contamination through best practices, careful planning and design of public activities and diversity of green spaces.
4. Create a uniquely Buffalo waterfront contrasting and complementing a vibrant urban sustainable city. Therefore, don’t sprawl. Densify existing urban structures internal to city in contrast to green Outer Harbor. On Outer Harbor, protect existing cultural resources, build only in existing building footprints, and locate services where there is existing infrastructure.
5. Protect Waterfront in perpetuity through designation as ecological “park.”
6. Practice full cost accounting and fiscal integrity; include environmental justice, social costs and lost opportunity.
7. Develop a publicly vetted plan for the waterfronts of the City of Buffalo, including the Outer Harbor. Instead of random acts of development, let’s create a shared vision toward which acts of preservation and development move.
Part of the Queen City Landing Proposal 2020. Just not the safest place!
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Queen City Landing site two days after Halloween 2019 Seiche. Water overtopped Fuhrmann Blvd during fierce hurricane force storm that resulted in the Governor declaring a disaster for WNY
Below: 24 hours after the Halloween 2019 storm, the waters continued to do damage
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Buffalo's Outer Harbor is located at the confluence of Lake Erie, the Buffalo River, and the Niagara River. The great lakes contain 21% of the earth's fresh surface water. That is an asset that we can protect. In doing so will make our future livable and resilient. What we build, how we build it, and whose money we use to accomplish this will help to determine the economic, social, and environmental success for future generations. Strategies for appropriately developing Buffalo's outer harbor are some of the most important decisions for our community, our region, and both hemispheric and global health.
DANGER AHEAD
As our climate is changing, conditions along our shorelines are rapidly destabilizing. Unprecedented high water levels, coupled with increasingly frequent and more powerful storms are driving seiches, high winds, seasonal ice, and flooding during all seasons. During late 2019, several powerful storms created disastrous conditions along Buffalo and WNY's shorelines. Miles of historic, sheltering breakwalls, including sections being restored by the Corps of Engineers, were severely damaged and in some cases destroyed. Portions of Ralph Wilson Centennial Park (formerly known as LaSalle Park) began collapsing into the Niagara River. Downtown's Canalside was flooded. Times Beach Nature Preserve was severely damaged and remains closed. Many places along our shorelines, including the Queen City Landing (QCL) site, which we consider entirely inappropriate, was overtopped by fierce waters. The Governor declared a State of Emergency for this region. Flooding has continued in 2020. Today flooding occurs on an almost weekly basis in places that we had not seen flood on the outer harbor for years.
Appropriate Development
Appropriate development means that we treat the Outer Harbor as a barrier island, designed to protect lives in Buffalo. A resiliency strategy for development requires looking at its ecological value and how appropriate development can be used to absorb storm waters, help create clean water, and help mitigate climate change. An outer harbor shoreline that is mostly green, provides billions of dollars of ecological services, and helps to protect the City of Buffalo from increasingly frequent, dangerous storms and seiches.
What is Appropriate Development in a Resiliency and Sustainability Context?
Appropriate Development:
-Protects and conserves ecology and environment, clean water, clean air, and biodiversity.
-Improves ecological and environmental resources.
-Provides substantial, transparent, and accountable public benefit now and for future generations, socially, economically, and environmentally. (Including a transparent public vetting process including public meetings and hearings)
-Recognizes, protects, preserves cultural and historic resources.
-Creates measurable and transparent public economic benefit.
Public V. Private
Most of the land and all of the water is and has long been publicly owned. We take the position that all public land remain public. Development on land that is privately owned will depend on significant public investments past, present, and future. This money has and will continue to go toward infrastructure, contamination clean-up, and marketing. To date, over $100 million public dollars have been spent at the Outer Harbor. More, much more will be spent. Recently the Queen City Landing project, a private development condo community, which would cost millions of dollars in public investment, withdrew its proposal. Many other proposals are being planned for the outer harbor including the removal of the skyway, and other parcels of land that if developed inappropriately, and without full environmental scrutiny, could both due significant economic and environmental damage. This is why we need to have a set of guiding principles that will insure that the public investment bests serves the public, and not just a few private developers. If we take public land on the Outer Harbor and sell it to private developers, our future will be lost.
Keep it Green and Resilient
A green outer harbor will improve the quality of life for humans. We can develop with a "resiliency eye" to create biodiverse, ecosystem services including helping to ensure clean water and air, and by absorbing floodwaters. A green outer harbor will contribute to social well-being. Developing a resiliency model that includes environmental, economic, and social benefits is the perfect definition of sustainability. The Outer Harbor is the outdoors. It is adjacent to dense urban population. It is a place of tremendous pleasure. It is a place to enjoy the gift of nature and wildlife. It is a big place to recreate. It has parklike trails, water connections, access for boats, kayaks, sail boats, and other watercraft, fishing, open space, bicycle paths, dark skies, and oh yes, world class birding. All of this is located just downtown, a stones throw from Canalside. This is the kind of place that makes people and businesses want to live here, vacation here, and invest here.
In the good times, a green outer harbor is a beautiful place that enriches our lives. In the bad times, as a protective barrier from the wilderness, it will save lives.
The Our Outer Harbor coalition unanimously adopted a set of appropriate development principles in 2016. The Western New York Environmental Alliance, an organization representing over 100 members, pioneered the concept of development principles on the Outer Harbor. These "principles" have been adapted into the short readable piece at the top of this page that covers what the Our Outer Harbor partners believe should guide us to appropriate decision making.
DANGER AHEAD
As our climate is changing, conditions along our shorelines are rapidly destabilizing. Unprecedented high water levels, coupled with increasingly frequent and more powerful storms are driving seiches, high winds, seasonal ice, and flooding during all seasons. During late 2019, several powerful storms created disastrous conditions along Buffalo and WNY's shorelines. Miles of historic, sheltering breakwalls, including sections being restored by the Corps of Engineers, were severely damaged and in some cases destroyed. Portions of Ralph Wilson Centennial Park (formerly known as LaSalle Park) began collapsing into the Niagara River. Downtown's Canalside was flooded. Times Beach Nature Preserve was severely damaged and remains closed. Many places along our shorelines, including the Queen City Landing (QCL) site, which we consider entirely inappropriate, was overtopped by fierce waters. The Governor declared a State of Emergency for this region. Flooding has continued in 2020. Today flooding occurs on an almost weekly basis in places that we had not seen flood on the outer harbor for years.
Appropriate Development
Appropriate development means that we treat the Outer Harbor as a barrier island, designed to protect lives in Buffalo. A resiliency strategy for development requires looking at its ecological value and how appropriate development can be used to absorb storm waters, help create clean water, and help mitigate climate change. An outer harbor shoreline that is mostly green, provides billions of dollars of ecological services, and helps to protect the City of Buffalo from increasingly frequent, dangerous storms and seiches.
What is Appropriate Development in a Resiliency and Sustainability Context?
Appropriate Development:
-Protects and conserves ecology and environment, clean water, clean air, and biodiversity.
-Improves ecological and environmental resources.
-Provides substantial, transparent, and accountable public benefit now and for future generations, socially, economically, and environmentally. (Including a transparent public vetting process including public meetings and hearings)
-Recognizes, protects, preserves cultural and historic resources.
-Creates measurable and transparent public economic benefit.
Public V. Private
Most of the land and all of the water is and has long been publicly owned. We take the position that all public land remain public. Development on land that is privately owned will depend on significant public investments past, present, and future. This money has and will continue to go toward infrastructure, contamination clean-up, and marketing. To date, over $100 million public dollars have been spent at the Outer Harbor. More, much more will be spent. Recently the Queen City Landing project, a private development condo community, which would cost millions of dollars in public investment, withdrew its proposal. Many other proposals are being planned for the outer harbor including the removal of the skyway, and other parcels of land that if developed inappropriately, and without full environmental scrutiny, could both due significant economic and environmental damage. This is why we need to have a set of guiding principles that will insure that the public investment bests serves the public, and not just a few private developers. If we take public land on the Outer Harbor and sell it to private developers, our future will be lost.
Keep it Green and Resilient
A green outer harbor will improve the quality of life for humans. We can develop with a "resiliency eye" to create biodiverse, ecosystem services including helping to ensure clean water and air, and by absorbing floodwaters. A green outer harbor will contribute to social well-being. Developing a resiliency model that includes environmental, economic, and social benefits is the perfect definition of sustainability. The Outer Harbor is the outdoors. It is adjacent to dense urban population. It is a place of tremendous pleasure. It is a place to enjoy the gift of nature and wildlife. It is a big place to recreate. It has parklike trails, water connections, access for boats, kayaks, sail boats, and other watercraft, fishing, open space, bicycle paths, dark skies, and oh yes, world class birding. All of this is located just downtown, a stones throw from Canalside. This is the kind of place that makes people and businesses want to live here, vacation here, and invest here.
In the good times, a green outer harbor is a beautiful place that enriches our lives. In the bad times, as a protective barrier from the wilderness, it will save lives.
The Our Outer Harbor coalition unanimously adopted a set of appropriate development principles in 2016. The Western New York Environmental Alliance, an organization representing over 100 members, pioneered the concept of development principles on the Outer Harbor. These "principles" have been adapted into the short readable piece at the top of this page that covers what the Our Outer Harbor partners believe should guide us to appropriate decision making.