Census Losers Market Cities to Newcomers
Aug. 19 -- — For years, Buffalo, N.Y., has suffered all manner of jokes and jabs. It's been called another "Mistake on the Lake." Home of the Buffalo Nils. A weather victim. And a deserted post-industrial town where generations of residents have run for the exits.
But like many cities routinely on the losing side of the Census, Buffalo is fighting back with a promotional campaign to revamp the city's reputation and lure people and jobs to the area.
The message: The steel mills may have closed, but there is other work here. The living is easy and affordable. And — perhaps the sorest point for Buffalo's promoters — don't believe the hype about the weather.
"People think it snows here 10 months a year, and it doesn't," says Leslie Hornung, marketing director of Buffalo-Niagara Enterprise, a public-private initiative charged with promoting the region. "We get, like, one big storm here every two years, and the Weather Channel shows up for that. But they're not here when it's summer and 75 degrees and sunny, and we're sailing on the lake."
Buffalo-Niagara has run ads on CNN, gotten its message out on public radio stations and publishes a Web site for job seekers and employers that gets 1.5 million hits a month, Hornung says. Many of the job seekers are 30-something Buffalo natives who would like to return but spent years elsewhere because they didn't think their hometown had anything to offer.
"What we find is when people are in their 30s, starting a family and wanting to buy a house, they find San Diego wasn't so great after all," she said.
When the latest Census figures were released last month, they told a story all-too-familiar to Buffalo and many other older industrial cities in the Northeast and Midwest. People just keep leaving, mainly for the suburbs and to the warmer, more promising lands of the American South and West, and newcomers aren't replacing them.
Buffalo has lost 5,000 people since 2000, putting the city's population at 287,698 — not as bad as in the late '90s, when the city lost almost that many each year. Faring worse was Detroit, with 2.8 percent of its population — or 26,000 — disappearing in two years. St. Louis lost nearly 10,000, or 2.8 percent. And Savannah, Ga., the fastest-shrinking city, according to the data, lost almost 4,000, or 2.9 percent.
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