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Buffalo's Field of Dreams

 By JAKE HALPERN
December 1, 2007; Buffalo, N.Y.                                                                               

My hometown is probably best known as a city that people like to leave. Since 1970, Buffalo has lost almost 40% of its population and, in some parts, the exodus has created a landscape that resembles scenes from the post-apocalyptic thriller "Escape From New York."

As kids, my brother and I would explore the city's ruins, venturing into crumbling train terminals and abandoned factories where moss carpeted floors, rainwater gushed down empty hallways, and peeling wallpaper rustled in the wind.

Buffalo does have a number of stunning neighborhoods, lined with stately old mansions and interspersed with thickly-wooded parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. And the population of the Buffalo metro area hasn't declined. Even so, the city is the second-poorest major urban area in the nation, just behind Detroit. Nearly half of the city's children live in poverty.

You can imagine my surprise to hear that Buffalo's salvation is at hand, and that its savior is a 29-year-old developer of Iraqi descent named Bashar Issa. Mr. Issa, it was said, had decided to build a gleaming, new skyscraper in Buffalo that would be one of the tallest structures between New York and Chicago.

Mr. Issa, born in Kuwait, is the son of an Iraqi father and a Kuwaiti mother. His parents sent him to England during the first Gulf War, and he has lived there since. He went to the University of London and, in his spare time, began restoring homes and selling them for a profit. He proved adept, and was soon buying old banks and warehouses and converting them to high-end hotels and condominiums. His parents gave him a little bit of seed money, but he has expanded his capital exponentially.

How did Buffalo catch Mr. Issa's eye? One winter night, around two in the morning, Mr. Issa was at home in Manchester, England, surfing the Web when he came across real estate listings that looked interesting. The buildings were grand, beautiful and cheap, and in a curious city in the western corner of New York State.

He did what a brash, impulsive, 20-something financier with money to burn is prone to do. He hopped a plane, found a local realtor, walked into the dilapidated remains of the city's grandest old hotel -- The Statler -- and within 30 seconds was sold.

Mr. Issa is now refurbishing The Statler and making plans to build a skyscraper, the Buffalo City Tower, which will stand 40-stories tall, offer 1.5 million square feet of floor space, and cost a cool $360 million. He's waiting to find an anchor tenant before breaking ground.

The responses to Mr. Issa's initiatives have been nothing short of jubilant. "He is treated like the messiah here," says Mark Goldman, a businessman and historian who has written two well-respected books on Buffalo. "He gives a little talk and 500 people show up." Newell Nussbaumer, editor of Buffalo Rising, an alternative monthly, calls Mr. Issa the city's "superhero." Mayor Byron Brown also gets carried away. "Here you have a well-financed businessperson from Manchester, England, who is saying -- in major way -- that Buffalo is worth investing in," he told me. "When someone like that makes those kinds of investments, people all over the world sit up and take notice."

But can Mr. Issa find commercial tenants? His strategy is to convince major companies in New York and Toronto to move their back offices and call centers to Buffalo, where salaries, office space and nearly everything else is cheaper. It's a compelling idea. After all, why send labor to India when Buffalo is closer, English-speaking and inexpensive?

Mayor Brown is especially bullish about this strategy. He notes that Mr. Issa has been "extremely successful" in convincing the BBC to move some of its offices from London to Manchester.

Unfortunately, this isn't exactly right. It is true that Mr. Issa belongs to a group of 20 developers, known as Piccadilly Partnership, and some of these developers have lured the BBC and other businesses out of London. But this isn't something that Mr. Issa has done personally. None of the high-rises Mr. Issa owns in Manchester are office buildings -- they are all residential facilities. He has far less experience with "back office" dealings.

The mayor is hoping Mr. Issa is the right man, in the right place, at the right time. And Mr. Issa may succeed. He is smart, charismatic and well-funded. Buffalo also has a great deal to offer, including a well-educated workforce, a world-class university, an exquisite housing stock, and a low cost of living. The city even has a number of grassroots activists, like my friend Aaron Bartley, a Harvard Law School graduate who launched a citywide effort to salvage abandoned houses and fill them with new immigrants and other aspiring homeowners.

The danger is that Buffalo's optimism regarding Mr. Issa will become a kind of clinging, desperate hope. This hard-luck city is always looking for redemption: redemption from poverty, from four straight Super Bowl losses, from the loss of the steel mills, from the bad stereotypes about the weather, and from the opportunists who, like myself, move away from the city in its hour of need.

This need makes someone like Mr. Issa more appealing because it casts him as a hero in the classic American storyline. He's the sheriff sauntering into town who, in John-Wayne-like fashion, will restore justice, dignity and prosperity.

The problem is that waiting for a John Wayne figure can create complacency and obscure the reality that redemption will not come easily or at once in the form of deus ex machina. The best thing the mayor could do now is forget about Mr. Issa and focus on the daily grind of improving schools, creating tax incentives for businesses and even filling potholes -- the unglamorous minutiae of city life that will truly pave the road to redemption.