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On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, 400 downtown properties went on the auction block.
Those of us who have always longed to own a bar or even a little strip mall could have bid on one with just 30 percent of the total price as down payment. Want to start your own Church of Lost Hope? There was a former house of worship on 16th Street under the auctioneer's gavel. Not to mention restaurants, pizza parlors, grocery stores, a fish market, day care center, offices, small factories, countless homes and the ever-popular vacant lot, all going for a fraction of their value because the owners couldn't pay their property taxes.
According to the Niagara Frontier Association of Realtors, this is the largest auction of city property in recent memory. Although memories tend to be short here, this does seem to be a big dumping of the assets of former taxpayers. Normally, sales of tax-foreclosed property in Niagara Falls average 60 a year. The auctioneer, Russell Scherrer, says the average across the state for such sales of public foreclosures is 150 properties a year. It's so heartening to know we can top the state in something besides stupidity.
If ever we needed another indication that the city leadership of at least the past half-dozen administrations was criminally negligent, I'd say we have the bloody footprints leading up to the door of City Hall. While inside, those know-nothing Neros are fiddling around waiting for that deus ex machina -- gambling -- to save us all.
Bet on it. I'm seeing red.
The state and federal governments spent $200 million in the 1960s and 1970s on "urban renewal" in Niagara Falls (or as many aptly call it, urban removal), using the funds to tear everything down in a hamfisted attempt to reinvent ourselves as the New Jerusalem of Tourism.
Consider the results.
Splash Water Park, which was closed long before I moved to our little Eden on the River. Call me a skeptic, but just who was the genius who though that a couple of water slides across the street from the (now defunct) Triscuit factory would be a tourist lure?
Then there's the Rainbow Centre. Is even Burger King still a tenant? A friend and I once drove down from Toronto to shop there because we were both American women determined not to spend three times the cost of buying decent cotton sheets in Canada when we could easily get to the good old U.S. of A. The sheets on offer were not only ugly, they were scratchy. "They're imported from Albania," my shopping-wise, New York City-raised friend decreed. We left without the sheets, though we did have a grand late lunch at the Red Coach Inn.
I do believe The Turtle, the Native American center, got funded under past government largess. It is now a rotting hulk in the middle of downtown. Every time I see it, I wonder what in the hell went wrong?
And what about our Convention and Civic Center, an ugly tomb currently losing at least $8 million a year in canceled bookings?
I could go on, but so many of you could read me chapter and verse about the roads not taken and the ones ignored.
But instead of any of the development promised to us, what we have seen played out this week inside the City Council Chamber of Shame is 400 taxpayers losing their homes, their businesses, their livelihoods, even their church.
"Poverty," said H. William Feder, former teacher, legislator and historian, who has watched this once-powerful city go to wrack and ruin, "has become a major industry in Niagara Falls."
Feder also said (and this chilled me to the bone), "If this city was a country, it would be a Third World country."
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | April 16 2002 |