By Tony Farina
The City of Niagara Falls has purchased 38 properties on Main St. and nearby side streets from Blue Cardinal Capital and also the Rapids Theatre, all in foreclosure, but the question lingering over all this is what is the city going to do with all those properties now that they have acquired them?
The city plan is to find legitimate developers—not just one—by working with the state, Niagara County, the Niagara Orleans Land Bank, and city officials to come up with a development path for the blighted parcels the city now has in its hands which it must take care of in the interim while the development piece somehow comes together, no easy task given the city’s development history.
The city has yet to do anything with the public safety building on Hyde Park Blvd. and there are two industrial corridors, one along Buffalo Avenue and the Fourth District on the north end of the city which sit fallow.
In the meantime, of course, the streets must be plowed and many people who rely on public transportation on Main St. were forced to walk on the street or through the unplowed icy sidewalks and that of course creates potential legal liabilities for the city as they try to manage the new acquisitions while they search high and low for development partners to make something of the city’s major property investment, made, of course, from different pots of money, all of it taxpayer money of course.
Of course the city’s big stake in the many derelict properties and the development future of them could potentially rub private investors the wrong way and could be a problem for a collaborative development agenda with public and private interests working together, something that probably must happen if anything good in the way of revitalizing the properties now in the city’s hands is to come about.
To make the city’s investment worthwhile, there must be a development consensus with all the players involved, and we’re talking public, private, residents, and businesses who must be a part of whatever the goal Mayor Robert Restaino has in mind to rebuild a major segment of the north end of Niagara Falls around the train station heading towards the entertainment district. Hopefully he will exert the kind of leadership that will bring the parties together to make the investment pay off. If he is unable to bring that leadership to the development table, he will wear on his back this expensive bid to save the city and his mayoral legacy for all to see.
Will it be another pie-in-the-sky pipe dream, the kind that helped bring Niagara Falls to its current blighted state, or will Restaino find the right combination to move forward, something we haven’t seen to this point. The mayor’s future is certainly on the table as time marches on.
