New houses built in Buffalo the past two decades initially drew many of the homebuyers from Hamlin Park but now attract residents from the Kensington-Bailey neighborhood.

A Buffalo News analysis of 1,180 subsidized homebuyers since 1990 shows where they came from and where they moved.

The analysis confirmed the vast majority of new homebuyers merely moved from one Buffalo neighborhood to another -- about 2.2 miles, on average. That is fueling concern among housing advocates that Buffalo's subsidized housing program revitalizes some neighborhoods at the expense of others, and may even be increasing the already large stock of vacant housing in some of the city's most distressed neighborhoods.

"Subsidizing buyers without paying attention to where you are pulling them from is the same as subsidizing the decline of the donor neighborhood," said Harvey Garrett, executive director of the West Side Community Collaborative.

The News analysis found just 8 percent of the new homeowners came from outside the city. But even these homebuyers generally moved just a short distance away, from the border towns of Cheektowaga, Amherst and Tonawanda. And in some instances, these suburban residents are actually former city residents, who moved back to Buffalo.

With the population of Buffalo and the region as a whole continuing to decline, only a few of the new homebuyers came from outside the Buffalo Niagara region.

City Hall's not worried.

Mayor Byron W. Brown says the new houses are necessary to keep residents in the city, and other housing strategies, such as upgrading existing homes, are available for older neighborhoods.

"Maybe those folks who moved from Hamlin Park, if they didn't move to a new house somewhere else in the city, they might have moved to Amherst or Hamburg or Cheektowaga," Brown said. "So our theory is, by having a range of options, that we keep people physically in the city."

The mayor wants a mix of new and upgraded housing that makes the city "so attractive that people will move into Buffalo from Amherst, from Cheektowaga, from Clarence, from Lancaster. We've got a lot of work to do," Brown said. "But that's the goal. That's the only way to rebuild and stabilize the population."

Some housing advocates think the city's policies need to be rethought.

"People who had reasonable disposable incomes and supported businesses on Bailey and Jefferson moved and aren't spending there anymore," said Michael Clarke, who heads a nonprofit organization that works on housing and community development in Buffalo. "And the new neighborhoods haven't generated any significant commercial and retail development."

All the movement within the city -- people moving into subsidized homes, others moving into the homes those residents moved from, and others then moving into the homes those occupants left -- can ultimately create vacant housing in the city's most distressed neighborhoods, other housing advocates said.

"Where is that person coming from? In all likelihood a more distressed neighborhood," said Charles Thomas, who served as Buffalo's deputy planning director before becoming the Rochester city planner in 2006. "There is a finite demand for housing in the city. It's creating more vacant housing."

The Buffalo News reviewed city records on subsidized homes and Erie County property documents to determine the current and former addresses of subsidized housing buyers.

The analysis covered the approximately 1,180 subsidized homes built in the city since 1990.

It follows a recent News series, "The Houses That City Hall Built," which documented the cost and location of 1,500 subsidized homes built in Buffalo since the 1980s.

The News analysis found half of the homebuyers over the past 20 years moved into a new home less than two miles from where they previously lived. For all homebuyers, the average distance between their new and old homes was 2.2 miles. Seven percent of the homebuyers moved more than five miles to a new home.

The analysis also found:

* In the 1990s, the Hamlin Park and Grider neighborhoods -- near Canisius College and Erie County Medical Center -- saw the biggest exodus of subsidized homebuyers among city neighborhoods. They mainly moved three miles away to the Willert Park and Emslie neighborhoods on the outskirts of downtown.

* The exodus from Hamlin Park continued from 2000 to 2005, but a neighborhood to the east -- Schiller Park -- also lost residents as homeowners moved to new subsidized houses on Michigan and Jefferson avenues. No subsidized homes were built in either Hamlin Park or Schiller Park.

* More recently, since Brown became mayor, the Kenfield, Kensington, Leroy and LaSalle neighborhoods in the northeast part of Buffalo emerged as the neighborhoods with the most residents leaving to buy subsidized homes elsewhere in the city.

* Two-thirds of all subsidized homebuyers come from Buffalo's East Side neighborhoods. Another 11 percent come from the city's West Side. Fourteen percent come from the rest of the city -- Elmwood Village, North Buffalo and South Buffalo -- combined.

* Eight percent -- one of every 12 of the subsidized homebuyers -- came from outside the city, mainly from Cheektowaga, and to a lesser degree from the towns of Amherst and Tonawanda. Few came from the Southtowns. The percentage of homebuyers from outside the city has slipped slightly in the past four years, but hasn't changed much since 1990.

* Eighty percent of homebuyers who moved to a subsidized home from within the city were African-American. Slightly more than one-half of homebuyers moving in from outside Buffalo were black, and about one-third were white.

* Only a tiny fraction, less than 5 percent, of subsidized homebuyers are more than 65 years old.

Two profiles

Among those leaving the Ken-Bailey neighborhood was Tamar Habeeb, 30, an electronics technician, who made the five-mile move four years ago to a subsidized home on Davis Street in Willert Park.

"We looked in Ken-Bailey, but there wasn't too much we liked," Habeeb said. "I had no problem leaving Ken-Bailey."

He remembers his first impression of the colonial home. "As soon as we walked in, we fell in love with it," he said.

The monthly mortgage payment for the $100,000 home is less than what he paid in rent for the two-bedroom apartment his family previously lived in on Davidson Avenue in Ken-Bailey -- thanks in part to the subsidy program that lopped $28,000 off the mortgage.

"I wasn't against moving into an older house, with updates," Habeeb said. "But when I found out we were eligible for a new home, I was excited."

Jackie Fluker and her husband also left the Ken-Bailey neighborhood for a new, subsidized home in the Willert Park neighborhood. They liked the idea of not worrying about making home repairs anytime soon, so bought a new home on Camp Street.

But Fluker misses living in Ken-Bailey, where she grew up, and wishes her old neighborhood had new homes to pick from like Willert Park. If it did, she said she would likely be living in Ken-Bailey today.

"They need to build there," she said.

Others note Ken-Bailey doesn't have open land available, and they say the neighborhood doesn't necessarily need new subsidized housing anyway. But they would like City Hall to pay more attention to the neighborhood, through additional rehab programs or other efforts to improve the housing stock.

"What I would like to see is stability in this community," said Dominic Fulciniti, general manager of Schnitter's Paint and Wallpaper, a Bailey Avenue store less than a mile from the Ken-Bailey houses where Habeeb and Fluker once lived.

"Instead of pushing them out," he said of prospective homebuyers, "try to maintain the neighborhood."

"A lot of these homes are stable and in good shape," he said, and can be attractive to homebuyers. But the lure of new housing elsewhere draws neighborhood residents who have jobs and can afford to buy a home.

"Our concern is if you turn this neighborhood from working-class to a neighborhood where no one works," Fulciniti said.

Ken-Bailey at risk

Common Council Member Bonnie E. Russell, whose University District includes Ken-Bailey, doesn't think her district has suffered from people leaving the neighborhood to buy subsidized homes elsewhere.

Those who left Ken-Bailey were renters, and they were replaced by other renters, she said.

"It's not a bad reflection that they are moving out," Russell said. "They want to buy a new home. We have new renters moving in. I think we are doing well."

But in the "shell game" that is going on, with subsidized housing moving people from one Buffalo neighborhood to another, the renters moving into Ken-Bailey have lower incomes than those moving out of the neighborhood to purchase subsidized homes, noted Clarke, who heads the Buffalo office of the Local Initiatives Support Corp.

That's evident, Clarke said, by an increase in Section 8 subsidies in the neighborhood, as well as data showing Ken-Bailey is at high risk for foreclosures. In addition, postal service data shows an increasing vacancy rate in the area, and census data shows a drop in homeownership along with the population declines of the past few decades.

Beyond that, Thomas said that while Ken-Bailey remains a strong enough neighborhood to attract new renters, these new Ken-Bailey residents are likely moving in from more-distressed neighborhoods. At some point, given the city's declining population, all this movement within the city creates additional vacant houses, typically in the poorest neighborhoods, he said.

Recent studies have shown that Buffalo has the highest vacancy rate in New York State, and among the highest among urban centers throughout the United States.

Thomas also said that attracting homeowners into Buffalo from the city's inner-ring suburbs creates additional issues for those suburban communities, which are also losing population.

Clarke said he isn't suggesting that the city abandon new housing, but that any new construction be carefully targeted, and combined with a broader strategy.

"I think new housing should continue to be developed, but it should be concentrated in more strategically targeted reinvestment areas, should reinforce rehabilitation opportunities, and should include more rental options," said Clarke.

"There's no question you have to deal with supply and demand issues," Thomas added.

Convert student housing

One suggestion for the Ken-Bailey area comes from Dennis M. Penman, a developer who has advised Brown on economic development issues in the city.

In addition to the Ken-Bailey residents moving to subsidized housing from streets such as Davidson, Martha and Phyllis avenues, on the east side of Bailey, the rental units on the west side of Bailey are now losing some of their prospective tenants to student apartments being built by private developers in nearby Cheektowaga, Penman point outs. Additional private student housing is also being built near the University at Buffalo's North Campus in Amherst.

Penman, who is involved in some of the new student housing in Amherst, suggests the city help renovate and convert some of the University Heights housing -- typically rented to students -- back to single-family homes.

A program like that, Penman said, could provide housing options for renters who are now moving out of the district to purchase larger homes.

"The tide is swaying from creating brand new single-family homes to doing rehab, creating home ownership through rehab," said Michael D. Riegal, vice president at Belmont Shelter Corp., a nonprofit organization that has, at the city's request, built many of Buffalo's new subsidized homes in recent years.

Beyond subsidizing new homebuyers and rehabbing older houses, City Hall has sought to promote other programs to help prospective homebuyers, including programs to assist people in improving their credit worthiness so they can get mortgages, Brown said.

The city has also supported programs to encourage owner occupancy, the mayor added, citing a program in his own neighborhood, Hamlin Park.

Hamlin Park, Brown said, has had little trouble attracting homebuyers, even though more subsidized homebuyers have come from this neighborhood since 1990 than any other city neighborhood.

Sixty-four people left Hamlin Park to buy subsidized homes, including seven who left Brunswick Boulevard between 1993 and 2001 -- the most of any street in Hamlin Park. They left properties assessed in the mid-$40,000 range for new homes assessed anywhere from 50 percent to 200 percent higher.

But it's not the exodus of these homebuyers threatening Hamlin Park -- but those who want to buy there, Brown said.

"Hamlin Park for a long time has been a stable middle income neighborhood," Brown said. "And probably for the last 30 years, Hamlin Park has been under siege by speculators who want to turn housing in that area into student housing."

In fact, the 2000 census found one of the census tracts in Hamlin Park had more rental homes than owner-occupied houses, and that overall homeownership in the community has declined along with the population between 1990 and 2000, as well as in the two prior decades.

So the city, backed by the Hamlin Park Community and Taxpayers Association, has tried to encourage homeowners -- not landlords -- to buy the houses put up for sale.

"One of the things the city has done as a strategy is support homebuyers clubs, so that family members of people who have lived in neighborhoods like Hamlin Park for 30 years -- the kids, nieces, nephews, and in some cases, grandchildren -- can plan to make themselves mortgage ready to be able to buy a home in that neighborhood," Brown said. "I think there has to be more of a focus on that kind of initiative."

sschulman@buffnews.com and plakamp@buffnews.comnull