A new home for one family begets a slew of repair and refurbishing projects in a West Side neighborhood, and the whole City of Buffalo remakes its image
Extreme makeover of a neighborhood
What began as a TV project to build a new house is turning into the transformation of a whole neighborhood.
“Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” famously helps one family and one house. But since work for ABC-TV's popular show began Sunday at 228 Massachusetts Ave., thousands of volunteers, skilled and unskilled, have descended on the Lower West Side. By the end of today, organizers say, they will have worked on 50 homes, installing siding, roofs and porches, planting shrubs and applying coats of paint.
Together with volunteers who have poured concrete sidewalks, painted murals, cleaned up vacant lots and built community gardens they are changing the face of an area of several blocks long considered one of Buffalo's most hard-pressed and crime-ridden.
“It's really 'Extreme Makeover: Neighborhood Edition,'” said Mark Lazzara, chief executive of WNY AmeriCorps, which has 300 members involved and is coordinating the thousands of volunteers — about 800 a day, Lazzara said.
The bulk of home improvements and beautification efforts have focused on an eight- to 10-block area involving Massachusetts Avenue — where Jamaican emigrant Delores Powell and her four children's new home already looks nearly finished from the outside — and Normal and Plymouth avenues, which bracket Massachusetts.
Miss Halton, who lives on Normal Avenue, has been “amazed” by neighborhood changes she's observed waiting for the school bus each morning that takes her daughter to Enterprise Charter School before she goes to work at Tops Markets.
“I think this really is transformational. It will bring the entire neighborhood hope, and help everyone feel like this isn't just a [lousy] neighborhood that everybody keeps saying to stay away from,” Halton said.
Bill Meldrum, who also lives on Normal, said the jolt the show has brought to the neighborhood was “unbelievable.” He said he's volunteered 12 to 14 hours a day.
“There are good people around this neighborhood, and this block, and we're all trying to make it better,” said Meldrum, whose wife's family roots there go back to 1948.
“This is going to make everybody here walk two inches taller,” Meldrum said.
Margarita Lopez, who lives next door to Powell, has had new siding put on her house. She said “there are no words to explain or express the emotion” she felt for herself, and for her close friend Powell.
The reason why the Buffalo version of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” goes beyond a modern-day fairy tale for a lucky resident begins with David Stapleton, owner of David Homes.
“I felt it would be unconscionable for us to come here and build this one house without trying to do something to help others in the neighborhood while we're here,” said Stapleton, who quietly accepted the invitation to be the home builder Oct. 19 after producers sought him out.
Stapleton said he initially encountered “some reservations from the show” because producers first needed to be reassured the main focus wouldn't be diverted.
Stapleton praised all those involved in what he said was “the possibility of people getting together and starting to take back this neighborhood.”
“Every time I asked for volunteers, more showed up than what we asked for. Every time we asked for donations in materials to help in the community, people said yes and gave more,” he said.
Brady Connell, the show's executive producer, said the community effort has been unlike any other in the six-year-old show's history.
“In terms of the number of projects, I don't know that we have ever started an episode intended to give a deserving family a new home, and suddenly realized we were working on 40 or 45 different projects,” Connell said.
“We couldn't have done this in other cities, even the same size as Buffalo, because the volunteer spirit here is off the charts.”
About 4,500 people initially signed up to volunteer, with another 500 on the waiting list, according to Lazzara. Volunteer registration was halted Nov. 4, but that hasn't stemmed the tide of people wanting to help.
“People continue to show up at the barricade with toolboxes and ladders and hard hats and paint brushes, saying, 'What can we do?' We can't exactly tell them to go away, so we just let them on in and put them somewhere to work,” said Matt Crane, one of two AmeriCorps project coordinators.
PUSH Buffalo has plugged volunteers into other neighborhood projects, with 180 people from the community signing up to help on Wednesday alone, said organizer Whitney Yax.
Darryl Lang of Cheektowaga was an example of someone who stopped by to help and then threw himself into the project. Lang, who owns a fencing business, wound up supplying materials for four projects, and paid three employees to help.
“The 'City of Good Neighbors' — that's why I'm here,” Lang said.
Carpenter Nicholas Cortese, from Clarence, was another.
“We rebuilt this porch, reframed it and put on all new trim,” he said outside a house on Normal owned by James Strach. “It was really great to share a talent I have and help somebody else out.”
Crane, a West Side resident who was discharged from the Army three years ago, compared the expanded “Extreme Makeover” experience favorably to his service in Iraq.
“This is extremely transformational, and the impact it makes on the community is so much more positive,” he said. “It means a lot more to me to see the community come together and rebuild homes and paint, and just really love their neighbors.”
Stopping at a house owned by Burmese emigrant Myo Thant, Crane said, “Simple things like fresh paint and a little bit of mulch go a really long way in people's lives.”
Community organizer Eric Walker of PUSH Buffalo, who knocked on Powell's door Saturday to tell her she had been selected, called it “an amazing week in the West Side.”
“Who would have thought that several thousand people would have come in and gone full blast in rebuilding the fabric of this neighborhood,” Walker said.
Connell, the executive producer, couldn't say how much of the show's actual 42 minutes of air time would be devoted to the neighborhood effort, which isn't typically within the show's parameters. But he said there would be something in the show “demonstrating how much work has been done in the community.”
“Extreme Makeover” is seen in 70 countries, with a weekly U.S. audience last year measured at slightly more than 10 million.
“Having only been here for a week, I have a deep respect and a growing love for the City of Buffalo. I hope the story we tell sheds light on how fantastic the people of Buffalo are,” Connell said.
West Side volunteer Chevy Felipe Garcia said he hoped the positive community consciousness continues well after the last “Extreme Makeover” truck pulls away.
“There is a great spirit among everyone, but this should not end here. This should continue, block by block, neighbor by neighbor,” Garcia said.
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