Vacancy is often thought of as a city problem. However, as new development has sprawled over the last several decades, population has declined, and new home construction has vastly outstripped household formation, vacancy has followed close behind – steadily affecting more suburban and exurban areas and eroding the sustainability of our entire region.

What the data says

Vacant housing units include those that are for rent, for sale or otherwise unoccupied for a number of reasons including abandonment. Currently 8.7% of all housing units in Buffalo Niagara are vacant. This amounts to 45,475 vacant dwellings in total, or more than three times the number of vacant units that existed in 1970. Today, while urban areas still have the highest vacancy rates, the rates of vacancy have ballooned in most first-ring suburbs and several outlying areas. Meanwhile, despite a 16% decline in population and the growing abundance of vacant properties, we have continued to build new houses, adding over 151,000 units over these last forty years1. This pattern creates an alarming strain on our region’s economy, our environment and our social well-being.

Where is vacancy a problem?

Click on image to enlarge

Why is this important to moving One Region Forward?

The vast majority of buildings in our region are homes. How much land they use, how much energy they consume, how they are related to transportation facilities, and where they are in relation to employment and services of all types determine, not only whether Buffalo Niagara is good place to live, but also whether we can be sustainable throughout the 21st century and beyond.

It is also important that the value of an individual home or other residential building is determined, not just by the quality of the unit, but also by the characteristics of the street, the neighborhood, and the community. Proximity to parks, schools, shopping, entertainment, health care, cultural amenities, and access to transit as well as a sense of security, all contribute to the value of a home.

Unfortunately, the combination of new investment in second ring suburbs and beyond and disinvestment in central city neighborhoods have led to high vacancy rates in the latter and in some cases pervasive housing abandonment, demolition, and resultant vacant lots. In areas of Buffalo, Niagara Falls and Lackawanna some neighborhoods have effectively collapsed, ceasing to provide even the minimum level of support for daily life.

Now we see rising levels of housing vacancy in places like Cheektowaga and Tonawanda. This suggests that our older suburbs are not immune to the downward cycle of disinvestment, deteriorating property values, declining tax revenues, degraded public services, outmigration, and further disinvestment.

What strategies can we adopt to stop the spread of vacancy in our region?

Addressing the imbalance between housing vacancy and abandonment in the center city and housing construction on the periphery will require a wide range of responses, starting with those aimed at protecting rural land for agriculture, limiting the extension of basic infrastructure, and focusing redevelopment on already developed areas.

But more will be required. We need some combination of improved enforcement of building codes, better sharing of information about the status of housing, new relationships between neighborhood organizations and lenders to untangle the foreclosure mess that holds many homes in limbo, and initiatives to coordinate neighborhood revitalization efforts across municipal boundaries.

Where neighborhoods are mostly vacant homes and vacant lots, the newly created land bank can help us stabilize things until neighborhoods can be brought back into the market. For neighborhoods that retain their basic fabric, a combination of infill housing construction with housing rehabilitation can restore their appeal. In older suburban neighborhoods where vacancy is a more recent phenomenon, we might think about how to retrofit homes for new lifestyles, new household types, and for energy efficiency.

Tell us what you think we should do to move our region’s housing and neighborhoods forward. Your comments and suggestions will be forwarded to the One Region Forward Housing and Neighborhoods Working Stream and will be used to help shape the implementation strategies developed as part of that effort.

Take Our Survey!

Data Sources

Brown University, Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences. (2010). US2010 Project, Longitudinal Tract Data Base. Retrieved November 6, 2012 from http://www.s4.brown.edu/us2010/Researcher/Bridging.htm

Erie County Department of Environment & Planning. (2012). Parcel Boundary Data.

Niagara County Department of Economic Development. (2011). Parcel Boundary Data.

Social Explorer Tables (SE). Count 4 – Original Tables – With Stratifiers, Census 1970, U.S. Census Bureau.

Social Explorer Tables (SE), Census 2010, U.S. Census Bureau; Social Explorer.

Social Explorer Tables: American Community Survey 2011 (1-Year Estimates) (SE), ACS 2011 (1-Year Estimates), Social Explorer; U.S. Census Bureau.

U.S. Census Bureau. (2010). TIGER/Line Shapefile, New York, 2010 Census Tract State-based.

Data Notes

1. According to the U.S. Census, the total population of Erie and Niagara counties was 1,349,211 in 1970. The 2010 U.S. Census counted a population of 1,135,509 within the two counties, indicating a decrease of nearly 16% over these forty years. The American Community Survey in 2011, estimated that 151,513 housing units had been built in Erie and Niagara counties during this same time period.

How we estimated the number of vacant homes since 1970: Data from the U.S. Census providing the total number of housing units and the total number of vacant units in each census tract within the Buffalo Niagara region was obtained for the years 1970 and 2010. This data was aggregated and used to derive the descriptive regional statistics presented above.

How we approximated the location of housing units and vacant housing units in 1970 and 2010: As the census tract boundaries have altered over time, in order to investigate spatial trends, data from 1970 was first redistributed to the 2010 census tract boundaries using a database tool developed by researchers at Brown University. All housing units classified by the census as being “for seasonal, recreational or occasional use” or “for migrant workers” were excluded from the data before it was joined to spatial data of census tract boundaries. A sequence of processes using geographic information systems (GIS) was then applied. First, the residential area existing within each census tract in 1970 and 2010 was extracted from GIS parcel data (Erie Co. Dept. of Environment & Planning, 2012; Niagara Co. Dept. of Economic Development, 2011) using the property class code and year of building construction assigned to each parcel by tax assessor data. A GIS procedure then evenly distributed points representing the total number of vacant units within a given census tract across all residential areas within that tract in both 1970 and 2010. This process was repeated to evenly distribute the total number of all housing units in a tract across all residential areas within.

How we used the location of housing units and vacant housing units to calculate residential vacancy rates across the region: Using ArcGIS software, a kernel density function was applied to the file produced in the step above representing the approximate locations of vacant housing units. This operation calculated the density of vacant units (measured in number of vacant units per square mile) on a pixel-by-pixel basis (using a spatial resolution of 900 m2) across the region. This entire process was repeated to determine the density of all housing units, vacant or occupied, across the region in 1970 and in 2010. The calculated density of vacant units was then divided by the calculated density of all housing units (both measured in units per square mile) on a pixel-by-pixel basis for both 1970 and 2010. This operation yielded a spatial data set of the housing vacancy rates covering the region for each year under consideration. Residential areas with a vacancy rate above 5% were extracted and symbolized to produce the maps displayed above.