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On Saturday, October 19, the Open Buffalo Emerging Leaders Class of 2024 embarked on their Buffalo Neighborhoods and Socioeconomic History Bus Tour.

The leaders boarded a chartered coach at 9:00 a.m. and spent the next 8 hours traversing the city, examining the resources we have in our neighborhoods as well as the deficits left by decades of redlining, neglect and disinvestment, and discussing not only how things got this way but how we can improve them. Sponsored by the Clean Mobility Buffalo initiative, the tour highlighted transportation access and mobility issues around the city, the impacts of excessive vehicle pollution in majority-Black neighborhoods, and how Clean Mobility solutions can improve not only our climate and health but also help residents access employment opportunities and address economic disparities.

The tour began with a small circle through the Cold Springs neighborhood immediately surrounding Open Buffalo’s office at Jefferson and Utica before circling outward through the Broadway-Fillmore area. The leaders examined the impacts of the Kensington Expressway dividing the once-prosperous Hamlin Park in half as they rode from MLK Park at Fillmore & Best up the NY-33 and Scajaquada Expressways up to the Buffalo History Museum. A tour of the museum’s research library with librarian Cynthia Van Ness introduced the leaders to resources in the collection for researching the history of specific parcels of land, maps showing the changes to neighborhoods over time, and the wealth of online resources available through the research library for free.

After lunch on the museum’s portico, the leaders rode through the West Side, viewing one of the last remnants of Buffalo’s Olmsted Parkway system and talking about ecological justice projects such as PUSH Buffalo’s Net Zero house on Winter Street, the Massachusetts Avenue Project, and more. Clean Mobility transportation initiatives will make it easier for residents all over the city to benefit from these projects, as well as to build their own improvements to increase green space and improve walkability in their neighborhoods. We visited Freedom Park to pour a libation for the ancestors who lost their lives crossing the Niagara River to freedom, before heading through the Old First Ward to Tifft Nature Preserve, through South Buffalo, and taking a tour with WUFO’s radio host Jim Anderson through several of the anchor sites of the Michigan Street African American Heritage Corridor.

The tour concluded at 5:00 p.m. after a look at several workforce development sites, such as Northland Workforce Training Center and Viridi Parente, which offer job training and employment opportunities on the East Side. The leaders examined the transit accessibility of these options and discussed how Clean Mobility improvements such as e-bike access and intersection safety improvements will open these options up to more residents.

Eight hours on a bus is a very long day, but leaders disembarked from the bus energized to begin putting their ideas to work to improve their neighborhoods.