Commentary: Buffalo's opportunity to lead

By John Howell

Buffalo, NY – This is the opposite of the expression be careful what you wish for. Be careful what you complain about. Pay attention to the bad news. The good news is between the lines.

The bad news: Buffalo's past 30 years of lost industry, lost population, and blight. The good news: excess capacity.

There is excess capacity in Buffalo in everything from housing to commercial real estate to manufacturing space to traffic lanes on the Thruway. Housing costs are a fraction of the cost of comparables in major cities. Ditto for business property. And capacity for residential and business real estate far exceeds demand. Thus, property values are as low as anywhere on the continent. And thanks to a 30% drop in population, rush hour is a memory.

All of this is happening at a time when technology has made it possible to do almost any type of work from almost anywhere, and at a time when the economy is making a major paradigm shift from employment to entrepreneurship. Relatively few of the millions of jobs lost over the past 18 months will ever come back. The future of work in the Western World is entrepreneurship. It is millions of new companies created by millions of laid off workers individually or collectively with friends, family, and/or former co-workers.

Now see how good that can be for this region at this time in history when entrepreneurs are being created, by design or by default, by the millions, as traditional jobs with larger employers go the route of the dinosaur.

As old industries and businesses are unable to survive in the new economy, new needs and opportunities for creative alternatives and solutions will be developed. Those who are ahead of the curve in this realignment process will be the most successful. The more these new businesses and industries can be clustered in a single region, the more efficient and profitable they will be, by sharing infrastructure, incubators, accelerators, other support services. The region that figures out how to beat the rush to attract such businesses will be the next Silicon Valley.

There's no reason why Buffalo Niagara can't be that region. Think about it. If you were looking for a place start a business or to expand your growing business, what would you be looking for?

Low cost housing, low cost commercial real estate, low cost labor, a geographical concentration of ancillary businesses, support services, and infrastructure, plentiful low cost power, world class higher education and research institutions, short commute times, and because water is the new oil, lots of water.

Buffalo has all of this, in spades. Still success is far from assured. Without a tremendous amount of focus, concentration and cooperation on the part of those who more often compete and obstruct, Buffalo will repeat its recent history of missed opportunity.

Buffalo needs to be intentional about connecting and coordinating all of these assets in a way that makes them well known to the world, and easily utilized as a package by would-be entrepreneurs already here or moving in, and creatively packaged and priced.

Buffalo could easily be the Silicon Valley of the next big thing if local business, academia and government can find a way to combine and coordinate their efforts to make the entire region one big business incubator.

But the bottom line is this. If Buffalo could speak with one voice to those around the world who have legitimate ideas or new companies looking for a home, offering them their first year here essentially free, from leasing to support services to utilities, infrastructure, fleet services and professional services, and if the infrastructure and services offered were coordinated and quality controlled to be world class, Buffalo would indeed be the place to be to start and grow a business. I wonder how we'd handle that kind of success.

John Howell is President and Chief Creative Officer of NEXT-ARROW. Tonight, John will be asking the question, "If You're From Buffalo, Is Suicide Really Redundant?" in a presentation at 8:00 at U-B's Allen Hall on the South Campus.

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