Rust Belt Radicals: Community Organizing in Buffalo

In 2004, several years after graduating from Harvard Law School, Aaron Bartley returned to Buffalo, New York, his hometown, to become a community organizer. Many of Bartley’s friends thought that his idea was naïve and quixotic. After all, Buffalo was the quintessential “Rust Belt” city, devastated by a dramatic half-century loss of blue-collar jobs and population.

Within less than a decade, however, Bartley’s vision has become at least a partial reality. People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH)—the group he founded with Eric Walker, another organizer—now has an enviable track record of winning victories that have improved the lives of low-income people on the city’s West Side and built a solid core of grassroots leaders prepared to contest for both political and economic power.

When Bartley, who was born in 1975, was growing up in Buffalo, the city was already on a steady downward spiral. In 1950, with 580,000 residents, it was America’s fifteenth largest city and a center of manufacturing, shipping, and grain storage. A powerful labor movement battled to guarantee that the city’s workers—primarily white ethnic groups, then a growing black industrial class that arrived after World War II—had a middle-class standard of living, including decent housing, schools, and public services.

By the late 1950s, Buffalo was confronting the crisis of deindustrialization. Major industries left the city. Middle-class families fled to the suburbs or outside the region. Its current population—261,000—is less than half of its peak. With a poverty rate of 30.2 percent, Buffalo is the nation’s fifth poorest city.

This former factory town still hasn’t figured out a clear “post-industrial” path to prosperity, but the city has recently seen some positive signs of life. Two of the country’s largest banks are headquartered in Buffalo. The expansion of the state university’s downtown medical campus has triggered an upsurge of private health care construction projects. A new office district is emerging adjacent to the city’s aging downtown. Middle-class families are now rediscovering Buffalo’s architectural jewels, triggering a historic preservation movement. As a result, Buffalo has a fast-growing construction sector. As Bartley notes, “our goal is trying to figure out how to make sure that residents of its low-income neighborhoods aren’t shut out of that growth.”

After graduating from Swarthmore College in 1993, Bartley worked for the SEIU’s Justice for Janitors campaign in Denver as part of the Union Summer internship program. Bartley called it a “trial by fire” and a “transformative experience.” He moved to Cambridge, where he did research for the Center for Insurance Research, a Nader-esque consumer organization. In the fall of 1998 Bartley entered Harvard Law School, graduating in May 2001. He was active in Harvard’s Progressive Student Labor Movement and helped lead the campus “living wage” movement, including a student occupation of the administration building that triggered national headlines and forced Harvard to improve wages, health benefits, and working conditions for about two thousand janitors and security workers. After law school, Bartley worked as an SEIU organizer for three years.

He decided to return to Buffalo in 2004. “Those were my roots,” he explained, “and I guess I also had a romantic attachment to my hometown. I thought there was lots of potential. So many unorganized people.”

Bartley purchased a 2,600-square-foot home for $5,000 on the city’s West Side, a neighborhood with a per capita income of about $9,000, and home to a diverse population that includes African-Americans and recent immigrants from Somalia, Sudan, and Burma. Although it’s one of Buffalo’s poorest neighborhoods, Bartley saw the ethnic mix, and the influx of immigrants, as a hopeful source of energy.

Bartley spent more than a year engaged in one-on-one discussions with neighborhood residents, union activists, community organizers, leaders of religious congregations, social service providers, and professors at the University of Buffalo. The Massachusetts Avenue Project, a non-profit group that sponsors urban agriculture projects, hired...