Last week, I shared some skepticism about yet another round of plans to “revitalize downtown Buffalo.” I want to explain why. It’s not because I don’t want Buffalo to thrive—I love this place—but because I believe we’re clinging to outdated assumptions. The city has changed. Its DNA has changed. Buffalo is still beautiful. It still matters. But it’s different now, and we refuse to admit this.

Movie director Guillermo del Toro didn’t choose Buffalo by accident. When he came here to film Nightmare Alley, it wasn’t just the buildings that drew him, it was the feeling. Buffalo looks like a place where something important once happened. A city where the past hasn’t left. Where the streets echo and the architecture watches. “Every day that I am here,” del Toro said at a press conference, “I fall in love more and more with it.” He called City Hall “a jewel … a perfectly preserved beautiful Art Deco jewel.”

Buffalo is a place with cinematic grandeur and haunted beauty. It’s no wonder filmmakers come here to shoot period dramas and ghost stories. Because Buffalo, in so many ways, is a ghost story.

It was once among the most important cities in the U.S. A gateway to the interior of the continent. A port powered by the Great Lakes. The final stop on the Erie Canal, which opened this region to the world. Eighty-percent of North America’s surface freshwater flows through this corridor. For more than a century, Buffalo was the meeting point of trade, shipping, and industrial might.

Then came the Welland Canal, which bypassed the city. Globalization followed. The center of gravity shifted. And Buffalo’s relevance—at least in the old sense—evaporated.

The DNA of this city changed. Cities have DNA, just like people. When that DNA changes, you either evolve with it or get stuck living in delusion. In Buffalo, we keep applying revival strategies meant for a city that no longer exists—the Buffalo of 1950, or even 1910—and wonder why nothing sticks.

We’re haunted by a version of Buffalo that isn’t real anymore. And that’s exactly what Nightmare Alley captured so well: a sense of grandeur, crumbling. But haunting doesn’t have to mean doom. We can shed the ghost. We can reimagine. We can move forward. But not if we keep pretending that a seasonal concert series or another brewery district is going to magically resurrect a lost industrial empire.

Around the world, cities change and reinvent themselves all the time. Babylon, once the greatest city in the world, is now little more than ruins in the sand. Small towns near Thetford Mines and Asbestos, Quebec, once built their entire identities—and economies — on mining asbestos. When the world learned the truth about that industry, those towns faded fast. Today, you can buy houses there for almost nothing. Even mighty London, long before it was the center of empire, was a muddy Roman outpost. After conquest, it rebuilt itself into something entirely new.

Change isn’t betrayal; it’s survival. But here in Buffalo, we keep chasing the same dreams from the 1990s. Every generation gets its “Talking Proud” moment:

• Light rail will save us.
• Canal Side will save us.
• A Tesla factory will save us.
• A new football stadium will save us. (Just kidding. They didn’t even build it downtown.)

Meanwhile, Buffalo’s poverty rates remain among the worst in the country: nearly 30% overall, and over 40% for children. This isn’t due to a lack of blueprints. It’s a failure of imagination and a failure of civic courage. 

We suffer from timid leadership, people who are unwilling to ask hard questions and instead remain content to manage slow decline rather than inspire bold transformation. Leaders who prefer to cut ribbons instead of challenging assumptions. Who give lip service to revitalization and civic pride but shrink from the difficult choices that real change demands—like relocating the Bills stadium to the city, a move that might have actually sparked a new economic and cultural core. Buffalo doesn’t need more slogans; we need leadership willing to risk something.

I understand the general urban planning posture, that sprawl is the enemy and we must reinvest in our cores. That logic makes sense in places like Houston or Los Angeles, where artificial suburban sprawl helped destroy historic urban centers. But Buffalo’s story is the opposite: we’re not suffering from too much sprawl, but from a forced fixation on downtown revitalization that ignores the changing geography of our economy and our lives. We’re funneling energy into a downtown that no longer makes economic sense at the expense of the region around it.

Our “new” mayor (already a state legislator for 13 years) won with just a few thousand votes, a margin you’d expect in a small-town election, not New York State’s second-largest city. He came into office promising bold change. And, to his credit, he has supported the restoration of the Olmsted parks system. 

But when it came to truly transformative decisions—like advocating for the Bills stadium to be downtown; or pushing for the return of the University of Buffalo to the city’s core; or, finally, reimagining Central Terminal as a regional train hub—we heard nothing from him or any other entrenched local leader. Instead, we built a small Amtrak station under a faded overpass of exhaust, as if the 21st century had never arrived.

And the pattern continues. Instead of building on our true regional strengths, we keep investing in ideas designed to serve a version of Buffalo that died decades ago.

We have strengths. Real ones.

Buffalo sits beside Niagara Falls, the most visited natural attraction in North America: 14 million visitors a year—more than the Great Wall, more than the Eiffel Tower—and we treat it like an afterthought. We offer them budget motels and shuttered streets. No grand lodge. No world-class museum. No regional rail link to get them here from Toronto or New York. Just missed opportunities, over and over again.

When I hear “Buffalo Niagara,” it feels less like a vision for regional revitalization and more like a holdover from the past. Shouldn’t it be “Niagara Buffalo”? If that sounds offensive to Buffalo, what does it say about Niagara Falls—a global destination that draws millions, yet is treated like a regional afterthought? Maybe it’s time we not only rethink our priorities, but also the order in which we say them.

We spent hundreds of millions on “Canalside.” The only problem? There isn’t even a canal there. I know people get mad when I say that, but there isn’t. Meanwhile, North Tonawanda, a place with an actual canal, has quietly become one of the most vibrant and creative hubs in the region. Restaurants, culture, private investment. No slogans, only modest state investment. Just momentum.

What I’m calling for isn’t an abandonment of downtown Buffalo, but to rethink our vision of regional revitalization. We need a regional strategy that reflects our current DNA, not a zombie version of the city’s past. That means investing where activity already exists: in Niagara Falls, in North Buffalo, in agriculture, in the arts, and in our park and trail systems. It means fanning the flames that are already burning, not trying to resurrect a corpse from a Guillermo del Toro movie.

“There is something suspect about a person who clings too tightly to their old truths,” wrote Christopher Hitchens, “even as the world around them changes.” Buffalo doesn’t need to be what it was. It can be something new, something real, but only if we stop pretending we’re still who we used to be.

So, yes, I said we need to rethink our vision of downtown. Not to abandon it, but to redefine it. To expand our thinking beyond a few blocks of office buildings and into the full regional story we’re actually living.

Buffalo is still beautiful. Still powerful. Still worth fighting for. But it is not what it was—and that’s not a tragedy. That’s a regional invitation, one that each successive generation has failed to accept.

Feature imaged: downtown Buffalo, from the Carol Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress. This essay has been reprinted with the permission of the author.