Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - The bold billion dollar project to cover a portion of the Kensington Expressway from East Ferry Street to Best Street is getting positive reviews from both a planning expert and lawmaker in the Buffalo community.
University of Buffalo's Dean of Architecture and Planning, Bob Shibley, is a noted authority on planning and design projects and turned to often in Buffalo's redevelopment phases. Shibley says the Kensington project has been talked about for decades. "It's not the first time I've heard it, we've been talking about this for twenty years, maybe thirty years, he said. "I do believe it's a complicated project, but it's also very exciting. It's an opportunity to add to the energy already coming off our West Side address to the lake at Ralph Wilson Jr, Centennial Park and the Scajaquada to the north. So when you add in the Kensington you see three projects that are stitching our city back together, after some pretty serious kind of cuts through the city based on transportation logic rather than full on community logic."
"This is great news for the City of Buffalo, period," said Buffalo Common Councilman, Ulysees Wingo. "We bisected a community that was at one time, thriving and we have the opportunity to right the wrong that had been done many many decades ago."
Councilman Wingo believes that this money is only the beginning to the start of a prosperous and cleaner community, "It is going to make the kind of difference that will give the folks over on Humboldt Avenue and in Hammond Park on the East Side of Buffalo, living in Manhattan District, the hope that they need to know that there will be more investment coming on the East Side. This right here is just the beginning."
"It's a community development project," notes Shibley. "It really has to be done in concert with a larger look at Fillmore Avenue and Jefferson Avenue as the historic commercial heart of those communities and make sure that the kind of quality of the park experience, the restoration of Humboldt, is so powerful that people want to make their homes better. They want to infill the vacant lots that they bring more population to that section of the city and in so doing they are establishing the commercial base for those neighborhood service corridors on Fillmore and Jefferson."
Before the project can commence, a $30 million dollar environmental study and the process is trying to be expedited, according to Wingo, "Governor Hochul has tried to expedite this and make sure that it's done before the aforementioned three or four years that it will take just for the study to happen. The study should be done. Soon, I'm looking at this year, as far as having the public comment periods, so that we can get through with this so that the construction can begin."
"We deserve as people living on the East Side of Buffalo, for our air to be clean, we deserve for our community to be reunited with this destruction of the building of the 33. We believe that it's high time for this to be done. We believe that the community deserves better. A billion dollars in the grand scheme of things in the overall scope, It's still only a drop in the bucket from what needs to be done to ensure that the East Side of Buffalo begins to thrive and is rejuvenated," said Wingo.
