Q & A
Aaron Bartley, executive director, PUSH Buffalo
By Jana Eisenberg; photo by kc kratt

Aaron Bartley
Aaron Bartley is the executive director and a co-founder of People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH) Buffalo. He is a slightly scruffy, young/old thirty-three with a casual yet intense demeanor and a killer vocabulary. For the last four years, he has brought his remarkable focus to bear on Buffalo’s West Side. From PUSH’s offices in a former library on Grant Street near Lafayette, he recently talked the talk with Spree.

What started you on the path to activism?
Growing up in Buffalo in the seventies, I went to an experimental public school; its radical pedagogy gave kids more space than they probably deserved to explore ideas. I give the school credit for giving me a sense of the underlying politics. It was well-integrated, and open to social change. Then, City Honors School, even though it was relatively privileged, exposed me to people of other ethnicities and experiences. Other influences include my parents; though they’re not activists, they are political, with progressive left-wing ideals. They also taught me to embrace the Catholic church’s honor of working people. Concretely, that meant resisting the inertia that can come with suburban living.

Then what?
I went to Swarthmore College. The academic life is almost uniquely cerebral and internal. My family is not overly academic—I became absorbed with the life of the mind.

How have these different environments affected you?
My life feels compartmentalized—it changed so dramatically when I was in school, and now it’s changed back to living in the world again.

What was your first actual activist experience?
During two years off between college and Harvard Law, I interned with a janitors’ union, transitioning toward this life. I had done all the reading and processing—my bachelor’s is in political science—and then I jumped in. During this internship, I connected with the interpersonal elements; I was exposed to a rich cultural milieu of people from all over. From the idealistic and political sides of things, these people didn’t meet any stereotypes of being poor. They worked like crazy, their families were intact, and yet they were barely surviving. There was no reason for them to have to suffer.

How did this affect you when you went to law school?
At Harvard, the inequality just slaps you in the face. The main culture was not so much class-based, like in the thirties, but there seemed to a haze of a different type of privilege. Everyone’s focus on “the next rung”—that job at one of the top five law firms—allowed them to be oblivious. Something had to be done. I had experience organizing immigrants and felt comfortable striking up conversations with people. I ended up cofounding the Harvard Living Wage Campaign. It advocated on behalf of over 2,000 university service workers, and resulted in $10 million in annual wage and benefit increases for those it represented.

You headed back to Buffalo about five years ago. Did you know what you were going to do?
No. I took a job as interim director at the Massachusetts Avenue Project, whose mission is to build the community through food, urban farming and entrepreneurship. Between working and living in the neighborhood, I began to look at the conditions here. I met [PUSH community organizer] Eric Walker; we had a shared perspective on how class and race have shaped American cities. We talked about the trauma of the post-industrial loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs in this region and in others like it. We both see this as a paramount factor in what’s happened in and to Buffalo. And we’ve been at it together ever since. We began by talking about where the city and the neighborhood are going. We want to build grassroots energy around those questions.

What is the end goal?
We’ve inherited this incredible city; it’s filled with both natural and architectural gifts. We’ve got the big cultural assets. And we also have the vernacular of the street architecture … nowhere else in the U.S. has the number of Victorian-era homes that Buffalo does. Instead of looking at silver-bullet ideas to transform the city, like a Bass Pro or a casino, we need to scale down the vision and root it in places where people live. This idea is compatible with the way a lot of things are going, like in Richmond, Virginia. A program called “Neighborhoods in Bloom” chose a few communities and worked together to prevent them from becoming abandoned. It succeeded, and in the process, peripheral areas began to stabilize, too. Stabilization is economic development.

How do you make it work?
There are two tracks—one is the practical, concrete goals, fixing and rehabbing houses. The more abstract, policy part is investing in the existing homes. For example, the state owns abandoned houses that, instead of being invested in to become profitable and livable, ended up with a negative value—i.e., once there are no positive returns, you have to spend $10,000 to $12,000 to demolish each one. We have to paint this picture for people here; get them to want to be actively involved.

What is the city doing?
We were startled to learn that for every ninety to 100 houses that Syracuse and Rochester rehabs through nonprofit/public money partnerships, Buffalo does six to ten. That really adds up over thirty or forty years. That “macro” lack of investment is part of the spiraling down. If private landlords don’t see anything happening on a block, they are not going to put a new roof on. The mayor has now committed to 500 rehabilitations over five years. We see this as a new chapter in learning “best practices.” And we see ourselves as having responsibilities to help to meet that goal. Right now, our organization can’t do all 500, but we want to get up to doing twenty units per year.

What can the average person do?
Look towards restoration. Be active. Be aware of and value the legacy of the architecture and character of whatever town you live in. Everything is pointing towards the ideas of independent businesses versus franchises or chains, and thinking more about local and community lifestyles—walking to the store, etc. East Aurora and Williamsville are embracing these ideals to some degree.

What can be learned from Elmwood Village?
It is a model in terms of design for all of Buffalo’s neighborhoods, including low-income ones. And it’s not just ideological—accomplishing these goals positions Buffalo to survive; makes it more interesting and vibrant, gives it place. Building chain stores on the Buffalo/Kenmore border doesn’t help the Buffalo “brand” or our local economy.

What about jobs?
We embrace Obama’s rhetoric around the “green jobs economy.” Practically speaking, we look at the West Side. Sixty to seventy percent of its housing stock is uninsulated, and it’s up to twenty percent vacant. Can we bring it back to create efficient houses and create neighborhood-based employment? It would make the neighborhoods viable, livable.

Where do you see Buffalo in twenty years?
It is an area that should be populated, unlike a desert that has no way of sustaining itself. With our water, wind, and hydro power, we’ve got tremendous assets for the future.

Jana Eisenberg was raised by progressive, left-wing idealists also. In order to rebel, she would have had to become a Republican banker. She never went that far.


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