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Why has the waterfront been
predominantly inhabited by industrial operations?
The Niagara River provided transportation channels, cheap power and water for
fledgling industries in the late 1800s. With the invention of alternating current
and the harnessing of the Niagara River to produce inexpensive hydroelectric
power, the die was cast that would shape the local economy and industry for
the next 100 years.
The influx of German immigrants to the region in particular catalyzed the emergence
of electrochemical and electro-metallurgical industries along the waterfront.
Successive waves of immigrants to the region provided the necessary labor for
the region’s expanding industrial economy.
Water served as a raw material for production and a waste-disposal vehicle for the region’s industries, including steel, metal, machine and auto manufacturing. An abundant water resource, raw materials, cheap electricity, technological know-how and the well-developed transportation system made the area a direct beneficiary of an increasingly industrializing economy.
Why hasn’t the U.S. side
transitioned into a tourism-based economy like Canada?
This question has largely gone unanswered. After World War II, American population
centers moved to the south and west. Emerging growth sectors of the economy
were no longer manufacturing-based. Other countries re-industrializing after
World War II built production facilities that were more efficient than their
older American counterparts.
These national and global socio-economic trends, together with the emerging environmental awareness in this country, hastened the economic dislocation that has generally plagued this part of the country. Western New York’s heavy reliance on industrial employment is reflected in its acceptance of public subsidies to maintain industrial sectors.
However, state and federal leadership has not focused on the need for policies and programs to energize economic restructuring across the region. We have largely sought to preserve industrial jobs rather than heavily investing in the unknown future of a tourism-based service economy. Our assets go largely unrealized, certainly underutilized and unproductive, in driving the region’s economy.
In contrast, in the late seventies and through the eighties, Ontario realized that growth would occur in service sectors of the economy and that a tourism- driven economy would lead them into the next century. Continuous planning and implementation of those basic strategies have resulted in the discrepancies we see today between both sides of the border.
Notwithstanding the above, the city of Niagara Falls is pushing for redevelopment of its waterfront assets and has made it a central component and of its economic strategy.
Why is land so inexpensive there?
De-industrialization and its attendant social dislocation has generated an enormous
acreage of “derelict properties” and an enormous hemorrhaging of
employment and population from our urban centers and the region as a whole.
This has resulted in a region with some of the worst sprawl in the nation, which
further erodes the public capacity to deal with the underlying problems of urban
reinvestment and brownfield redevelopment. Hopefully New York’s recent
brownfield legislation, with its expanded liability relief and generous tax
incentives, will be a catalyst for redevelopment in the Niagara region. BFN