It’s Not All Bad Here In Western New York

There was recently sad business news when the New Era Hat Company announced that it was closing its manufacturing plant in Derby. Yet, the very next day, there were comments from other manufacturers in the Buffalo area indicating that they had potential job openings for those workers who were losing their jobs.

I was especially encouraged that one of those comments came from a young man I know who grew up here and now owns a manufacturing business in Buffalo. It shows you that there can be a future in Western New York for our young people. They might not always come back to Chautauqua County, but they could be close by in Erie County.

When you look at the nation at large, Buffalo is really a small town. Yet, Buffalo and the Western New York area as a whole support an NFL and an NHL team, have a large research University, a very diverse population, and remain a good place for manufacturing. When you add to that the relative low cost of living and housing, and fewer traveling headaches than if you lived in a Chicago or New York–it can be a magnet for getting some of our kids to come home and live here.

I don’t think that Western New York will ever suffer from the urban sprawl of a Los Angeles or Chicago, but that is one of its strengths. Yes, the winters can be bad and you might not be able to command as big a salary as in Silicon Valley. But, in terms of livability and establishing a home…it is a pretty good place to be.

There is another real plus and that is the cost of education. Many of my friends’ grown children live in large urban areas and spend a lot of money sending their kids to private schools. Around here, you can find very good K-12 public schools. Yes, we have too many school districts and school taxes are high. Yet, you get something for it. You can graduate from a public school in Western New York and be accepted into the finest universities in the country. That is a good thing.

We have our problems. We have poverty and sometimes our infrastructure gets old and out-of-date. Because we are an older area of the country and a bit off the “beaten path,” we have not experienced a lot of growth and so we have to fix up the old as we build the new.

If global warming is a worry, remember that we live on high ground and the water all goes downhill from here!

Yet, the bottom line is that there are reasons to be optimistic about where we live. When you read about the fires in California and the hurricanes in Florida, maybe living through a few snow storms in Western New York is really not at all that bad. Also, if global warming is a worry, remember that we live on high ground and the water all goes downhill from here! It is probably my age, but the longer I live in this region of the country–the better I like it.

Rolland Kidder 

This article first appeared in The Post-Journal on December 16, 2018