COMMERCIAL BUILDING STABILIZATION
FUND UPDATE

ESD is partnering with Preservation Buffalo Niagara and City of Buffalo Department of Permits and Inspection Services to implement the Fund.

ABOUT THE FUND

As part of the East Side Corridor Economic Development Fund (an initiative of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo’s Buffalo Billion), Empire State Development (ESD) established a $5 million East Side Commercial Building Stabilization Fund that will help to protect the fabric, density, character, and community on the East Side – making sure that building assets on the East Side that may have current challenges are able to be maintained for prospective future development as mixed-use, retail, and commercial uses, and can help to build up the strong commercial activity already present in areas on the East Side.

FUND GOALS

The Fund will provide a dedicated funding source that will support near-term stabilization of at-risk historic buildings on the East Side with preference given to those buildings along commercial corridors especially in the target investment areas of the East Side Corridor Economic Development Fund. The Fund will support smaller, seal-up efforts such as roof patching, mothballing precautions, etc.—or rather, correcting obstacles that are preventing active use and business activity – to help prevent crisis-level failures in the future or, even worse, additional emergency demolitions of the existing urban fabric along commercial corridors.  It will ensure that buildings with code violations or structural deficiencies, but where there is not a currently viable project, are not torn down as a short-sighted “solution”; rather, such buildings will be kept viable through the Fund, so that when there are market opportunities, the resources themselves will be intact and available for re-use.

Visit the PBN website for details.