Why Your Business Needs to be in Buffalo

By John W Howell

I love New York (City). I left my heart in San Francisco. I still miss my Sweet Home Chicago. There’s nothing like the moon over Miami. And what about those beaches in LA?

     But, I live in Buffalo, having recently moved back home from Chicago, and Santa Fe before that. I wouldn’t live anywhere else now, especially given the fact that I came back to start a company dedicated to helping others do the same.

 The numbers tell the story

     Numbers are what keep people from starting the business they always dreamed of, or spell doom for ventures that are under-funded.

     You can’t argue with what the numbers say about the difference between starting a business here versus any of the large market towns I just listed (all of which I’d enjoy living in if I had all the time and money in the world).

     $68:  The going rate for class A office space in New York and DC (with other major cities just slightly less) is $68 per square foot.

     $18-30:  The rate for the most expensive class A space in Buffalo is $30, and it can be had in some downtown buildings for as little as $18. Retail space in downtown Buffalo goes for $15 per foot. Class B space in the city can be had for $10-15, class C (and warehouse space) starts at $5, occasionally less. But your business space is just one piece of the mosaic. How about housing?

     $67,900:  I bought a great arts & crafts house with only minimal rehab needs, within blocks of Buffalo’s best and most expensive neighborhoods, for less than $68K. It has five bedrooms, two baths, three floors, around 3,000 square feet. I can walk easily to the subway, the bus, and one of Buffalo’s most chic strips for great boutiques and restaurants.

    $1:  You could call my house pricey compared to some aspects of the housing market. People are buying houses with great bones for as little as a dollar in Buffalo, and after rehab, have a beautiful home for $10-50K.

     $515: If you prefer to rent, Buffalo’s median monthly rent (including apartments, condos and single family homes) of $515 is second best among major metro areas in the country.

     $1,300: Compare Buffalo’s median rent of $515 to the Bay Area and similar costs in Southern California. That’s an extra $800 per month you don’t have to have, just to live, when you start or grow your business in Buffalo.

     20 Minutes:  Another number that matters is time. Commute time and ease are also key. Unlike any of the major cities I cited, Buffalo’s maximum commute is 20 minutes. You can literally go anywhere in metro Buffalo to anywhere else, by car, absent bad weather or accidents, in 20 minutes. In Chicago it often took 20 minutes just to merge onto the Kennedy Expressway. But here’s another number.

     <2 Hours: In the amount of time it takes for an average suburb-to-downtown commute in Chicago or LA you can travel by car from downtown Buffalo to downtown Toronto, Canada’s largest city. In fact, within a half-day drive of Buffalo or less than an hour flight, one can travel to most of the largest U.S. cities from Buffalo. Buffalo is within a half-day’s drive of nearly 70% of the total population of Canada.

     3: If sports stats are your favorite numbers, you’ll have the opportunity to see three major league franchises (hockey, football, women’s soccer) and enjoy some of the lowest costs for tickets and concessions in the NFL, NHL or WPS (Women’s Professional Soccer).

     $5: If you like the idea of keeping box scores at “American’s Pastime,” you’ll love our retro downtown stadium, Coca Cola Field, home to Buffalo’s Triple A Bisons, and home to the 2012 Triple A All-Star Game, and– recently named “America’s Coolest Minor League Ballpark” by Complex magazine. It’s baseball like it used to be, the way it was meant to be, some would say. If you take advantage of numerous promotions, you can get a ticket for as little as five bucks.

     <$11: For Sabres hockey games at HSBC Arena or Bisons baseball at Coca Cola Field you’ll seldom spend more than $10 to park nearby. When you’re downtown on business you can park for as little as a half-dollar an hour on the street or in some lots.

     9th: People with children are concerned about the numbers ranking schools in the area. We will be honest. Buffalo Public Schools as a whole have their problems, but many of our magnet schools and charter schools in the city are among the best in the state or the nation. City Honors, a public magnet school, has been ranked 9th in the nation by the Washington Post and 16th on Newsweek’s top 500 high schools. Buffalo’s private schools such as Buffalo Seminary (secular all girls’ high school), Nichols School, and Nardin Academy (Catholic all girls school) routinely score even higher than City Honors.

    50%: If you’re interested in private schools, tuition costs around half what you’d pay in the major cities listed above.

##??  Then there are numbers related to natural disasters: categories for hurricanes or tornadoes, Richter scale readings for earthquakes. You know Buffalo is not on the tornado, hurricane, mud slide, flood or earthquake list. Even assuming we have a bad snowstorm every now and then, snow melts, and normally leaves everything it covers intact. The same can’t be said for the effects of disasters and severe weather experienced in some of the country’s “best” cities, such as the Bay Area, LA, & Miami.

     Inches. Lets start with inches of snow. The weather in Buffalo is grossly misunderstood outside of the area. Actually we have some of the best weather in the world for three of four seasons, and our winters (in the city proper) are quite average, for a northern city. The piles of snow you hear about attributed to Buffalo are actually in our southern suburbs, where the wind off Lake Erie dumps snow made from the effect of freezing wind on water. Except in what we call the (suburban) snowbelt, we don’t have any more snow in the city of Buffalo than in New York or Boston, and the last couple of years, we’ve had less.

     Feet:  But, where the snow falls deepest is in some of the best ski country east of the Rockies. It’s less than an hour’s drive from downtown Buffalo to several feet of fresh powder. It makes a great compliment to the tremendous quality and variety of opportunities for water recreation all over Western New York, on two Great Lakes (Erie, Ontario) and the Niagara River, between ski seasons.

     Degrees:  It seldom gets hotter than 90 or colder than zero. Having lived in Chicago for many years before returning to Buffalo I can tell you that winters are normally worse in the windy city than in Buffalo, especially where temperature is concerned. I was amused to hear the spokesperson for the company that makes the electronic parking pay stations used in Chicago express his confusion over the machines freezing up. “I don’t get it,” he said. “We tested them in Buffalo and they worked fine.” Of course. Chicago is colder!

     Too Many to Count:  There are many other numbers that indicate why it might be worth considering moving from your major market city to Buffalo to start a business, or just to find a better life. Numbers such as 27 colleges and universities in the region, such as 23 professional theater companies, such as two world class art museums, such as 75 years of our world class Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, such as numerous hundred year old architectural gems designed by Burnham, Richardson, Wright, and Sullivan et. al, and so much more that makes the quality of life, as well as the numbers of life very favorable in Buffalo, New York.

     1:7 And of course there’s one of the original seven wonders of the world just 2o minutes (sound familiar?) up the Thruway: Niagara Falls!  We never get tired of seeing this awesome (in the true sense of the word) natural wonder, though it is only one of many attractions in and around Buffalo that can take a weekend or a full week (or more) to enjoy.

     Zero! Here’s one more number. That’s how much members of our program pay in their first year in Buffalo to launch or grow a business. Our company, nxtARROW, can arrange a free first year for out of town startups and companies that come to Buffalo to launch or expand. There’s an admission fee to our program that is a reasonable percentage of the value of what you will receive at no charge for the first year here. You just have to agree to stay, and to pay market rates for local services and benefits that are a huge bargain compared to what you’re used to paying now.

     So if you’re thinking of starting a business but have been intimidated by the cost, consider Buffalo. If you have equity in your home in a major market, you might be able to own a home in Buffalo outright with what’s left over from your sale, or use that equity to pay your living expenses until your business starts to support you. The rent is certainly low enough to make that work.

There’s certainly a lot to consider. Why not give it some thought?!

John W Howell, President and Chief Creative Officer at NXT Arrow