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Liberal Place: Buffalo, NY
These are comments on Buffalo, submitted by other Turn Left visitors. They do not necessarily represent the opinion of the webmaster. You may add a comment on Buffalo if you want.
Buffalo NY is friendly to Liberals . I think the people of Buffalo were against this conservative "Contact with America " When they saw it was all take progams from the people and put money in corporations pockets . It was a wakeup call for people to tell congress what is important and not important . Programs for the poor, elderly and the disabled, might not be important to Conservatives , but to people her in Buffalo and to Liberals all over they are very important . I hope you'll add Buffalo NY to the friendly to Liberals column because it belongs there proudly with the other cities who care about the welfare of it's people .

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Buffalo may be politically liberal, but the attitude of the people is a far different story! I grew up there, and will spend the rest of my life being glad I got out. Bigotry is a way of life; minorities are expected to stay in "their" side of town. My parents visited someone in West Seneca (a white suburb) about two years ago; during lunch at a restaurant the local resident expressed shock when an African-American couple came in and sat down in a "white" establishment!

Even the white areas are sub-divided into religious groups. And woe to you if you attend the "wrong" church. It happened to my family while I was growing up; we children were persecuted, our home was vandalized, rocks were thrown at the house, etc., all because we were Lutheran in a Catholic neighborhood.

Think several times before moving to the Buffalo area!

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Just wanted to add a few comments about Buffalo, which is, indeed, a generally progressive city. Although SUNY Buffalo is now primarily concentrated in the primarily conservative suburb of Amherst, the university still has a strong presence in the area, and a large part of Buffalo's population (the part that isn't lower-class victims of the postindustrial economy) is college students and professors. As you might expect of a combination working-class city/college town, it's overwhelmingly Democratic, and the Republicans seldom even bother to put up much of a fight for local political power. (I should point out that Buffalo has fared quite badly since its factories left, and has a large minority population.) Some people look at the old and often crumbling art-deco buildings the city is full of as dead and depressing, but the town has an interesting flavor unlike the lifeless strip-mall sprawl of its suburbs. The atmosphere is generally tolerant, and there is a strong emphasis on community in the city, particularly in more bohemian neigborhoods like the ones along the Elmwood strip and Allentown. There have been instances of intolerance, like during Operation Rescue a few years ago when abortion clinics in the area were harassed, but many of the people involved were out-of-towners who came for the occasion.

The suburbs are more conservative; Republicans tend to prefer the squeaky-clean commercial wasteland of towns like Amherst. The Christian Coalition knew it had no chance in the city itself, and its local HQ is situated waaay out in the second-tier suburb of Clarence. Some conservatives in the surrounding area generally view Buffalo as being a crime-ridden, welfare-mother-intense tax-money vacuum, which I find rather amusing, since they obviously know nothing about a city they live a few minutes away from.

This is not to say that Buffalo is the ideal city for everyone; the job market is pretty weak at this point, there are some pretty rough neighborhoods, and some areas of Buffalo are in dire need of cleanup. But the city is generally quite friendly, and as American cities go, it's a tolerant place.

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