Tor-Buff-Chester may not be a figment of Florida’s imagination

Richard Florida will hit the promo trail for his new book The Great Reset next month armed with statistics that vindicate everything he was on about regarding this here mega-region he defined for his previous work, Who’s Your City? The geographical triangle he audaciously branded Tor-Buff-Chester incorporates two of the four American cities calculated by research group the Brookings Institution to have best weathered the recession — with the smallest increase in unemployment over the last couple years. Now, this is partly because both towns were in pretty dire shape prior to 2008, although the shift to areas like health care and academia over steel manufacturing and Kodak processing was therefore in motion before the rest of the U.S.A. was rattled. And a weaker American dollar led to a renaissance of cross-border shopping, too. Buffalo News columnist David Robinson is pretty pragmatic: “Like an overmatched boxer, we tend to get clobbered so hard by recessions that, by the time we manage to dust ourselves off and stagger to our feet again, we’re already lined up to be on the receiving end of another haymaker.” Crunching the numbers, Buffalo still hasn’t recovered from the downturn of 1981-82. A forthcoming summit from the Binational Tourism Alliance will ponder how to sustain the momentum of the mega-region: indeed, the bicentennial of the War of 1812 is just two years away. You’ll only know things have gotten out of hand again when someone proposes a revival of the ferry ride to Rochester.