Quality of life in Buffalo

The largest city in New York State's Niagara Frontier, Buffalo is a city full of surprises. Though Buffalo is sometimes the butt of jokes about chicken wings, its long-suffering sports teams, and the mountains of snow under which it is supposedly buried each winter, local residents and others who are in the know tell a different story: one of vibrant nightlife, world-class museums and cultural attractions, tight-knit neighborhoods with community spirit and a real sense of place, a winning combination of high quality of life and low cost of living — and the sunniest summers in the Northeastern United States. A great part of Buffalo's appeal to visitors is the still-palpable sense of its history as an important industrial center. Majestic historic buildings and sites around every corner tell the story of a city that was great once and has all the tools in place to be great again someday.

Outside of Buffalo itself are a number of suburbs. Unlike the faceless cookie-cutter residential tracts surrounding other American cities, many of Buffalo's suburbs have real character — individual identities of which their residents are fiercely proud. More than that, suburbia's range of attractions, festivals and events, and other items of interest to visitors can hold its own with the urban core.

Buffalo is New York State's second-largest city, with (as of 2010) a population of 261,310 in the city proper and 1,135,509 in the Buffalo-Niagara Falls Metropolitan Area. Buffalo is the cultural and economic center of the Western New York region. Though for the past half-century it has been rightly considered a stagnant working-class city that has suffered from the aftereffects of deindustrialization, Buffalo's economy has turned around significantly, with an unemployment rate in April 2014 of 5.8%, running below the national rate of 5.9% and the statewide rate of 6.1% for that month. Perhaps surprisingly given its history as a center of heavy industry, Buffalo has also recently been cited as the third-cleanest city in the United States. Recently, Buffalo was named one of the Dozen Distinctive Destinations for 2009 by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, whose 2011 National Preservation Conference was held in Buffalo and was the largest and best-attended of these annual conferences in the history of that organization. Other titles bestowed on Buffalo in recent years include a placement among the "44 Places to Visit in 2009" by the New York Times, the "All-America City Award" for the years 1996 and 2002, and one of the 10 best cities in the U.S. to raise a family, according to a 2010 feature in Forbes magazine.