The Census Bureau doesn’t publish its data for Buffalo’s Common Council districts, so finding out who lives in a district, and how that is changing, has never been easy. In January 2022 we launched the Buffalo Council District Information System to make it easier. It built Census Bureau estimates up from census blocks to council districts, and the next month it became the model for our Rochester Council District Information System. In February 2023, after the city redrew its district lines, we released an updated version. It showed change over ten years, let users choose the new district lines or the old ones, and could switch from council districts to the city’s planning neighborhoods.
A month earlier, as part of the ILR Buffalo Co-Lab’s Equality Initiative, we had begun a series of tools for the #BuffaloHonest conversation that Buffalo’s Poet Laureate, Jillian Hanesworth, started amid the tragedies of 2022. The first was the Buffalo WalkScore Cluster Map, which found that Black residents were about half as likely as white residents to live in the city’s most walkable blocks (16.6% against 32.1%). We said then that the series was building toward one comprehensive Buffalo indicators dashboard, giving residents quick access to data they could use to describe and understand inequality in their city.
Today we’re releasing that dashboard. The Buffalo Community Information System replaces the Council District and Neighborhood Information System, and its Landscape view, with Walk Score ratings for every district and neighborhood, takes over from the WalkScore Cluster Map. It also goes well beyond census data, to who owns Buffalo’s property and how it is kept up, what the city’s property tax breaks cost, where money is going into buildings and where neglect shows, and the street trees and zoning that shape each neighborhood.
What’s in it
Results are available for the city, its nine Common Council districts and its 35 planning neighborhoods.
- People and housing come from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey for 2020-24, 2015-19 and 2010-14, so the profiles show change over ten years, and from the 2010 and 2020 censuses for population, race and ethnicity. As in the original system, each block group’s estimates are divided among its census blocks and the blocks are regrouped into districts and neighborhoods. The original divided every measure by population; the new system divides each one by what it counts, whether people, households or housing units. Built up this way, the 2020-24 citywide figures agree with the Census Bureau’s own estimates for Buffalo on all 39 measures, within half a percent for counts and medians and half a percentage point for shares. When the Census Bureau releases a newer survey, the next rebuild picks it up and moves the comparison periods forward with it, with no change to the code.
- Owners and code violations come from the state’s copies of the City’s assessment rolls for 2021 to 2025, the City’s 2026 roll, the City’s code violation records and its rental registry. Properties are linked into one owner group when their tax bills go to the same mailing address or when a company or organization of exactly the same name owns them, so a landlord’s properties can be seen together rather than one building at a time. An address that gets bills for many unrelated owners, such as a tax service, links nothing, and a link is a lead to check against deeds and state filings, not proof of common ownership.
- Tax breaks cover five sections of state law: industrial development agency projects (412-a), nonprofit organizations (420-a), low- and moderate-income housing (421-e), mixed-use conversions (485-a) and business investment (485-b). Each exempt property is priced at that year’s City, school and county tax rates, using the City’s separate rates for homestead and non-homestead property, for the 2021-22 to 2025-26 tax years.
- Investment and disinvestment come from the City’s building permits since 2009, its code violations since 2017, and its 311 requests about housing, vacant property, dumping, rodents and streets since 2009. Too few of the older dumping and street requests can be placed in an area, so for districts and neighborhoods those two start in 2022.
- The landscape comes from the City’s street tree inventory, its Green Code zoning map and Walk Score’s ratings of how walkable and bikeable each census block with residents is, averaged over the residents of each district and neighborhood.
The system is built in Python from public data. Apart from the City’s tax rates, which we copy from its yearly rate sheets, every step from the downloads to the charts is in code, so each part can be rebuilt when its source is updated. It shares its look with the rebuilt Wage Atlas, Federal Impacts Dashboard and NYS Evictions Dashboard.
How to use it
The views are listed across the top of the page.
- Area profiles describes who lives in the city, a council district or a neighborhood, and how that has changed over ten years. Choose an area, or select one on the map.
- Rankings and map compares the districts or the neighborhoods on any measure, in any period or by how much it changed.
- Landlords and violations looks up a property or an owner: the code violations the City has cited there, who owns it, and the other properties linked to the same owner. It also lists the owners with the most open violations.
- Tax breaks maps every property with one of these breaks and adds up what each kind of break costs the City, its schools and Erie County each year. Nonprofit exemptions are off when the page opens, and a glossary explains each kind of break.
- Investment and disinvestment follows permits and what they’re worth, homes added and lost, demolitions, code violations and complaints to 311 year by year, for each district and neighborhood, and lists every permit of $1 million or more, largest first.
- Landscape shows the street trees in each part of the city, the empty spots where trees could go, how walkable and bikeable each area is, and how the Green Code zones the land.
- About the data lists every source and explains how each figure is computed.
On the shaded maps, a darker shade means a higher value. Maps of change show falls in red and rises in gray, with darker shades for bigger changes. Each view offers its data for download.
What it shows
Buffalo grew in the 2010s, and poverty has fallen, but not evenly. The 2020 census counted 278,349 people in Buffalo, up from 261,310 in 2010, the city’s first gain since 1950. The poverty rate fell from 30.9% in 2010-14 to 26.0% in 2020-24. It still ranges from 13.6% in the Delaware District to 34.7% in the Fillmore District, and from 9.5% in South Park to 46.1% in Genesee-Moselle among the neighborhoods.
Half of Buffalo’s renters are cost-burdened. In 2020-24, 52.3% of renter households paid 30% or more of their income for rent, and 30.9% paid half or more, down only slightly from 54.8% and 33.6% in 2010-14.
The City is citing more code violations, mostly through rental inspections. It recorded 33,940 code violations in 2025, half again as many as the 22,573 in 2017, the first full year in its records. The increase comes from rental registry inspections, which first appear in the records in 2021 and produced 13,300 of 2025’s violations. Without them, the count fell, to 20,640 in 2025. As of October 2026, 83,147 violations were open on 17,671 properties. The lookup links the city’s 93,568 parcels to 58,899 owners, and 17,376 of them, not counting government, own more than one property or a registered rental.
Nonprofit exemptions are the largest tax break. In the 2025-26 tax year, the value exempted under the nonprofit organization break (420-a), which covers churches, private schools and colleges, hospitals and charities, would have paid an estimated $36.4 million in City, school and county taxes at that year’s rates. The other four breaks came to $23.6 million: $9.0 million for low- and moderate-income housing, $8.4 million for mixed-use conversions, $5.7 million for industrial development agency projects, before the payments in lieu of taxes that many of those projects make, and $0.5 million for business investment. These figures are not money the City would collect without the breaks. Because tax rates are set to raise a levy, an exemption shifts the tax onto other property owners.
Investment is concentrated. Building permits declared $854 million of work in 2025. From 2021 through 2025, the Fillmore and Ellicott districts drew more than half of the $3.8 billion in permitted work across the city, in 2025 dollars, while the University and Lovejoy districts drew about $130 million each. Demolitions have fallen from 907 in 2009 to 68 in 2025.
Nearly half of the city’s tree sites are empty. The City’s inventory counts 68,898 trees along streets and in parks, and only 51.9% of the sites where a tree could grow have one. Maples make up a third of the trees (33.9%), which leaves the canopy exposed to any pest or disease that strikes them.
Walkability depends on where you live. The average Buffalo resident’s block has a Walk Score of 68 and a Bike Score of 63, and 45.4% of residents live on blocks Walk Score calls very walkable (70 or more). In the Niagara District that is 97.2% of residents; in the Lovejoy District, 3.3%. Among the neighborhoods, Walk Scores range from 42 in Seneca Babcock to 93 in Allentown.
Tell us what you see
These are a few starting points. Open the system, find your district or neighborhood, and look up the properties on your block. If something looks wrong, or there’s something you’d like the system to track, let us know.