By Walter Pryce
This is an opinion column. It reflects the views of the writer.
For years, the stretch of Main Street in Niagara Falls between Ontario and Michigan avenues was a lesson in what happens when nobody is accountable for a block. Buildings sat vacant and decaying under a single absentee owner while storefronts went dark. One of them, the building now slated for student housing, has been boarded up since at least 2007, WKBW reported.
The city has changed that, and it deserves credit for it. The question now is whether residents will be able to see, building by building, whether the promises being made on Main Street are kept. Right now, they can’t.
The city did the hard part
The Niagara Falls City Council voted 4-1 to move $1.5 million in casino revenue to the city’s Urban Renewal Agency so it could buy 39 mostly vacant properties, 38 of them owned for years by the investment firm Blue Cardinal Capital, plus the Rapids Theatre, according to the Niagara Gazette. Empire State Development added a $2.5 million grant to reimburse the agency for acquisition, stabilization and finding developers. A closely divided council later waived property and school taxes on the properties. The state’s Downtown Revitalization Initiative is putting about $10 million into the streetscape.
That is public money, public land and public tax forgiveness. It is also working, at least on paper. On Thursday, developer Abe Bose of Niagara Development Partners outlined a $25 million plan to turn 2010 and 2018 Main St. into housing for 100 Niagara University students, with shops on the ground floor.
“In a short span of about a year and a half, we now have projects with total projected investment of nearly $50 million in private investment here on Main Street,” Mayor Robert Restaino said, according to Buffalo Toronto Public Media.
Mr. Bose framed the stakes well. “It’s not just about replacing blighted structures with modern premium student housing and ground floor retail. It’s about creating an economic engine that brings foot traffic and daily activity back to this block,” he said.
Promises are easy to announce and hard to track
Here is the problem. A resident who wants to know where things stand on all 38 parcels has no single place to look. The mayor told WKBW that deals are in place for a little under half of them. “I would say we are at least in the 20s of properties we still have that we’re looking to develop,” he said. That is an estimate offered at a press conference, not a public record anyone can check.
Even the timeline for the centerpiece project depends on who is talking. Mr. Bose said construction could start in April or May 2027, with an opening in May or June 2029. WKBW reported that Mr. Restaino hopes to see the student housing open in late 2028. The gap shows why one written schedule matters.
When the first four developers were named in October 2025, the city and ESD said each project would require a “development enforcement mortgage” and would be “monitored until completion.” That is the right tool. A mortgage that lets the agency take a property back if work stalls is exactly what Main Street lacked under absentee ownership. But the public has not been shown the milestones in those agreements, so it cannot tell whether anyone is on schedule.
At the time, Mr. Restaino described the approach this way: “The commitment was to be understanding of the market and what needed to come together, but to also hold people to a tight timeline that they could live with,” he told BTPM. He said the goal was to have developers finish their projects in around two years. A tight timeline only holds people to anything if someone outside City Hall can see it.
The timeline now matters for more than Main Street. On Wednesday the City Council voted 3-1 to again delay a zoning rule meant to bar student rentals in the DeVeaux neighborhood, tying reconsideration to substantial construction on the new Main Street student housing, Niagara Express reported. DeVeaux homeowners now have a direct stake in whether one project’s schedule holds.
The fair objection, and why it doesn’t win
The strongest argument against more disclosure is that redevelopment on a block like this is fragile. Developers are often small, local outfits. Financing depends on historic tax credits and lenders who dislike publicity, and a city that publishes every slipped date risks scaring off the next bidder.
That concern is real, and nothing here requires publishing anyone’s private financial statements or negotiating positions. But once a deal is signed and a public agency has handed over land bought with casino money and a state grant, the basic terms belong to the public: who bought the parcel, for how much, what they promised to build, by when, and what happens if they don’t. Developers who are meeting their milestones have nothing to fear from a list that shows it. And the ones who stall are exactly the reason the enforcement mortgages exist.
The people already investing see the value of momentum. “There are so many other properties that need some love. They need a new idea. They need investment,” Ally Spongr, director of public art for the Niagara Falls National Heritage Area, which plans to turn a former church on Main Street into a market and antique mall, said in October 2025. A public scorecard is how the next investor sees that the city follows through.
What should happen now
Mr. Restaino and the Urban Renewal Agency should post a simple, regularly updated tracker on the city’s website listing all 38 parcels: the developer or the status of the solicitation, the sale price, the key deadlines in each development enforcement mortgage, and whether each project is on schedule. The City Council should ask for a short quarterly report on that tracker at a public meeting. Empire State Development, which put up $2.5 million, should ask for the same reporting as a condition of its support.
“It’s still a long walk to develop the entire property, and no one’s fooled that our job is done here,” Mr. Restaino said Thursday. He’s right. Residents who paid for that walk should be able to see how far along it is. Ask your council member to put the Main Street scorecard on the agenda before the next parcel changes hands.
Featured photo: the former Jenss Department Store on Main Street, by Andre Carrotflower via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped.
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