Buffalo, New York, the city that gave America chicken wings, a football team that enjoys breaking furniture, and roughly nine months of gray sky per calendar year, is apparently back in the news again.
Not for a table-smashing incident at a Bills tailgate.
Apparently people are moving there on purpose.
People with functioning internet connections and access to Zillow are voluntarily choosing to live near a lake that occasionally turns into a snow cannon.
Rent is cheap, houses cost less than a used Honda, and you can apparently buy a whole Victorian mansion for the price of a studio apartment in Brooklyn.
The catch, of course, is that you have to live in Buffalo.
Now before the upstate loyalists come for me in the comments, let’s be fair.
The waterfront isn’t a parking lot anymore, there’s actual craft beer, and the food scene punches way above its weight.
Also, and I cannot stress this enough, the wings are objectively better there.
But let’s talk about the elephant in the room: the weather.
Every Buffalo transplant I’ve ever met goes through the same five stages.
Stage one is “the summers are beautiful.” Stage two is “you get used to the snow.” Stage three is the first lake-effect event, where they learn that “snow” in Buffalo means “your car is now a two-dimensional object.” Stage four is crying in a Wegmans parking lot.
Stage five is becoming a person who says “it builds character” unironically.
Because a mortgage payment that doesn’t require a second job is a powerful drug.
Because you can leave work at 5 and be at a Sabres game by 7, then home by 10, which is a fantasy in most American cities.
Because your neighbor will plow your driveway without being asked and then refuse to accept money for it, which is either wholesome or deeply suspicious depending on your upbringing.
The real story here isn’t that Buffalo is trendy.
It’s that Buffalo never cared about being trendy in the first place.
This is a city that got left for dead when the steel mills closed, shrugged, opened a few breweries, and kept going.
That’s just stubbornness with a marketing budget.
If you need sunshine to regulate your emotions, Buffalo will humble you by October.
But if you want a city where the cost of living doesn’t require a GoFundMe and the people are aggressively normal, well, the secret’s already out.
Just know that the locals are too busy eating beef on weck and judging your pizza to care.
That might be the healthiest attitude in America right now.
Final Thoughts
My take: Buffalo is the friend who never got famous and is weirdly fine with it, which makes them more interesting than half the cities charging $3,000 for a one-bedroom.