PUSH Buffalo hosts Spring cleanup

By Kyla Goodfellow and John Fetter
BengalNews Reporters

Wooden doors, living room chairs, sheets of carpet, and other dusty and deserted remnants were pushed out windows and doorways of an abandoned house and thrown into massive blue dumpsters with a ground-shaking thud.

That was the scene on March 17 at 43 Lawrence Place where People United for Sustainable Housing, a local organization working to rebuild the West Side, started part one of its two-part Spring Cleaning program.

Local PUSH volunteers joined forces with a group of Princeton University students from New Jersey, volunteering as a part of their studies, to empty the organization’s newly acquired vacant two-story property and prepare it for rehabilitation, but ultimately to transform it into affordable housing for West Side people in need.

“What we’re going to do is empty it out, make sure there’s no leaks in the roof or broken windows and then we’re going to board it up and wait until we can find the money to rehab it. We really want to make sure that we have enough money so that we can make it a quality house,” said Whitney Yax, PUSH’s community planner.

Whitney Yax speaks about PUSH projects:


Joshua Smith, PUSH’s landscape manager, said the organisation is focused on rehabbing properties and turning them into rental units that are very affordable for people.

During the six-hour cleaning session PUSH volunteers sporting industrial gloves and white masks emptied both floors of the cluttered house, filling up nearly three dumpster’s worth of trash. But hidden in the rubbish were salvageable items.

“We have just filled up our second dumpster…but we did save everything that’s usable. It will all get donated into the neighborhood or to Goodwill,” Smith said.

Luckily for PUSH organizers it was surprisingly sunny for a Buffalo day in March and residents flocked over to lend a hand.

“It turned out to be a beautiful day so we got tons of folks, people just waking by. We had a bunch of folks from Gateway Longview, a father-son mentoring program, come down and they were really helpful and we had a lot of PUSH members,” said Yax.

Tim Lowert, a local PUSH volunteer, was also impressed by the interest shown by members of the wider community.

“People are really getting behind it. We’ve had locals walk past and put gloves on and help out. People driving past in their cars are stopping and asking what’s going on,” he said.

Lowert said he decided to help out because he knows how much work PUSH has done to get useable urban housing in the area for locals in need.

Yax said PUSH homes are so affordable and of such a high quality that tenants just don’t want to leave.

“Most of our tenants have been longer term. Once you come into a PUSH house you usually want to stay because it’s nice and their heat bills are low,” she said.

PUSH is utilizing energy-efficient technology to downsize utility bills for the home’s future residents.

“We’re aiming to make it net zero energy efficiency. It basically means that as much energy that is consumed by the household gets produced by the house so it turns out to be equal and theoretically there will be zero dollars in energy bills,” said Yax.

The second part of PUSH’s Spring Cleaning program will be held April 25, at Good Neighbors Park, located on the corner of 15th Street and West Utica.

According to Yax, the volunteers have a lot of work ahead of them in order to transform the deteriorated park into a more functional space for everyone who lives around the area.

“So we’re going to be there on April 25 cleaning up the park, raking leaves and trash from the streets and cleaning up our vacant lots, about almost 20 vacant lots in this area, so we have a lot of work to do. We’re hoping to get about a hundred people if not more,” said Yax.

“It’s called our Spring Cleaning Party because we’re going to have a party afterwards in the park so it should be a lot of fun. If it’s a nice day it will be great,” said Yax.