Transcription:
Ambient grocery store sounds (00:01):
Welcome. If you have your frequent shopper card, please scan it now. Scan items one at a time.
Allissa Kline (00:07):
I'm inside Tops Grocery Store on Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo, New York. In the early afternoon of Saturday, May 14th, 2022, an 18-year-old white man who lived at the other end of the state walked into this store with the intent to kill as many Black people as he could. In mere minutes, inside the only grocery store on the city's East Side, he shot 13 people, killing 10 of them and inflicting trauma across an entire community. In the days and weeks that followed, as shock and disbelief turned into grief and rage, there was an unprecedented outpouring of support for the East Side, for the Jefferson Avenue corridor, from politicians and nonprofits, individuals and corporations including banks, all trying to meet the immediate needs of the community, namely food, but also mental health resources. Conversations turn to the conditions on the East Side, issues like segregation, racism, poverty and inequity that positioned the community as a target for a white supremacist.
The East Side, you see, is an area that for generations has been segregated, isolated and disenfranchised from the wealthier, and whiter, parts of Buffalo. The 14208 ZIP code, where Tops is located, has one of the highest percentages of Black residents in New York state. The fact that the shooter wound up in this community was not an accident.
(01:48)
My name is Allissa Kline and I'm a reporter for American Banker. This is Bankshot, a podcast about banks, finance, and the world we live in.
I live 5.3 miles from Tops on Jefferson Avenue. I remember that Saturday being a bright spring day. In the morning, I took my five-year-old daughter to soccer. We had lunch at Wegmans, another grocery store chain, and then we ran a few errands.
Around 4 p.m., I received a text message from my father, who lives three hours away. "Stay away from Tops in Buffalo," he wrote. I had not been online or checked social media in hours, so I immediately Googled Tops and Buffalo to find out what he was talking about.
Franchelle Parker (02:36):
Saturday morning, I was actually on my way to Tops to get a donut and an unsweet iced tea.
Allissa Kline (02:44):
That's Franchelle Parker, a community organizer and the executive director of Open Buffalo, a nonprofit focused on racial, economic and ecological justice whose office is located about one block north of Tops on Jefferson Avenue.
Franchelle Parker (03:00):
And I seen on Twitter, actually, that there was an active shooter at Tops, and at that point, no one knew exactly what was happening, but just to stay away.
Allissa Kline (03:15):
Parker, who grew up in nearby Niagara Falls, was torn about whether to go home or keep heading to the Jefferson Avenue corridor to see if she could help. She wound up going home, but the next day she was on site, grieving with the community.
Franchelle Parker (03:30):
The only way that I could explain my feeling, it was almost like watching an old war movie when a bomb had gone off and someone's in shell shock. That's how it felt.
Allissa Kline (03:49):
For weeks and weeks after the shooting, as I read local and national press and, like others, grappled with how to make sense of such tragedy, an idea for a story kept turning over in my head: What is the role of banks in fixing deeply entrenched problems in segregated communities that banks' past lending practices such as redlining helped create? What do banks owe a community like the East Side, which was targeted by a white supremacist because of the sheer concentration of black residents within its borders?
Over the course of many months of reporting, I found consensus around the idea that banks do have a role to play and there's more they could do, but how deep their obligation lies depends on who's talking.
Now, more than a year after the Tops massacre, a growing number of community leaders, activists, and other East Side stakeholders are looking for the banking industry to do more. They argue that banks, because of their powerful role as financiers and because of the industry's history of lending discrimination, have a greater responsibility to address the East Side's generational challenges.
Pastor George Nicholas (05:02):
Pastor George Nicholas, senior pastor, Lincoln Church, Buffalo, New York, and chair of the Buffalo Center for Health Equity.
Allissa Kline (05:10):
Pastor Nicholas has led Lincoln Memorial United Methodist Church since 2010. He was baptized and married in this church, which sits a few blocks north of Tops.
Pastor George Nicholas (05:22):
This church sits on the East Side of Buffalo and has a very long history of prosperity in a lot of ways. It was a church that many middle class African Americans attended, you know the past president of the Urban League, and you know educators, business owners, and it was a much different community then.
Allissa Kline (05:50):
Pastor Nicholas moved away from Buffalo for several years. When he came back, he found that the community was worse than it used to be.
Pastor George Nicholas (05:59):
East Side communities, Black communities, have been decimated. And so now it's a community that's filled with high poverty rates, low graduation rates, filled with disparities in disease, chronic diseases, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, no access or very little access to fresh food, healthy food, high crime rates, but overpoliced. And so your pretty case study of what happens in urban communities when their growth and development is not prioritized.
Allissa Kline (06:44):
The pastor says banks have a huge responsibility to help the East Side, one that goes beyond marking the one-year anniversary of the massacre.
Pastor George Nicholas (06:54):
So what we need, one of the things that banks can do is provide leadership. You can't come down here on May 15th with your shirts on and food and talk about us and "One Buffalo," right? And not really say, mean it in a larger, more longitudinal way. It can't be episodic. And so if we feel that this is "One Buffalo" and the East Side of Buffalo and the Black community is part of that "one," then we have to say, "OK, what can we do with our power and influence, skills, resources, what we have? This is what we have. We have a lot more than bags of groceries that we can give you. We can do a lot more than that."
Allissa Kline (07:43):
How the East Side of Buffalo and the Tops store on Jefferson Avenue became a destination for a racially motivated mass murderer is a story about racism, segregation and disinvestment. For all of Buffalo's fantastic qualities — the arts, the architecture, the restaurants and parks, gorgeous summers and, again these days, the Buffalo Bills — it has long been one of the most racially segregated cities in America. Of the 114,000-plus residents who live on the East Side, 59% are Black, according to census data, and within the 14208 ZIP code where the mass shooting happened, nearly 76% of the 11,000-plus residents are Black.
The segregation of Buffalo goes back to the first half of the 20th century when a small number of Black people began migrating to the city, a manufacturing hub, in search of jobs. At first, they moved into the same neighborhoods as many of the city's poorer immigrants. As the number of Black people increased in the 1940s, they faced housing discrimination in the form of redlining, which is the practice of restricting the flow of capital into minority communities.
Jason Richardson (08:57):
Redlining, as we know it, is related to the Home Owner's Loan Corporation, which during the Great Depression sent examiners into about 200 cities to better understand where in those cities were mortgages that they wanted to buy.
Allissa Kline (09:13):
That's Jason Richardson, senior director of research at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. The NCRC is a group of associations that advocates for fair lending. Richardson says the goal of the HOLC was to free up mortgage capital by giving banks a way to unload mortgages so they could turn around and make more mortgages.
Jason Richardson (09:36):
It was kind of a radical concept, and it has evolved over the decades into our modern mortgage finance system. At the time, the thinking was that they should be careful not to buy mortgages in parts of town that they considered undesirable. So to figure this out, they went into the cities and they spoke to real estate agents and local leaders, and they walked the different communities and they produced a series of maps, and eventually that grew to about 200 maps.
Allissa Kline (10:03):
The HOLC also developed examiner sheets that they filled out for each of the neighborhoods in every city they visited.
Jason Richardson (10:11):
And here you really see how they were thinking about race and ethnicity and culture at the time. While it is true that you could have an area that was redlined because it was Catholic or Jewish, or it had a mixture of different Eastern European or Southern European nationalities, there was a specific line on the form that was used to identify the presence of African Americans. Examiners were concerned with a lot of things, but the presence of African Americans in the city was one of the key things that they were looking for. It was sure to get you redlined if your community had any number of African Americans living in it.
Allissa Kline (10:47):
The Federal Housing Administration took over for the HOLC in 1934 and used similar methods to map urban areas. They labeled neighborhoods from A to D with a being the most financially stable, and D being the least. Neighborhoods that were largely Black were labeled D.
Jason Richardson (11:08):
When the FHA took over, the Federal Housing Administration said, "Look, we've got this method that the HOLC developed. It's great. It lets us pick and choose the mortgages that we want, not the ones that are risky. Our investors don't want risk." So they said, "Look, these maps, we're not interested in buying loans in the red areas." Now, if you're a bank and you're making loans and you want to be able to sell your loans, are you going to make those loans in areas that you can't sell? No. So they didn't make the loans there, and in that way, the government took an existing pattern of segregation, systemized it, expanded it and then replicated it across the country for the next 40 years.
Allissa Kline (11:52):
There were other factors, of course, that contributed to the division of Black residents and white residents in Buffalo. A major one was the construction of a highway called the Kensington Expressway, or as we Buffalonians call it, the 33. Built in the 1960s, this below-grade highway split the city in half, cutting off the East Side even more from other areas, displacing residents, devaluing homes and destroying neighborhoods.
Dr. Henry Louis Taylor Jr. (12:18):
They sold those houses to Black people as quickly as they could get them in there because they didn't know that a highway was coming through. There were very, very bad things occurring, and so Black Buffalo gets trapped in the city, for all intents and purposes.
Allissa Kline (12:38):
That's Dr. Henry Louis Taylor Jr., a professor of urban and regional planning at the University at Buffalo and founder of the University at Buffalo Center for Urban Studies. In 1990, Dr. Taylor published a report on the state of Black Buffalo. Thirty-one years later — and eight months before the Tops shooting — he and the center published another report comparing present-day conditions to the findings of the 1990 report.
The 2021 report, which is called "The Harder We Run," found that conditions for Black people remained largely the same as they were three decades earlier. As of 2019, the unemployment rate of Black people was 11%, the average Black household income was $42,000 and about 35% of Black people had incomes below the poverty line.
Dr. Henry Louis Taylor Jr. (13:33):
We were going to measure progress in terms of how the masses of the Black community, of Black folks in Buffalo, moved toward the realization of that goal, of that idealized type of community. And by all of the critical indicators — poverty rates, median household income, home ownership rates, unemployment rates — those figures remained virtually unchanged while the actual physical conditions that existed inside of the community worsened. And so when we looked at those conditions on Buffalo's East Side, that's downstream. And when we looked upstream to see what was causing them, it was clear: It was systemic, structural racism.
Allissa Kline (14:29):
Over the years, as the community struggled with persistent poverty, abandoned housing, crime and violence, vacant lots and crumbling infrastructure, banks retained a physical presence. Though the total number of branches has been dwindling, a reflection of an industry-wide trend.
In the past four years, four branches have opened the East Side, including three by banks that did not formerly have a physical presence there. Cleveland-based KeyBank and Columbus, Ohio-based Northwest Bank opened branches in 2019. Both branches were requirements of community benefits agreements negotiated as part of a bank acquisition. Evans Bank, a community bank headquartered about 20 miles south of Buffalo, opened its inaugural East Side branch in the fall of 2021. Bank on Buffalo, which operates as a division of CNB Bank in Clearfield, Pennsylvania, opened up on the East Side about a month after the Tops shooting. The branch is located on the first floor of the Northland Workforce Training Center, a former manufacturing complex that prepares students for careers in advanced manufacturing and energy. Bank on Buffalo helped fund the center, and wanted to do more.
Michael Noah (15:49):
So over the last five years, we've been committed to helping fund the training center because we saw such a great ability out here in what they're doing. But it didn't stop at that, right? So we wanted to put our mouth where our money was and just say, "Hey, in this case, we're going to help. We're going to do a branch here as well."
Allissa Kline (16:05):
That's Michael Noah, president of Bank on Buffalo, which began doing business in 2017. Last fall, Bank on Buffalo also launched a full service mobile banking truck that's stationed on the East Side once a week. The 34-foot-long truck, which was in the works before the Tops shooting, is a place where customers can open bank accounts, make deposits and withdrawals, get debit cards, and apply for loans.
Michael Noah (16:32):
Our bank on wheels is a way to get the bank to the people, and we've got three locations that we go to right now. And we're able to get in front of the community and let them know that we're there for them as a bank, and we expect those locations to grow over time.
Allissa Kline (16:46):
Banks, to be clear, have done more than maintain branches on Buffalo's East Side. On the community and economic development front, there've been different degrees of participation. One of the most prominent examples comes from Buffalo-based M&T Bank. M&T is the largest deposit-holder in the Buffalo market, holding 64% of all deposits. The bank is a longtime supporter of Westminster Community Charter School, a kindergarten through eighth grade school located on the East Side in the 14215 ZIP code. M&T also supports Buffalo Promise Neighborhood, a nonprofit organization that aims to improve access to education within the same ZIP code. M&T says it has invested $31.5 million into the program since it launched in Buffalo in 2010.
Northwest Bank supports a financial education center through a partnership with Belmont Housing Resources of Western New York. KeyBank, which became the No. 2 largest deposit-holder in Western New York following its acquisition of First Niagara Financial Group, gave $30 million in financing for the Northland Training Center. Evans Bank has partnered with the city of Buffalo to construct market-rate single family homes on vacant lots on the East Side.
And about four years ago, as part of a broader state-led effort to pump $1 billion of economic redevelopment funding into Buffalo, six banks became part of a public private partnership called East Side Avenues. The initiative was created to provide capital and organizational support to various revitalization projects happening along four East side commercial corridors. Bank of America, M&T Bank, KeyBank, Five Star Bank, Northwest Bank and Evans Bank are among the 14 private and philanthropic groups that pledged to combined $8.4 million to pay for operational support.
Evans Bank made a five-year, $100,000 pledge to East Side Avenues.
David Nasca (18:55):
We have taken, and we've picked areas where we think we can use our resources to participate. Things like East Side Avenues, things like housing finance.
Allissa Kline (19:08):
That's David Nasca, president and CEO of Evans Bank. In 2014, Evans was accused of redlining by the New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who said the bank was avoiding making mortgage loans on the East Side. The bank paid $825,000 to settle the case. But even today, Nasca maintains the charges were unfounded and says the bank agreed to settle due to mounting legal fees. During an interview this summer at the company's administrative offices in Amherst, New York, a suburb of Buffalo, Nasca said the bank's present day engagement on the East Side isn't a result of the accusations.
David Nasca (19:48):
So 10 years ago, our involvement was probably, it certainly wasn't what you're seeing today, and it was an involvement that stemmed from us being a community financial institution that was looking to participate more. But we were participating within our means and our reach. As we have grown, we have built more resources to be able to do more.
Allissa Kline (20:13):
But according to Nasca and others, there is a limit as to how much the company and the banks as a whole can do to affect generational change on the East side.
David Nasca (20:23):
I don't think the root causes can be ameliorated just in a private, you know, what are the banks' responsibility? The banks' responsibility is to be a partner. We're still a for-profit entity, as are all the banks. We can't just grant money. It has to be within our construct of a financial institution that invests supports the public-private partnership. It's really integral that there needs to be all the oars pulling together or this doesn't work.
Allissa Kline (20:56):
KeyBanks' Chiwuike Owunwanne has similar thoughts.
Chiwuike Owunwanne (21:00):
My name is Chiwuike Owunwanne, or Chi-Chi, or Chi, and I am the corporate responsibility officer and community relations manager for KeyBank.
Allissa Kline (21:10):
Owunwanne, who was born in Nigeria and moved to the West Side of Buffalo when he was 11, joined KeyBank in 2021. He worked at a global micro-hedge fund for about 10 years before moving back to Buffalo. In 2019, he was working as a program director of East Side Avenues when he decided to take the job at KeyBank. A day after the Tops shooting, he mobilized his resources to try to feed East Side residents whose only neighborhood grocery store was now shut down for an unknown period of time.
Chiwuike Owunwanne (21:44):
So one of the things that I did as the corporate responsibility officer at Key, I have relationships, you know, throughout the community with community leaders. So I just started making phone calls.
Allissa Kline (21:54):
Owunwanne tapped his contacts and identified a passenger bus that needed some repairs. If fixed, the bus could help transport residents to other grocery stores and deliver food. By Sunday afternoon, 24 hours after the shooting, it was repaired and ready to go. A few months later, Owunwanne spearheaded the launch of a weekly farmer's market on the East Side to help address the lack of food options in the community. Leveraging relationships, finding ways to fill gaps in services, those are some of the ways that banks should be playing a role on the East Side, he says.
Chiwuike Owunwanne (22:30):
The challenges of the East Side, obviously, is beyond just what a financial institution can do, right? There are different agencies and industries that can certainly participate. I know banks are often looked upon as sort of like as a panacea. I don't particularly see it that way. I think others have a role to play in all of this.
Allissa Kline (22:55):
But banks should play a significantly larger role than other sectors, at least according to people like Pastor Nicholas. He argues that while banks' philanthropic efforts are commendable, the industry has an obligation to step up even more given its lending history.
Pastor George Nicholas (23:12):
Banks play a critical role in development of communities. So if you see any community that is going to develop itself — new housing, new businesses, new whatever — there's always a bank that's in that picture somewhere, even when there's government funding. And so banks can play a critical role in bringing equity and justice into areas where there is none. And I'm not talking about charity. So I think one of the things that banks do very well is charity. But when you think about it, if you want to develop a suburban, white suburban neighborhood or region or what have you, you don't start with charity, right? You start with investment, right? So I would like to see banks do what banks do, but do them in our community.
Allissa Kline (24:16):
Some of the criticism of banks comes down to their basic function in society — providing credit — and how engaged they are, or are not, with the Black community. In 2021, the New York State Department of Financial Services published a report about redlining in Buffalo. The report looked at banks and non-banks and found that loans made to minorities in the Buffalo market made up less than 10% of total loans in Buffalo. Yet Black residents make up about 33% of the city's total population. The lower percentage of loans to minorities was not the result of too many denials based on race or ethnicity. According to DFS, it was the result of companies having little or no engagement with minorities.
As for redlining, which was outlawed in 1968, there are accusations that the practice continues today in Buffalo. KeyBank is currently being accused of redlining by the NCRC. In a report last year, the group said KeyBank is making very few home purchase loans in certain majority minority neighborhoods, including parts of Buffalo. KeyBank has denied the allegations.
Regardless of what happens in that case, it's clear to several community members that the banking industry should be providing more support to the East side. Thomas Beauford Jr. is a former banker at HSBC and M&T Bank who is now the president and CEO of the Buffalo Urban League. He is also co-chair of the Buffalo Together Community Response Fund, which was established after the Tops shooting and so far has raised more than $6 million to address the long-term needs of the East Side.
Beauford said the funding is being used to study how the East Side became what it is today.
Thomas Beauford Jr. (26:05):
What made this community, that specific area, such a rich target for someone who wanted to carry out such a heinous act?
Allissa Kline (26:14):
So far six banks — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, M&T, KeyBank and Evans Bank — have made donations to the fund. And while those contributions are meaningful, banks have an opportunity in this particular moment to step forward and do more.
Thomas Beauford Jr. (26:32):
Just greater investment, just a greater investment. And that can be, you know, certainly treasure, but time, talent, and treasure. They have resources that are needed to help some of these businesses incubate. They have a pool of volunteers. Most of these organizations have employees who are willing to volunteer. They have talent embedded in their workforce that they have invested in, that has skill sets that can help uplift this community. So time, talent, and treasure.
Allissa Kline (27:04):
Dr. Taylor, the head of the UB Center for Urban Studies, says he is looking for banks to band together.
Dr. Henry Louis Taylor Jr. (27:12):
So what if the banking industry in Buffalo decided rather than to work in an atomistic, piecemeal fashion, they would just come together and then collectively pull their resources that way? I mean, all of them got these foundations, as I said before, so it's money that they're going to spend. So you can either spend that money in a strategic and intentional way, designed to develop a community for the actually existing population, or you can spend that money alone in a piecemeal, silo, sectorial fashion that will look good on your annual report, but won't generate the transformations and changes that are occurring inside of the community.
Allissa Kline (28:04):
According to Parker of Open Buffalo, not only could banks provide more financial support, but they could leverage national relationships with other organizations to get those groups to invest in meaningful ways in businesses, nonprofits and education systems that are already working.
Franchelle Parker (28:23):
When we look at the massive disinvestment, the massive poverty, what is currently being done isn't enough. And that's not to point fingers at one or two institutions, but we need coordinated strategies in order to address the underlying causes and conditions that created the events around May 14th. And that is lack of transportation, lack of jobs, education, community safety. And, you know, we could spend hours on each of those areas, but we need a comprehensive strategy to tackle all of that. And I think that that's a great role that the banks could potentially play.
Allissa Kline (29:19):
The first step, according to Parker: Listen to the community. During an interview in her office on Jefferson Avenue, about nine months after the Tops shooting, she told me the story of how a temporary ATM was dropped off a few days after the massacre outside the library across the street from Tops. The ATM was meant to be helpful to residents, but according to Parker, some community members were skeptical that it was indeed a legitimate ATM. That's because, she says, nobody reached out to the community to see if it even needed an ATM.
Franchelle Parker (29:58):
I think that that is a symptom of how investment is done in Black communities, even though it may be well-intentioned. Did we ask the questions? Do you need an ATM right here? Is this the bank that people in this community utilize?
Allissa Kline (30:22):
It turns out that it was a JPMorgan Chase ATM, and that the governor's office had asked the bank to help in some way, according to a bank spokesperson.
Franchelle Parker (30:33):
So there's a lot of questions, and the only way to get the answers is to actually talk to the people. And I know that that takes a little additional work, but in order to make sure that what we're doing isn't just in vain, or to make sure that this is something, you know, I feel good about as an individual, is this what the people really need in this moment? So I think that that is something that institutions here in Western New York greatly need to improve on.
Allissa Kline (31:07):
Several bankers said they're trying to do more listening. Michael Noah of Bank on Buffalo is one of them. He says closing the racial wealth gap is central to making lasting changes on the East Side.
Michael Noah (31:19):
Every community that we serve in, we should be a big part of that community, giving back to that community, volunteering for that community. Again, listening to the community and finding out what the needs are. That to me is the way you can have the biggest impact. As we talked about earlier, putting a branch in is great. Having a bank on wheels is great. But if you're not embedded in the community, listening to the community and trying to improve it, you're not creating that wealth and creating that better lifestyle for everyone. That's what we're trying to do here.
Allissa Kline (31:47):
Nasca of Evans Bank said the Tops massacre elevated the urgency with which banks are trying to make a difference. But banks, he said, can't be the only leaders.
David Nasca (31:59):
We're not the "parachute in and save the day." We're a resource that needs to be included in the solution. But the solution needs to be a broad-based, collaborative effort.
Allissa Kline (32:14):
To those who say that banks are making investments on the East Side and supporting the community, Pastor Nicholas says there's room for improvement.
Pastor George Nicholas (32:23):
It's not enough. I mean, the results are what they are. I mean, you could say whatever you want, but the results are what they are. And so banks can say, "Well, we've invested in all these different projects and built housing and stuff," but if people in the community don't capture any of the economics of it, if the only way a Black person participates in that process is as a consumer, it doesn't build wealth.
Allissa Kline (32:54):
And if banks really listen, and if they identify a different strategy, then it becomes a matter of acting upon it. The good news is that there has been some change in attitude when it comes to acknowledging and understanding life on the East side, the pastor says.
Pastor George Nicholas (33:12):
So I've seen a shift. My hope is in the shifting of some of the conversations from, "Oh, things aren't that bad," to "Oh yeah, we know they're that bad, and we need to do more." So now the question is going to become, if we understand what the more is, are we still willing to do it?
Chana Schoenberger (33:41):
This episode of Bankshot was written and reported by Allissa Kline. It was edited by Kevin Wack and produced by Kellie Malone Yee. Special thanks to all the folks who sat for interviews, including Franchelle Parker, Pastor George Nicholas, Jason Richardson, Dr. Henry Louis Taylor, Thomas Beauford, Chiwuike Owunwanne, David Nasca, and Michael Noah. For American Banker, I'm editor-in-chief Chana Schoenberger, the executive producer of Bankshot. To get more news and analysis of the banking world, visit americanbanker.com/subscribe. Thanks for listening.