Buffalo, parcel by parcel
The city’s 2026 assessment roll lists 15,380 vacant parcels, not counting land already in use as parks, farms, streets or parking. Put together they cover 2,516 acres, about seven Delaware Parks and one of every ten acres of dry land in the city. In Broadway-Fillmore there is an empty house lot for every house, and the City of Buffalo owns most of them.
Drag the circle anywhere. Its area is every lot you are showing, added up.
Buffalo has 25,617 acres of dry land. 2,516 of them are vacant parcels: 3.9 square miles, 9.8% of the city, and 12.5% of the land that is divided into lots at all (streets are the rest). That is about seven Delaware Parks, or nearly three villages of Kenmore. The circle in the panel draws it as one piece, so you can see how much of the city it would cover.
Most of the acreage is a few big pieces of old industrial land along the Buffalo River and in South Buffalo. Most of the lots are house lots. 12,428 of the 15,380 are residential vacant land, the median one 3,300 square feet, a 30-by-110-foot city lot where a house used to stand or never did. Together the house lots come to 1,090 acres. Most of the industrial land never had a house on it, so the House lots only switch at the top of the panel shows the map without it.
The City of Buffalo owns half of them: 6,256 empty house lots, and 7,060 vacant parcels in all. Most of that is recorded under “City of Buffalo Perfecting Title”, the name the city holds land under after taking it for unpaid taxes.
Say you farmed it. Leave a fifth of every lot for paths and edges, as the classic study of Cleveland’s vacant land did, and Buffalo has 2,013 acres to plant, 814 hectares.
Everything a person eats takes a lot of land. Peters and colleagues worked out how much U.S. farmland one person’s diet needs: 1.08 hectares a year for the way Americans eat now, and as little as 0.13 for the leanest healthy vegetarian diet. By that measure Buffalo’s empty lots could feed about 750 people the American diet, or about 6,300 as vegetarians. The city has 278,349. That is 0.3% to 2.3% of Buffalo.
Fruits and vegetables are a different story, because vegetables are the most productive thing you can grow on a small lot. Grewal and Grewal found that 80% of Cleveland’s vacant lots, a little over 3,000 acres for a city of about 400,000, could supply 22% to 48% of its fresh produce, depending on how intensively it is gardened. Buffalo has about 1.2 times as much vacant land per person, which scales to roughly 25% to 60% of the city’s fruits and vegetables. On paper, something like half the city’s salad, grown within walking distance.
The ground is poisoned, and the lots most worth farming are the worst.
The big parcels are old industry. 457 acres of the vacant land, 18% of it, sits inside 67 New York State DEC cleanup sites: Brownfield Cleanup, State Superfund and Environmental Restoration sites along the Buffalo River, the Outer Harbor and the South Buffalo rail and steel lands. 24 of those sites list lead among their contaminants; others list arsenic, mercury, cadmium, PCBs, benzene and coal-tar compounds like benzo(a)pyrene. Turn on State cleanup sites in the panel to see them.
The house lots are not on any state list, and that is the problem: nobody has tested most of them. They are where houses stood, most built before 1940 and painted with lead for decades, and when the city knocks one down the rubble is commonly pushed into its own basement and covered over. Paint chips, ash, leaded-gasoline fallout from a century of traffic and old coal furnaces all settle into the same yard. 83% of Buffalo’s empty house lots are on the East Side, and when Open Buffalo tested East Side soil in 2025 it found an average of 642 parts per million of lead, more than three times the EPA’s 200 ppm screening level for yards where children play, with over 90% of properties above it and some samples near 3,500.
Lead does not wash out and does not break down. Root crops and leafy greens pick it up, and dust off the soil gets onto everything else, including the kids who help in the garden. The way urban farms grow safely on land like this is raised beds filled with soil trucked in from somewhere else, over a barrier. At that point the lot’s own ground contributes nothing but flat space, and the math above is really a question about how many dump-truck loads of clean dirt the city can afford.
So the honest answer: on paper, Buffalo’s empty lots could grow a big share of the city’s vegetables. In practice, the first crop most of them need is a soil test.
Share of the residential lots in each neighborhood that are empty: vacant residential parcels, divided by those plus the one-, two- and three-family houses. In Broadway-Fillmore there is an empty house lot for every house, 3,193 to 3,192. The Fruit Belt is close behind, 541 to 603.
The same count for each of the nine Common Council districts. Ellicott, Fillmore and Masten hold three of every four empty house lots in the city.
Slowly, if at all. The final assessment rolls on Open Data Buffalo list vacant parcels every year since 2017:
Matching parcel IDs between the 2017 and 2026 rolls, 579 lots that had a one-to-three-family house in 2017 are vacant now, and 61 lots that were vacant in 2017 have a house on them. The 2025 drop is mostly bookkeeping: the assessor moved about 600 house lots to commercial vacant land and merged others.
Parcels. The City of Buffalo’s 2026-2027 parcel layer, 93,807 polygons with the assessment roll attached. A parcel counts as vacant when the assessor gives it a New York State vacant land class: 311 and 312 (residential, the second with a garage or shed), 330 and 331 (commercial), 340 and 341 (industrial) and 350 (urban renewal). Surface parking lots are class 438, a separate thing, and are not counted.
Areas are measured on the drawn outlines, projected to UTM 17N and clipped to dry land (the TIGER city line minus TIGER and OpenStreetMap water), because the roll’s own acreage column is blank or wrong on most large parcels. Clipping takes the river and harbor off waterfront parcels.
Shared outlines count once. Condominium parcels are all drawn on the building’s one outline. Summed naively, 1088 Delaware Avenue’s 449 units add 470 acres of “vacant” land to a 1.6-acre lot. A few public sites do the same: a vacant parcel at 9 Black Rock Harbor shares its 90-acre outline with the water treatment plant, and one on Pennsylvania Street shares Ralph Wilson Park’s. An outline is counted once, and only as vacant if every parcel drawn on it is vacant. The naive total is 3,924 acres; with outlines counted once it is 2,743.
Land already in use is taken out. The assessor’s vacant classes include land that plainly is not empty. A vacant-coded parcel is dropped when at least half of it lies in an OpenStreetMap park, playground, sports field, cemetery, farm, garden or surface parking lot; when it holds a Grassroots Gardens WNY community garden; when a mapped trail runs through or alongside it (the North Buffalo rail-trail sits on NFTA corridor parcels coded vacant); when 60% of it is street pavement (private drives and paper parcels under roads); or when a building covers half of it (construction the roll has not caught up with). That removes 413 parcels and 227 acres: 100 acres of trail, 58 of parks, 35 of parking, 16 under new buildings, 11 of farms and gardens, including the Wilson Street Urban Farm, and 7 of streets. Turn on Already in use in the panel to see them, with the reason for each.
Vacant is the assessor’s word, not mine. Some of these lots are side yards a neighbor mows, community gardens, urban farms, or gravel someone parks on. Others are capped brownfields. What they share is that the city taxes them as land with nothing on it.
Owners are grouped from the roll’s first owner name: City of Buffalo (every spelling, including Perfecting Title and the Urban Renewal Agency); other public (New York State, Erie County, the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation, the NFTA, the housing authority and similar); and everyone else.
Contamination is the NYS DEC’s remediation site boundaries, with each site’s contaminant list from the state’s Environmental Remediation Sites table (data.ny.gov c6ci-rzpg). A lot counts as on a site when a quarter of it, or more than an acre, falls inside one. That is sites the state knows about; an untested yard does not appear on it.
Farming figures: Peters, C. J. et al. (2016), “Carrying capacity of U.S. agricultural land: Ten diet scenarios,” Elementa 4:000116; Grewal, S. S. and Grewal, P. S. (2012), “Can cities become self-reliant in food?” Cities 29:1-11. Scaling Cleveland’s result by vacant acres per resident is a rough transfer, good to about a factor of two, not a yield model. Population is the 2020 census.
Trend counts come from the final rolls for 2017 to 2026 (data.buffalony.gov), which count roll entries, so condo
units on a vacant class inflate them slightly; the change year to year is the useful part. Neighborhoods are the city’s
35 planning neighborhoods, as the roll assigns them. Pipeline: tools/vacantlots.
Siblings: Where the Trees Aren’t, Ten Minutes to a Park, The Canopy, Buffalo 311.