Podcast Archives - Investigative Post

The windows and doors of a West Side house are boarded up, debris scattered throughout the yard.

Inside, two individuals have died, their bodies left to decay.

The dilapidated house at 149 Arkansas St. has been the source of numerous calls to emergency personnel. Its owners have been hit with multiple housing code violations and thousands of dollars of unpaid summons.

Local residents have said the property’s owner, the Buffalo Police Department, and City Hall have skirted accountability.

In their stead, the residents of Arkansas Street are left to deal with the property’s effects, including the stench of a decaying corpse from inside.

Since September, Investigative Post’s I’Jaz Ja’ciel has followed the story of the house at 149 Arkansas on Buffalo’s West Side. Ja’ciel sat down with Garrett Looker, host of our podcast series, to discuss her reporting.

You can watch the interview via our YouTube channel or listen to it as a podcast.

In the coming weeks, Erie County officials are poised to allow the future Buffalo Bills’ stadium effectively to skip New York State’s environmental review law. Activists and experts say doing so results in a lack of transparency and little consideration for the environment. 

The deal’s major players — Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz and the Buffalo Bills organization — would not offer further details. Their silence fits a pattern of stonewalling. Investigative Post has successfully sued Erie County and New York State to obtain public records before, and continues to be met with little communication.

Community groups have called for more transparency from Poloncarz and New York State Gov. Kathy Hochul. Still, the state and county refuse to answer basic questions. 

For the past several weeks, Investigative Post’s J. Dale Shoemaker has been uncovering details of how the proposed stadium may impact the environment. After combing through over a thousand pages of documents, questions were left unanswered.

Shoemaker sat down with Garrett Looker, host of our podcast series, to discuss his reporting. You can watch the interview via our YouTube channel or listen to it as a podcast.

On Thursday, Investigative Post reported on the number of eviction warrants issued in Buffalo City Court, more than 3,700 this year alone. Across Erie County, primarily in Buffalo, landlords have moved to evict tenants in numbers greater than anywhere else in the state, save for Kings County, which encompasses Brooklyn.

Reporter I’Jaz Ja’ciel sat down with Garrett Looker, host of our podcast series, to discuss her reporting. You can watch the interview via our YouTube channel or listen to it as a podcast.

On today’s Investigative Podcast, reporter J. Dale Shoemaker sits down with journalist and author Alec MacGillis to talk about Amazon’s expansion in Western New York, the future of Rust Belt cities like Buffalo and MacGillis’s book, “Fulfillment: America in the Shadow of Amazon.”

MacGillis’s book explores how Amazon and other large companies have transformed American cities and exacerbated wealth disparities. Cities like Seattle, for example, where Amazon is headquartered, have no shortage of high-paying jobs in tech, but are rapidly becoming unaffordable except for the very richest people. Meanwhile, cities like Buffalo and Niagara Falls have experienced steep population decline and are left struggling to attract good-paying jobs for those who are left.

MacGillis published his book last year and has since returned to his day job as a senior reporter for ProPublica, where he writes about government and politics.

In their discussion, Shoemaker and MacGillis explore Amazon’s history, how it became a behemoth in part due to public subsidies and how the company offers a useful lens for looking at “winner” cities and “left behind” cities in America. The pair then discuss what the future may hold for “left behind” cities like Buffalo, especially once Amazon has come to town.

“My sense of it is that Amazon will just take as much as they can get,” MacGillis said, speaking of Amazon’s numerous tax subsidy deals. “They’ll assess the level of desperation and they’ll shoot for the moon. They’ll get as much as they can.”

You can find MacGillis’s journalism here, and you can buy his book via a local bookstore here.

Listen to the podcast:

Tom Toles is the most decorated journalist in the history of Buffalo news media. He cut his teeth as an editorial cartoonist at The Courier-Express, moved on to The Buffalo News, where he earned his Pulitzer in 1990, and then succeeded the legendary Herblock at The Washington Post in 2002. His work was syndicated in more than 200 newspapers across the country

Along the way, the Hamburg native has received numerous awards for his work. Honors, in addition to the Pulitzer, include the National Cartoonist Society Editorial Cartoon Award in 2003 and the Herblock Prize in 2011. Toles retired in 2020.

Toles was interviewed by Jim Heaney, a longtime colleague at The News who recruited him to serve on the board of directors at Investigative Post.

“Tom is a deep, original thinker,” Heaney said. “He doesn’t lack for insights and opinions, as our interview demonstrates.”

You can watch the interview via a YouTube video above or listen to it as a podcast below. We encourage you to share it with Tom’s legion of fans.

Geoff Kelly recently interviewed U.S. Rep. Brian Higgins about a variety of topics, including national politics, the Tops massacre and the Jan. 6 insurrection. The Congressman’s response, in so many words, involved what he sees as division.

We posted the first half of the interview on Friday. You can watch that first part via our YouTube channel or listen to it as a podcast.

Next up: an interview with Pulitzer Prize winner Tom Toles.

Geoff Kelly recently interviewed U.S. Rep. Brian Higgins about a variety of topics, including national politics, the Tops massacre and the Jan. 6 insurrection. The Congressman’s response, in so many words, involved what he sees as division.

You can watch the first part of the interview via our YouTube channel or listen to it as a podcast. We’ll post the second half of the interview Monday.

Next up: an interview with Pulitzer Prize winner Tom Toles.

On Tuesday, Investigative Post reported on the huge subsidy package Amazon is receiving to build a warehouse in Niagara County. Amazon will receive $124 million in tax breaks from the Niagara County Industrial Development Agency, plus state tax credits of at least $2 million. In exchange, Amazon will employ 1,000 people, most earning $15 an hour.

Reporter Dale Shoemaker sat down with Garrett Looker, host of our podcast series, to discuss the reporting. You can watch the interview via our YouTube channel or listen to it as a podcast.

Our intent is to publish a podcast a week. Coming up are interviews with Congressman Brian Higgins and Pulitzer Prize winner Tom Toles.

The math of Byron Brown’s loss in the June 22 Democratic primary is simple. 

The mayor’s traditional base of voters on the East Side stayed home, while voters on the other side of Main Street — from the Lower West Side and Allentown to the Elmwood Village — turned out in comparatively high numbers and overwhelmingly chose India Walton. 

The result: Walton beat the four-term incumbent by 7 percent.

Ken Kruly is a political analyst for WGRZ-TV, publisher of Politics and Other Stuff and author of Money In Politics for Investigative Post. In an analysis for Investigative Post, Kruly compared Brown’s performance this year to the results of his previous four mayoral campaigns. He found Brown’s share of the vote dropped in six of the nine Common Council districts compared to four years ago. 

“He pretty well collapsed everywhere in the city,” Kruly said. “And he’s got a whole lot of homework to do now as he enters this write-in campaign.” 

The erosion of Brown’s base was most striking in the Masten District, where the mayor lives and which he represented on the Common Council for five years. The number of votes for the mayor in Masten dropped by more than one-third compared to 2017, Kruly found.

Dr. Henry Louis Taylor Jr., director of the Center for Urban Studies at the University at Buffalo, described the drop in East Side support for Brown as a “radical no-vote.”

“And by that I mean to say there were people in the Black community who couldn’t stomach Brown but didn’t believe India could win,” Taylor told Investigative Post. “So they just stayed home. They sat this one out.”

In Brown’s previous mayoral campaigns, Masten has been reliably stalwart for the mayor, even as turnout steadily declined. In 2009, running against Mickey Kearns, Brown got 5,805 votes in Masten — a flood of support that canceled out Kearns’s strong turnout in South Buffalo. 

This primary, Masten gave Brown just 1,668 votes. Brown won the district, but not overwhelmingly, as he has in past campaigns. In 2017, when Brown faced Mark Schroeder, the mayor took Masten with 68 percent of the vote. This year his share was just 55 percent.

Masten District voters stayed home this year, according to Kruly’s analysis: The 20.7 percent turnout there is only slightly higher than the 20.2 percent turnout for the race citywide.

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The decision not to vote amounted to a protest, according to Taylor, the UB professor. It was provoked by any number of complaints: against Brown’s policies, against his personality, against his long tenure.

“That protest no-vote in the heart of his constituency, which he had not really stirred, blew him away,” Taylor said.

Voter turnout was low citywide: The 21,469 votes cast on election day is 6,232 fewer than there were in 2017. But it was about the same as it was in 2013’s mayoral primary.

Only two districts posted higher turnout than four years ago: Delaware and Niagara. Walton won both of them.

Delaware District had the best turnout on primary day: 33 percent of eligible voters went to the polls. They voted nearly two-to-one for Walton. 

Niagara District’s turnout was 22 percent. There the margin was nearly three-to-one for Walton.

Taylor considers that a sign that Walton succeeded in something other Black politicians have not tried to do: She united different communities of progressive-minded voters.

“Every other African American politician has attempted to tie themselves primarily to progressive forces within the Black community,” Taylor said. “She was the first person that really tried to build a multiracial coalition that was anchored in the white Left.”

Brown fared best in South Buffalo, where he won 60 percent of the vote. It appears the Brown campaign is seeking to increase turnout there in November: Since the mayor announced on Monday he would wage a write-in campaign, city workers who live in  South Buffalo — home base for right-wing developer Carl Paladino — have been passing around sign-up sheets, trying to collect commitments to vote for Brown in the general election.

“He’s going to have to go where the votes are for him,” Kruly said, noting Delaware — a high turnout district that has supported Brown in the past — may be irretrievable. 

So Brown is likely to focus on turning out support in the South District, Kruly said, while trying to reconcile with and motivate his East Side base.

Brown supporters started leaking potentially damaging information about Walton’s past starting the afternoon of the election. After a week of bouncing around social media platforms, those leaks are beginning to generate stories in the media. Taylor sees that as an effort by Brown to get the conservative Black middle class, many of whom stayed home on June 22, to return to Brown’s side in November. 

Taylor thinks that’s a risky strategy.

“If he goes on a witch hunt with India, because she’s a Black working-class mom, he runs the risk of that just blowing all up in his face,” Taylor said. 

Nor does Taylor think Brown can easily coax his former base back to the polls by running on his record. Taylor is currently undertaking an update to the sociological survey of Buffalo’s Black community he published three decades ago, to determine how the East Side has fared in the years since — 16 of them with Brown in the mayor’s office. 

The perception in the Black community, Taylor said, is that Buffalo’s “renaissance” hasn’t benefited poor people of color or the neighborhoods where they live. 

“If he tries to engage in debates and other types of things, you know, there’s gonna be a mountain of data that can be used against him.” 

Our “Money In Politics” posts today and yesterday detail the largest donors to the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Joseph Biden. Ken Kruly and Jim Heaney discuss.