Most Buffalo Land Is Owned By This Organization

There is a lot of land in New York's second-largest city, and you may be surprised by who owns the largest share of it.

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All across the country, there are some people and businesses that own a lot of land and property.

For example, according to an article in USA Today the founder of CNN, Ted Turner owns more than 2 million acres of land all across the United States. To put that into context, if you took the state of Rhode Island and multiplied it by 3, you roughly have the same amount of land that Turner owns.

My grandfather used to tell me that land and real estate are among those things that you should invest in because, unlike other commodities, they're not making any more of it.

Knowing that we are not going to have any more land pop up in the 716, I got a little curious about who was the biggest landowner in Buffalo.

In 2020, The Buffalo State College Geography and Planning Department did a study of public records that are available in Erie County, New York, to find the answer to this exact question.

Their study initially focused on the number of vacant lots in the city of Buffalo that could be used for future development. However, as they dug into the data, they discovered an interesting fact.

They discovered that the City of Buffalo government owned nearly 7,000 vacant properties along. Add that to the nearly 1,000 other structures that are owned by the City, and that makes the City of Buffalo the largest land owner in Buffalo.

Owning close to 8,000 lots of land, some with buildings on them and some without, the City owns more property than any other individual or company in Western New York.

Western New York is seeing such a real estate crunch for people trying to buy a home, maybe it's not a bad idea to try and acquire some land from Buffalo and build a new house.