The story of how Buffalo's oldest, best-established Black neighborhood was literally wiped off the map is a perfect parable about systemic bias

"Fruit Belt" is a 150-year-old predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo that has faced a series of systemic hurdles, each worsening the next, with the latest being the erasure of its very name, with the Big Tech platforms unilaterally renaming the area "Medical Park."

The neighborhood's story shares a lot with other historically Black, northern neighborhoods: boosted in part by the Great Migration and in part by the razing of other historically Black Buffalo neighborhoods on the east side. In the 1960s, racist slum-clearance policies led to clearance of a large part of the neighborhood and the creation of a huge, university-affiliated medical park with two massive hospitals. The decades that followed were attended by relentless pressure from city government and planners to establish a "medical corridor" in the neighborhood, with more displacements of the families that made up the community.

Rents skyrocketed and landlords began to take properties off the market, allowing them to sit vacant in the hopes of flipping them to developers. An African-American cultural center was torn down, as were many homes.

But the final indignity was when all the online maps of Buffalo began referring to the neighborhood as "Medical Park." Onezero's Caitlin Dewey sleuthed out the way this came to pass, and it's a fascinating tale.

In the early 2000s, a dotcom startup called Urban Mapping hired low-waged recent college grads to catalog neighborhood names referenced in online sources like blogs, marketing sites, city plans, and real-estate sites. Lax antitrust enforcement allowed Urban Mapping's competitor Maponics to acquire it; and then allowed the postage meter giant Pitney Bowes to acquire both companies, becoming virtually the only supplier of neighborhood mapping data in the US. Read the rest