From the pain of racial injustice to hope for healing

“I was an eight-minute drive to the site of the shooting on Jefferson Avenue,” says the 28-year-old East Side native of his sense of shock from the racially motivated tragedy that killed 10 Black people doing their Saturday shopping at the neighborhood’s Tops Friendly Markets.

“5/14/22 was the day I knew what I wanted to do – to work in a field where I can contribute to rectifying the issues that allowed such a massacre to occur in my own community.”

That conviction led him to Henry-Louis Taylor, Jr., founding director of the Center for Urban Studies at UB’s School of Architecture and Planning. The urban planning professor and expert on underdeveloped urban neighborhoods and place-based racism had just published “The Harder We Run,” a report on the state of Black Buffalo today compared to 30 years ago.

“That report is single-handedly responsible for my enrollment in the Master of Urban Planning program at UB. It spoke directly to my lived experience,” says Mullen of the 85-page document that revealed just how little life has improved for Black Buffalo over the past three decades. His discovery of the report immediately compelled him to pick up the phone and contact Taylor.  

What has trapped the city’s Black population in a socioeconomic stagnancy of below-average levels of income, education and homeownership, according to the report, is a long history of structural racism and neglect on the East Side, home to approximately 85 percent of Buffalo’s Black population.

“I sat down in my meeting with Henry Taylor and learned about redlining and the history of racism on the East Side,” said Mullen of the 1930s discriminatory practice of financial institutions (including even the former Federal Housing Administration) that denied services like mortgages and insurance to residents of specific, often racially defined neighborhoods. Redlining, now illegal, is perhaps one of the most significant factors behind racial income disparities as it left Blacks and people of color in substandard rental housing, depleting generational wealth and perpetuating place- and race-based disinvestment.

“I saw myself in that report. I thought, your ZIP code can, in fact, impact where you go in life. It’s not so easy to take the ‘straight’ path of going to college, getting a job and settling down when you grow up on the East Side.”

Mullen, now an associate planner for the UB Regional Institute, first noticed in his mid-teens that being Black is ‘a thing’ and not just a cultural abstraction. He was troubled by the different street and sidewalk conditions and vacancy levels between his Genesee-Moselle neighborhood and the bordering suburb of Cheektowaga, where his family would do their shopping.

“That lived experience pushed my curiosity in how cities and neighborhoods work and function. I became interested in demographics and patterns of race, place and space.”

He entered SUNY Buffalo State's political science program and took courses in the college's urban civic engagement program, but shifted to a history major after taking an eye-opening course on African American history. His senior project for that program took him to Buffalo’s Fruit Belt, a primarily Black residential neighborhood that was once home to German immigrants at the turn of the last century. The construction of the Kensington Expressway in the 1950s severed the district, led thousands of German Americans to leave the area, and began a decades-long slide into neglect.

Today, the neighborhood sits next to the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, a health care and life sciences research corridor whose growth has contributed both to downtown Buffalo’s renaissance and to further fracturing of the Fruit Belt. After learning about a residential parking permit program that residents advocated for, Mullen wanted to understand how community members, the BNMC and government leaders could cooperate for the shared interests of the district.

One of the most important resources for that project – Taylor and his report, "The Historical Overview of Blacks in the Fruit Belt" – would end up giving him that critical connection for his call to action in 2022.

After enrolling in UB in Fall 2022, Mullen ensconced himself in the work of the center, where he served as a graduate research assistant for the first year of the program. He also entered the MUP program’s community development and neighborhood planning specialization, studying closely with Taylor as well as Robert Silverman, an expert on inequity in cities with a focus on affordable housing.  

Among his most memorable experiences at UB was a studio project taught by adjunct instructor Art Hall, a fellow MUP alum and Buffalo planner. Students were asked to develop a community engagement plan for the relocation of Evergreen Health and Community Access Services to the Kensington Bailey section of East Buffalo.

“This studio got to the core of urban planning – listening to the community – which is what I value most about the field,” says Mullen. “We conducted asset mapping, identified community stakeholders, designed an engagement process, and explored the complex history of the neighborhood.”

“Data is one thing, but people are our greatest assets. They help us understand what questions to ask, and what’s most important to the community,” says Mullen. “We don’t know what promises were made to them years ago. Trust has been broken.”

In his current role with the UB Regional Institute, an urban planning policy and research center within the School of Architecture and Planning, Mullen leads a number of social equity-focused efforts. Among them is designing community outreach strategies for the Buffalo Equity and Street Tree Program, a city-wide re-treeing effort. He is also working on a community development initiative that will bring together planning, research, and engagement to ensure residents are connected to the recent influx of public and private resources for the East Side.  

“This is why I studied urban planning – to build relationships and trust. I am grateful for the opportunity to give back to my community in this way,” he says.

In reflecting on the state of the profession and our communities, Mullen says the most important thing is to be more curious and open to people different from ourselves.

“As planners, we have to constantly ask, ‘does everyone feel welcome in our built environment?’ I encourage my peers to go to other neighborhoods and absorb different places and their lessons. Engage the people who live and work there. This is the essence of creating inclusive spaces where all feel seen.”

Mullen, a jazz aficionado, says music is an example of how our unique histories can bring us together. Buffalo’s Black community, for example, has a storied past in jazz, with venues on the East Side drawing such greats as Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington in the 1940s and 1950s.

“My culture played a major role in creating jazz, and to see it being loved by people from many backgrounds is exciting,” he adds, noting how festivals as diverse as the Pine Grill Jazz Reunion on the East Side and outdoor concerts at the Larkin District have created new openings for communities to come together. “We talk about making built environments more inclusive. I see jazz as something that can do that.”

And so, as Mullen looks back and Buffalo prepares to mark nearly three years since 5/14/22, a newly empowered urban planner slowly finds his pain turning to hope for healing for all. “Every neighborhood and culture has something to offer. We just need to engage and appreciate each other.”