Dreaming of a better city

By Matt Hoffman

The Pulitzer Project

I used to think Niagara Falls would be a scene out of a postcard. Mist curling off the edge, newlyweds in plastic ponchos, and the kind of quiet, intimate frames Alec Soth captured in the early 2000s. Beautiful, but distant. The kind of image you send when you’re passing through.

That’s just one version of the story, the one most are handed, and one they never think to question.

The city and its residents sit in the shadow of the falls, cast there by chemicals and contradiction. Factories loom next to playgrounds and power lines stretch alongside football fields. There’s beauty here, but it doesn’t announce itself. You have to look for it in the small moments and the people who refuse to accept the story they’ve been told.

Julissa and Donte don’t talk like victims. They talk like people who have learned how to keep going. They talk about asthma and grief and the dead bat in their classroom that no one dealt with for days. But they also tell of standing in front of the City Council, about leading a student team focused on mental health, and about the Buffalo Bills Foundation giving them $10,000 to keep that work going.

There’s a kind of clarity that lives in places like this. You can hear it in the way people speak, not loud, but clear and steady. It’s easy to romanticize resilience from a distance. It’s harder to sit in it, listen to it, and understand what it really costs.

Before we began working on this reporting project, I thought I had a handle on what environmental injustice looked like. I attempted to go in with a clear lens, but it’s difficult knowing what’s at stake, and seeing the real human impact. Now, I know it’s quieter than I expected.

It’s the sound of kids trying to learn while trucks growl outside their windows and power lines hum above the parking lot. It’s getting used to water that smells off. It’s noticing how your breathing changes and your face begins to clear when you leave town.

But there’s still life here. You see it in murals splashed across boarded-up buildings, the community gardens tucked between streets, and in the way neighbors show up for each other—even when the systems don’t.

We didn’t come here to fix anything. We came to give a voice to the voiceless. The quiet heroes who live among us deserve better from those they trust to take care of them.

The real power of a place like Niagara Falls isn’t the water that draws tourists from around the world, but in the people who believe in a better tomorrow. People like Julissa, Donte, Amanda, Saladin, and countless others who keep showing up and pushing for change.

Environmental injustice doesn’t always look like disaster. Sometimes it looks like a dead bat in a classroom or a child who can’t breathe during recess. But here, against that silence, there’s still noise. Still movement. Still a chance to listen more closely to the people who’ve been speaking the whole time.