Kenmore is the dense streetcar-era village on Buffalo's northern city line, inside the town of Tonawanda. Nearly half its houses were built before 1940 on the flat lake plain, with foundations that were never drained and lots too small to leave room for the water to go anywhere else.
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The ACS 2024 five-year estimate puts Kenmore at about 7,200 housing units, roughly 48 percent of them built before 1940 and another 15 percent in the 1940s and 23 percent in the 1950s. Almost nothing has been built since 1970 because there has been nowhere to build it; the village was platted out on a grid of narrow lots that filled in one house at a time between the streetcar years and the post-war boom. Those pre-war houses stand on rubble stone, brick and early concrete block, with full basements that were meant for coal and a furnace, not for living space.
The lots matter as much as the walls. A Kenmore house is often a few feet from its neighbor, with a shared driveway on one side and a small back yard. Roof water from two houses lands in the gap between them, the driveway pitches toward one foundation or the other, and there is no room to regrade. The water in the backfill has nowhere to go but down, and the clay will not take it.
The Erie County soil survey maps the village and its surroundings as Urban land complexes over Niagara and Odessa soils: the silty and clayey deposits of the old lakebed, with a seasonal high water table in the upper subsoil from December through May. The survey's comment on these urban complexes applies directly to Kenmore: runoff is rapid from the relatively impermeable Urban land part of the complex. Roofs, driveways, sidewalks and streets shed water onto the small undisturbed patches of soil, which are exactly where the foundations are.
The survey also observes that on the Urban land-Niagara complex many homes show signs of settling because of low soil strength and frost heaving. In Kenmore that shows up as diagonal cracks at foundation corners and windows and as walls that have moved just enough to open old mortar joints. Add the melt of a normal Buffalo winter, about 95 inches of snow by NOAA's 1991-2020 normals, released in March onto a village where most of the surface is roof and pavement, and the small strip of clay beside each foundation is asked to absorb far more water than it can.
Because the outside of the house is often unreachable, Kenmore is interior-drainage country. A perimeter drain at the footing, a drainage board over stone or brick walls to carry seepage into it, weep holes in block, and a sump with a sealed lid and battery backup handle the water table and the wall seepage without excavating a driveway that belongs half to someone else. Cracks in the rare poured walls are injected.
Outside, the fixes are small and precise: downspout extensions run to the front or rear where there is room, a shared-driveway drain where both owners agree, and window well covers. Sump discharge follows the town of Tonawanda's rules for storm water and is routed to the street or yard, never the sanitary sewer, and on lots this small the discharge point is worked out with the neighbor in mind.
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