Former Niagara Falls mayoral candidate Demetreus Nix placed a portable basketball hoop on the sidewalk at the front edge of his neighbor’s property on 14th Street last week.
The neighbor — the private firm Niagara Falls Redevelopment — responded by sending over a private contractor to install a chain-link fence along the property line between the company’s land and Nix’s family home in the 300 block of 14th Street.
Nix told the Niagara Gazette the fence installer arrived on Saturday, the day after NFR’s long-time executive vice president, Roger Trevino, paid a visit to the street and told Nix he needed to get the b-ball hoop “off his land” because it posed a potential liability concern for the company.
In a 35-minute, expletive-laced video posted on Facebook following his interaction with Trevino, a heated Nix reacted angrily to the company executive’s visit, at one point likening NFR, which is co-owned by the Milstein family of real estate developers from New York City, to a “Goliath” city residents must rally against.
“Ya’ll worth $3 billion. I’m worth about three hundred dollars, but I could probably get together a thousand or two thousand people. Are you all ready for change? We must step up. We must stand up. We must be ready to take on Goliath,” Nix told his followers on the social media platform.
In an interview with the Niagara Gazette on Tuesday, Nix described NFR’s fence move as “comical.”
“It was just a power play to show us who’s the boss and who got what,” Nix said.
NFR’s spokesperson James Haggerty did not respond to a request for comment from the newspaper.
The exchange with Trevino followed a series of recent Facebook posts in which Nix has criticized NFR for buying up properties and tearing down houses in the East Side neighborhood, where his grandmother and grandfather, Thelma and Samuel Nix, owned the house at 338 14th St. for decades.
Nix said this year marks 55 years of the property being owned by a member of his family. He said he came back to the house following a stint in prison in 2009 to find the old neighborhood he knew “was gone” and so were most of the families who lived there.
“Everything I knew was gone,” he said.
In recent years, Nix has performed improvements to the interior and exterior of his grandmother’s house, a space he’s dubbed “The Mansion.”
It is one of a handful of resident-occupied holdouts found in NFR’s 140-acre redevelopment territory, which is bounded by Niagara Street, John B. Daly and Rainbow Boulevards and Portage Road.
Nix said NFR’s presence addressed one issue that was a problem in the area when people actually lived there.
“They brought down the crime,” Nix said of NFR. They brought down the crime by getting rid of everybody.”
In posts on Facebook in recent weeks, Nix has suggested it’s time for city residents to get organized and “take back” properties NFR acquired with little progress to show for it. He’s part of an effort to hold a Juneteenth celebration in the neighborhood later this month.
The dustup with Trevino and the installation of the fence inspired him to do something he never thought he’d do before — write a letter to his former political opponent, Falls Mayor Robert Restaino, offering to help him in his efforts to “continue to build, organize and invest” in the community.
In his letter, which he said Restaino has not yet received, Nix told the mayor he’s no longer interested in running for the city’s top public office but remains interested in a larger mission –— building upon grassroots community power to help build back the Falls, including his neighborhood where NFR owns most of the land around him.
“Niagara Falls does not suffer from a lack of ideas — it suffers from a lack of unity between leadership and the people on the ground doing the work every day,” Nix wrote in his letter to Restaino.
“I represent a network of individuals who are committed to seeing Niagara Falls rise. Not just in words, but in action. Not just in vision but in execution,” Nix added.