BY BARRY PADDOCK
DAILY NEWS WRITER

Buffalo is facing extinction.

New York state's second-largest ranks among the fastest-dying American cities, Forbes.com reports, joining long-struggling Rust Belt towns in Ohio and Michigan on the ignoble list.

The cities share the triple whammy of tanking local economies, huge population losses, and alarming jobless rates.

Since 2000, Buffalo has lost a sixth of its population, more than 50,000 people. That's a far cry from the city's heyday a century ago when it was one of the nation's 10 largest cities and raked in dough from trade with Northern neighbor Canada.

Officials in Buffalo said yesterday that news of its demise is greatly exaggerated.

"Folks believe here so strongly in the potential of the community," said Hadley Horrigan, a spokeswoman for the Buffalo Niagra Partnership, representing more than 2500 local businesses.

"There's positive things happening here that I see every day," Horrigan told the Daily News.

Indeed, Buffalo's June unemployment rate of 5.7% isn't that bad compared to other hurting cities on Forbes' unlucky list.

Hard times for Michigan automakers General Motors and Ford helped drive the jobless rate to nearly 10% in Flint and Detroit.

Ohio's four blacklisted cities - Cleveland, Canton, Youngstown and Dayton - have struggled since the collapse of the steel industry, never replacing vanished manufacturing jobs.

Forbes' final three dying cities are Springfield, Mass., Scranton, Pa., and Charleston, W.Va.