Alive Welcome to Rochester's new center city
Downtowns are the heartbeat of a place. They say a lot about who we are, what we value, our history, and what our vision for the future looks like. They are everybody’s neighborhood. They are very diverse places, and if they become homogeneous in a community like ours, we’ve lost the very thing that makes them places you want to be as well as dynamic talent attractors. Rochester’s center city is undergoing the biggest transformation in nearly half a century, and the old downtown is being rebuilt – block by block, brick by brick. This transformation has been led by housing, and there are now 7,200 people who call downtown home. With 21 housing projects in the pipeline, 3,000 more people will join them by the year 2021.
This varied population includes young professionals, seniors, wealthy empty nesters, lower-income families, and lots of people with dogs. The evolving downtown living scene is drawing people in from the suburbs and creating the most diverse and rapidly growing part of the city. The innovation culture is hot downtown and because of this, the other big story is the DIZ: the Downtown Innovation Zone. There are now 170 innovation and creative-class enterprises in the DIZ – up 59 percent since 2015. The business incubators around Main and Clinton are already pumping, creating a magnetic environment for a wide variety of tech startups and releasing a kind of energy downtown we haven’t seen in decades. More than $864 million is being invested in downtown right now, capping the $2.2 billion invested since the year 2000. Underperforming properties are
being replaced by landscape-changing projects, business incubators, innovation and creative-class enterprises, and thousands of new residents. We are very fortunate to be dealing with real growth. It’s now time to watch for the next great opportunities and to respond to what our new downtown users want. – Heidi Zimmer-Meyer Zimmer-Meyer is president and CEO of the Rochester Downtown Development Corporation.
A P R O M O T I O N A L P U B L I C AT I O N B Y C I T Y N E W S P A P E R I N P A R T N E R S H I P W I T H T H E R O C H E S T E R D O W N T O W N D E V E L O P M E N T C O R P O R AT I O N