A vibrant city center is crucial for a region’s economic growth. Since the pandemic, the City of Rochester has been steadily rebounding, but is perception keeping pace with momentum?
The City’s Bureau of Architecture and Engineering right now is overseeing hundreds of millions of dollars in investments in Rochester’s natural assets, its heritage and history, Rochester Mayor Malik Evans said in April during his 2025 State of the City Address.
He pointed to last year’s relocation of Constellation Brands’ world headquarters to Downtown Rochester, followed by an $80 million private investment to renovate the historic structure under downtown’s Mercury statue.
He pointed to ROC the Riverway, a revitalization initiative in the Genesee River corridor to connect the community to the river with investments in parks, trails and historic sites. With more than $100 million committed from New York State, ROC the Riverway encompasses more than two dozen projects, including a few that are already complete:
The Aqueduct District Street Improvement Project
The Austin Steward Plaza
The Frank and Janet Lamb Sister Cities Bridge
The Pont de Rennes pedestrian bridge
Building on these investments, Gov. Kathy Hochul selected a team of local and national landscape and urban architecture firms to design the High Falls State Park–a proposed 40-acre park around the High Falls and the Genesee River downtown.
And along the northern and eastern borders of Downtown, the city is advancing plans to remove the Inner Loop expressway and reclaim more than 22 acres of property for redevelopment. Construction, the mayor noted, will begin in 2027.
While public and private investment in Rochester ramped up since the pandemic; violence and poverty both are markedly down.
Rochester’s poverty rate has reached its lowest point in more than a decade: from 51 percent in 2014 to 41 percent at the end of 2023. Childhood poverty has dropped from 34 percent to 27 percent over the same period, the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative reports. “Now, we’re certainly not celebrating a 41 percent total poverty rate, or a 27 percent rate of childhood poverty,” the Mayor said. “But this steady decline shows us that this is a challenge that can be solved, and it reaffirms our commitment to helping all of our citizens escape the cycle of poverty forever.”
Last year, the Rochester Police Department reported an overall 30 percent drop in crime from 2023, across major violent and property categories.
Yet, the total number of visits to Rochester remains down from pre-pandemic levels. In 2019, the Rochester Downtown Development Corp. logged 20.9 million visits. In 2022, total visits were 15.4 million.
The perception of Rochester often seems outdated, especially by people from outside the city, notes Matthew Simonis, Director of Zoning and Permitting with the City of Rochester. In conversations with his suburban counterparts and friends, he notices a pervasive yet often unsubstantiated fear.
“They'll make comments by saying, ‘Oh, I went to Branca downtown. (Branca Midtown is located downtown at 280 East Broad St.) At first I was concerned, but it looked great. I had no idea,’ Simonis recounts.
In the 1990s, major cities like New York experienced dramatic spikes in loss-of-life incidents. Rochester reported 69 such incidents at its peak. In 2024, the Rochester Police Department reported 37 such cases, reflecting a marked decline.
According to the Rochester Police Department, incidents across violent and property-crime categories were down an overall 30 percent from 2023 to 2024. In some categories, rates fell to levels unseen since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Today, all key firearm violence metrics have fallen by about half from their high-water marks of the pandemic,” Mayor Evans said in April.
While there is no known new research that shows local perception of Rochester's crime, a 2013 survey by Rochester Institute of Technology and the Center for Public Safety Initiatives showed that most locals of the nearly 300 people polled, underestimated murder levels nationally, but dramatically overestimated them in Rochester.
Respondents from the region demonstrated a strong tendency to see Rochester as having a much higher proportion of all US murders than is actually true. “Overall, people seemed to overestimate danger in their most familiar city but saw other cities as even more dangerous. This is suggestive about both the power of perceptions about crime and the potential value of improved communication about the topic,” the report states.
Downtown Rochester is not just a concept or a dot on a map. It is the beating heart of our region. Yet, we tend to think of downtown as separate–as a problem–instead of the cultural hub it should be.
One reason for that, Simonis says, is a decline in population. In the 1950s, Rochester was the 32nd largest city in the United States; its population of 332,000 was 98% white. Rochester’s decline in population followed a national trend in urban depopulation brought on by factors, such as suburbanization and racial tensions. Population dropped by 18 percent between 1970 and 1980 as people moved to newly built tract homes in the suburbs.
Even though the decline has leveled off, most people alive today have only experienced a shrinking Rochester, Simonis says. “It is now the year 2025 which means that everyone 85 years old and younger has only ever experienced depopulation.”
“There is a desperate need to reframe the conversation about the fact that Rochester is experiencing a Renaissance in many ways; maybe not a huge uptick in permanent residents, but a huge uptick in new businesses and new areas to come into and enjoy. I mean, we're sitting in a building that was vacant ten years ago, right?”
Simonis is referring to 1255 University Ave., a formerly under-utilized industrial space that in 2016 was converted into 105,000-square-foot office and retail space with more than a dozen loft-style apartments.
He points to the Culver Road and University Avenue area as one example of steady development over the decades that has transformed the area. Pockets of private investment like it, over the decades, have helped redefine the city.
There have been over 20 new projects, conversions, historic renovations and infrastructure upgrades since 2020, the Rochester Downtown Development Corp. reported last year.
Cities, in general, are built organically in this way, and Rochester has done the work. Yet, visitors who do venture into Rochester sometimes bring their suburban expectations, Simonis says. One example is parking. In successful cities, however, parking is difficult to find. That’s actually a good sign, Simonis says, while adding that it often means it's a place people want to be.
An economically strong Rochester and vibrant city center go hand-in-hand. And economically speaking, experts say the Rochester region is poised for growth.
Six years ago, Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Co-Author of the 2019 book “Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream,” Jonathan Gruber visited Rochester. At the time, Gruber and his co-author had listed Rochester #1 among 102 urban communities they identified with the potential to become next generation technology hubs.
Rochester ranked first for its:
–Strong university base
–Highly skilled working-age workforce where one-third of the population has a college degree
–Attractive standard of living with an average home price of $170,000
In order to grow, Gruber said in 2019 that Rochester needed an enormous financial commitment to science to attract the best scientists and capital to finance new businesses. ROC City Lifestyle reached out to Gruber recently to see if, post-pandemic, Rochester still has the potential he saw years ago.
“I haven’t really followed what has happened in Rochester post-Covid, but I would say more generally that nothing has really changed locally: Rochester still has great potential to be a tech hub for the nation, but it will need a federal boost to do so,” Gruber says.
In recent years, significant federal investment was made in the domestic semiconductor industry through initiatives like the CHIPS and Science Act. The Buffalo-Rochester-Syracuse corridor has already received initial funding toward becoming a designated Tech Hub, which the local chamber estimates could support more than 115,000 new jobs.
Challenges remain, however. According to MIT’s Jonathan Gruber, a limited portion of the allocated funds has been distributed, and future support remains unclear amid shifting federal priorities. Delays in funding awards could slow down progress in emerging Tech Hubs like Rochester.
But with increased public safety, investment in development and lower poverty rates, Rochester has momentum–so much so that Mayor Evans repeated the word more than 50 times in his hour-long State of the City address.
"Hope begets opportunity. Opportunity begets hope,” he said. “That is the self-perpetuation of the new momentum we are building in Rochester.”
"Rochester still has great potential to be a tech hub for the nation..."
A vibrant city center is crucial for a region’s economic growth.
Rochester needs financial commitment to attract the best scientists and capital to finance new businesses.