NeighborWorks® Rochester is a nonprofit organization and a member of the national NeighborWorks® Network. As a HUD approved Housing Counseling Agency and a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), NeighborWorks® Rochester provides homeownership education to first-time home buyers, makes available affordable rehab loan/grant resources to city homeowners and engages city residents in neighborhood revitalization efforts through our Healthy Blocks initiative.
NeighborWorks® Rochester supports “smart growth” – economical, ecological, equitable, and coordinated approaches to land use and development – as it is essential for realizing quality housing, successful homeownership and stable neighborhoods. Because Rochester and most other Upstate cities and surrounding areas have been losing population, and are predicted to continue to lose population, we recognize that many land use practices and policies currently guiding decisions throughout our region are not sustainable. Growth in outlying areas without the overall population to support it only leads to an oversupply of housing units and commercial spaces. This in turn leads to the devaluing of existing property – residential, commercial and industrial – and results in increasing vacancies, property decline and public spending to maintain an ever growing infrastructure without any increases in our local or regional tax base to support it. In fact, in Rochester, New York, 7.8% of the city’s net acreage is now made up of either vacant buildings or land.
Several cities are rethinking their approach to growth in an era of sustained population loss. Although not without its own set of risks and challenges, this rethinking is a leap outside conventional thinking about community and economic development, as well as outside traditional measures of what constitutes prosperity. This rethinking is necessary because the over-development of even well-designed and located buildings in cities and regions like Rochester, Buffalo, and Syracuse can have cannibalistic and costly effects on local governments and taxpayers.

A case in point is Youngstown, Ohio which once was a city of 182,000 and is now down to just 80,000. Several years ago its leaders concluded that the city could not reasonably expect that its population would significantly increase, despite its many assets and citizens committed to its revival. Yet the city was still attempting to serve a physical infrastructure designed for over twice as many people (and taxpayers) as actually still lived there. Youngstown realized that by focusing on reducing its oversupply of housing units and creating planned green spaces in their place, it could focus its resources on making the city a vibrant community for 80,000, rather than gradually being bled dry trying to maintain a built environment constructed for almost 200,000.
Notably, Detroit, with a built-environment for 2,000,000 and a current population of 800,000, has been in the national news lately for its similar “right-sizing” efforts.
New York State’s cities are slowly recognizing that we can not grow our way out of the population decline we have been facing. Notably, the City of Rochester has put forward a policy, Project Green, that if fully implemented seeks to balance Rochester’s housing market. By removing obsolete housing units that can’t be reabsorbed back into our housing market because of our city’s and region’s shrinking population base, Project Green seeks to reconfigure our urban landscape by reusing the vacant lots left behind for green uses.
In 1950, Rochester had a population of over 330,000, making it the 32nd largest city in the country–more populous than cities like Atlanta, Miami, and Phoenix. In 2008, the population had dipped to the 99th largest city, at 202,000. (By the time you read this, Rochester may have dropped out of the top 100.) Because Rochester’s built environment once accommodated almost 130,000 more people than it does today, there is a huge oversupply of housing units, resulting in a citywide vacancy rate of 12% to 14%. This is over twice the amount (5%) considered to be the limit for a healthy, balanced market.
Project Green is designed to address the severe consequences of this imbalance: vacant properties and the myriad costs borne by resulting blight, crime, and the high costs to maintain and serve (through fire, police, water, and code enforcement resources) housing units there is no demand for.
Over the next twenty years the City of Rochester expects that 920 new housing units will be built in response to affordable housing needs and demand for new or adaptive re-use units (loft apartments, townhouses, etc.). During the same time period the City will work to remove 2,988 dwellings from the inventory. The net balance will be a reduction in housing units that will bring our city-wide housing market to within a 5% to 7% vacancy rate. Because of the considerable expense to remove this many units, the City is looking at a two-decade process to achieve this.
In order to avoid a pock-marked landscape of unkempt vacant lots randomly sprinkled throughout our neighborhoods and on our commercial avenues, Project Green seeks to strategically parcel lots for reuse ranging from single lot community gardens to block wide redevelopment sites. Demolition decisions will be based on the feasibility and opportunities to combine lots to create larger parcels for future development, or on sites that have high greening potential. Greening options include community gardens, public parks, bona fide urban agricultural enterprises, recreation areas, and renewable energy generation sites.
Vacant lots created through demolition can also be combined with the lots of adjacent property owners, giving each a larger yard. Cleared sites that would be suitable for future re-development would be greened for the short term until market conditions make re-use economically feasible. Tree planting and landscaping on parceled lots will keep these areas attractive and add to the streetscape. They would also help to add value to surrounding properties and improve social connections by providing park-like settings.
Overall, Project Green strives to reduce public service and remedial costs, stabilize property values in high vacancy rate neighborhoods, at the same time creating stronger market demand for the remaining inventory. These improved market conditions will also benefit the City’s tax base.
Moving Project Green from policy to implementation will not be without its challenges and difficult decisions. Despite the complexity and controversy that will be inherent in the process, Project Green is a critical means to Rochester reinventing and revitalizing itself in ways that reflect current trends and realities. Like Youngstown, Rochester is starting to realize that efficiency, solvency, livability, and prosperity will come from right-sizing our built environment to match our population. In our new reality, better doesn’t always mean bigger.
By Eric Van Dusen
Eric is Chief Operating Officer of NeighborWorks Rochester. NeighborWorks Rochester is one of 39 coalition members of Empire State Future.