After years of mass demolition and auto-oriented commercial development, downtown Rochester has found an unexpected ally: residents. This comes after several decades of transforming downtown into a place for anyone but residents. Nevertheless, people are flocking to the center city and it’s looking like Rochester’s dead city streets may find a second life in the coming years. At the center of it all, developers are rising to the challenge of delivering attractive, urban residential options in a place previously built for cars and commuters. Likewise, the city has made strategic investments and policy reforms to aid in this renaissance. Together, private and public actors are building the next generation of downtown Rochester.

To truly appreciate the success of downtown today, it’s important to understand the definition of success in Rochester’s past. With the widespread adoption of the automobile in the early twentieth century, many believed that the level of success in downtown shared a direct, positive relationship with the width of its streets, number of parking spaces available, and height of the tallest building. The construction of the Inner Loop was considered a massive success because it improved vehicular circulation around downtown at a time when Rochester’s population was at its highest. Xerox Square, First Federal Plaza, The Metropolitan, Five Star Bank Plaza, and many other commercial fortresses were celebrated as successes for clearing blight and realizing a grand vision of a downtown of monumental scale.

Today, Rochester is a different story. Downtown office buildings are plagued with high vacancy rates, and the social and financial costs of massively expanded infrastructure have become strikingly apparent. Developers and city leaders alike have learned from the dangers of selling out to special interests and subsidizing one mode of transportation. More and more, they have embraced a new measure of success for downtown: the ability to attract and retain residents. The sheer amount of private development now following this mentality has been astounding, especially considering the contracting economy and population of upstate New York.

The early success of developers’ downtown residential push is in the numbers. Downtown’s population has swelled from just 3,100 in 2000, to 7,000 today across 3,718 residential units. On top of that, 1,700 new units are in the pipeline as developers pour $620 million of private capital into the center city.

To put these numbers in context, consider nearby Buffalo, New York. In 2016, Buffalo’s downtown, similarly defined as approximately one square mile around the central business district, housed just 2,500 residents across 1,893 units. Of course, downtown Buffalo is also seeing notable investments such as the new University at Buffalo medical school, redevelopment of the waterfront at Canalside, as well as an assortment of mixed-use conversions. But even if Buffalo achieves Mayor Byron Brown’s goal of adding 2,000 downtown residential units by 2018, the total number of units will continue to trail far behind as Rochester adds 1,700 of its own in a similar timeframe. The revival in Rochester is real, and the scale of downtown residential activity is truly unique to the region.