Twenty-somethings to the rescue

Kelly Tiberio has fond memories of the childhood years she
spent living in Rochester with her grandmother. The 27-year-old freelance
writer and editor currently lives in Fairport, where she graduated from high
school, but from 1982 to 1988, she lived off Lake Avenue, not far from
downtown, in what she describes as a “beautiful, old, city home [in a]
beautiful neighborhood.”

            After high
school, Tiberio moved back into her grandmother’s house, but found that the
once-beautiful neighborhood had become an urban battleground.

            “I was
surrounded by drugs, prostitution, gun shootings,” Tiberio says. “It was
crime-ridden. It was becoming the ghetto.”

            Less than a
decade before, Tiberio had felt comfortable sitting in her grandmother’s front
yard on summer afternoons, drinking iced tea and reading magazines. By the
mid-’90s, that was no longer an option.

            “I wouldn’t
get in my car without locking it immediately after,” she says. “When I drove
down the street, at every stop sign, you’re on your toes. You’re suddenly at
this heightened state of awareness about your safety levels.”

            After two
break-ins, Tiberio’s grandmother had bars installed on the ground-floor and
basement windows. She then had the old home repaired and refurbished in
preparation to sell it. After two years on the market, it was finally sold to a
couple from Mississippi who, Tiberio says, “kind of didn’t know what they were
getting themselves into.”

            “Here’s a
gem sitting in the middle of this horrible neighborhood,” she says. “If you
picked that house up and moved it into a suburb, you could sell it for 200
grand. She barely got $40,000 for it.”

            Before
long, the house was foreclosed, vacated, and up for sale again.

            Then it
became a murder scene.

            Tiberio’s
grandmother was visiting her home in Fairport about two years ago when they
were shocked by a local TV news broadcast. “On comes a story about a man who
was shot in daylight on Ravine Avenue,” Tiberio recalls. “They showed the
[scene] and there’s our house. The guy was shot in our driveway. The reporter’s
standing there at the end of our driveway, telling us about this homicide.

            “That
really freaked me out.”

Tiberio’s experience may be extraordinary, but her
fears about downtown Rochester are typical of people her age. Many, if not
most, twenty-somethings are freaked out by the prospect of driving through, let
alone living in, most parts of Rochester. “I know a lot of people who won’t
even go downtown by themselves,” Tiberio says.

            Some young
people with the choice to live elsewhere have chosen to reside in Rochester.
The Park Avenue area, with its relatively high rents but low crime, is one of a
handful of urban neighborhoods these brave souls have hunkered down in.

            But in the
last decade, as downtown neighborhoods like Tiberio’s grandmother’s have
deteriorated, tens of thousands of young adults have simply decided to move
away. Census figures show that the area’s twenty-something population shrank
from about 172,000 in 1990 to roughly 133,000 in 2000.

            This trend
perpetuates itself, as the lack of peers makes Rochester an even less desirable
place for people in their 20s to live. Businesses suffer as the area’s “brain
drain” makes it more difficult to find qualified employees locally or attract
them from afar. Local retailers, restaurants, and cultural institutions lose
the significant revenue this relatively free-spending consumer demographic
could provide. Neighborhoods are sapped of the vitality young, educated people
bring to an area.

            In short,
we’re turning into Utica.

In the last year, three organizations have been
formed in an effort to reverse this trend.

            Last
spring, a group of young Rochesterians — including Tiberio — organized The
City Walk, a monthly pub crawl created to draw people downtown and make them
more aware of what the city has to offer.

            Last
summer, four young people founded Rochester-Area 20-Somethings, or R.A.T.S., to
give Generation Xers more opportunities to mingle and make social and business
connections.

            And most
recently, two of the original R.A.T.S. founders started another, similar
organization, Rochester Young Professionals.

            All three
grassroots, non-profit organizations are dedicated to changing young locals’
negative perception of our region. The groups’ organizers all insist this
perception is largely unfounded — and that Rochester’s positive attributes
are just hard to find.

Aside from fears downtown is a dangerous place, two
of the most commonly held, negative perceptions of Rochester are that there are
no good jobs here and the social scene sucks.

            “There are
a lot of what I’ll call ‘sexy’ opportunities elsewhere — both from the
professional standpoint and, honestly, the social standpoint,” says
ex-R.A.T./RYP-co-founder Christopher Burns, 27.

            Burns, a
venture consultant at the Lennox Tech Enterprise Center (a business incubator),
says local college students are often wooed away by big companies that can
afford to send recruiters to area colleges. Although, locally, the Big Three
— Kodak, Xerox, and Bausch & Lomb — are downsizing, Burns says there
are plenty of opportunities available at small, growing Rochester firms. People
just have to be made aware of them.

            Burns cites
GR Recruits — a new program, initiated by the Rochester Business Alliance and
local colleges, that educates students about business opportunities in the area
— as a step in the right direction. His nascent Young Professionals group
seeks to complement that effort by matching students and recent graduates with
older peers who can show them the ropes of Rochester’s business community.

            When it
comes to the social scene, Burns concedes that bigger cities attract our
twenty-somethings away — “particularly if they’re single” — by virtue of
the sheer number of people their age living in such metropolises. “In a
relatively smaller community, you have to look a little further to find those
[social] things,” he says. “I’m one to argue that they’re here nonetheless, but
you have to look harder.”

            “The
biggest thing, at least for the guys, is ‘Oh, there’s no women here,'” says
ex-R.A.T./RYP-co-founder Chris Bourne. The notion that Rochester’s
twenty-something social scene is sterile and stale is false, Bourne, 20, says.
“I criticize people for saying that, because they’re not doing their homework.
If they can’t find something here to do, if they can’t meet people, they’re not
trying hard enough.

            “I see
women walking the streets all the time,” Bourne says (not referring to
prostitutes, we should add). “So I don’t see what the problem is.”

            A big part
of the problem, says R.A.T.S. co-founder Matt Hammond, is ignorance of
downtown’s social attractions. Hammond, 24, is a Missouri native who moved into
the Park Avenue neighborhood last spring. He says he’s met many people who’ve
lived in the Rochester area almost all their lives, but who’ve never heard of,
say, Parkleigh — the trendy mini-department store on the corner of Park
Avenue and South Goodman Street — or, for that matter, Goodman Street itself.

            The Cobbs
Hill area is “another great place to go and see the skyline and stuff like
that,” Hammond says. “I told some people about it and they hadn’t even heard of
Cobbs Hill. That blows my mind.”

            “I see it
as a big marketing campaign,” Bourne says of his and other groups’ efforts.
“It’s trying to change perceptions, trying to get people out there.”

Of course, airbrushing the World’s Image Center’s
image can only do so much. The factors that fuel that perception — failing,
underfunded city schools; high taxes and reduced services; violent crime;
crumbling inner-city neighborhoods; a downtown that’s a ghost town after 5 p.m.
— need to be addressed with practical solutions.

            Two of the
area’s most prominent and contentious 
issues — property taxes and the state of city schools — are of
little or no concern to twenty-somethings, most of whom are renters with no
children.

            At least at
the county level, public officials seem out of touch with this fact. Hammond
and his fiancée, R.A.T.S. co-founder Laura Allen, met with representatives of
County Executive Jack Doyle’s office last summer to come up with an initiative
to keep young people in the area.

            One of the
ideas a county official floated involved a reduced mortgage rate for young
homebuyers. “I had no idea where this guy was coming from, because he was
talking about early twenty-somethings buying houses,” Hammond says. “To me,
that boggled my mind. That’s not so much an issue, because we’re renting.”

            Though the
couple are still years from deciding where to start a family, Allen, 23, is
already being advised to do so outside the city by one influential lobbyist.
“My mom keeps saying, ‘If you’re gonna buy a house when you get married, don’t
buy it in the city, because if you have kids, then they’ll have to go to city
schools, and those are no good,'” she says.

            Nevertheless,
Allen’s not ruling it out.

            There’s a
general sense among local twenty-somethings that city schools are underfunded,
but little sense of how that or other problems can be fixed.

            Asked what
could be done to improve city schools, Burns says, “To be honest with you,
that’s not something that comes up in casual conversation, because for so many
of us, the prospect of having children is so far into the future.”

            Burns says
the new “Rochester: Made For Living” marketing campaign — a collaboration
between the county, the Greater Rochester Visitors Association, and Greater
Rochester Enterprise — misses the young demographic he represents by
emphasizing the benefits of raising a family in Rochester.

            “When [the
campaign] says it’s a great place to raise a family, I’m coming at it from the
perspective of my peers: ‘OK, that’s off in the future. You’re telling us
something that we’re not thinking about and, in a sense, don’t need to be
thinking about for a while.’

            “The ‘Gee,
it’s a great place to raise a family’ message is something that I think all of
us intuitively know, so it seems kind of odd to tell us things we already
know,” Burns says. “Marketing towards the people that are already here and
aren’t likely to leave — that is, families that are here or later-stage
career people — isn’t where the emphasis should be put. Rather, [the campaign
should be] grabbing the attention of people that are more likely to leave,
which are those folks between college age and getting married and having
children. Those are the ones that are, frankly, more likely to be footloose and
fancy free.”

When it comes to addressing Rochester’s fundamental
problems, the twenty-something organizers had little to say about major public
policy issues, capital projects like stadiums and ferries, or political
solutions. Instead, they focused on minor municipal improvements they believe
would have a major impact on their peers’ perception of the city.

            Making
downtown a clean, well-lit, culturally rich place with plenty of parking was a
common suggestion, as was improving public transportation. Several
twenty-somethings lamented the demise of the EZ Rider, the free shuttle that
took nocturnal revelers around downtown until it was discontinued last June,
the victim of city budget cuts.

            Several of
the groups’ organizers also say more needs to be done to lure local college
students off campus and into downtown. Again, more accessible public
transportation was seen as a solution, as well as further awareness-building of
Rochester’s cultural attractions.

            Hammond
thinks having a state college closer to Rochester — in addition to SUNY
Brockport — would also help by providing another option for students that’s
neither a community college (Monroe Community College) nor a relatively
expensive, private school (Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of
Rochester).

            Bourne
suggests further improvements to the area’s public beaches and other waterfront
attractions. He’d also like to see a small subway downtown, perhaps one linked
to the suburbs. People say Rochester is too small to have a subway system, he
says, but “if you have a subway system, what do you think is gonna happen? It’s
gonna get bigger.”

The City Walk has roughly 700 people on its e-mail
list, and draws upwards of 70 people to its monthly events. (It should be noted
that the Walk is not specifically geared toward twenty-somethings, though
locals in that age group tend to make up the bulk of the participants).
R.A.T.S.’ mailing list has grown to about 500 young adults, and their events
attract a similar number of people. The Young Professionals group is less than
two months old, but Burns says about 75 people have already expressed interest
in joining.

            As their
ranks swell, these groups have the potential to enliven Rochester’s social
scene, build business networks, and become a significant source of volunteer
labor. (In addition to various social and networking events, the groups also
organize fundraisers and projects for organizations like Habitat for Humanity
and local schools.).

            The new
groups also have the potential to become a powerful political force, but at
this stage, the organizers are wary of taking official political stands, for
fear of turning off potential members.

            “We’re
trying to keep the group open to just about everybody,” says Hammond. “Pretty
much the stance we have is, we have no stance. We keep it totally apolitical.”

            The City
Walk organizers have come closer to engaging in what could be termed
“activism.” Early on in its existence, the group made City Walkers aware of the
congressional redistricting process and its potential to dilute Rochester’s
voice in Washington by combining our district with Buffalo’s. They were
careful, however, to frame the issue in non-partisan terms.

            “We want to
emphasize remaining neutral,” Tiberio says. “We don’t want to lean one way or
the other too heavily and scare people off, but we want to be able to give
people a voice and raise awareness, because we recognize that there’s a need
for our generation to get more involved.”

            This year,
Tiberio says, the group plans to establish focus groups on a variety of social
and cultural issues in the community. Volunteers would research topics, then
make their findings available to fellow City Walkers. Again, the information
would be presented in a non-partisan, strictly informational fashion.

            “That will
be a phenomenal way to give people a voice in the city and take it to that next
step,” says Tiberio, who adds that “right now, we’re taking baby steps, we’re
building relationships first and establishing this strong sense of community to
kind of get people in their comfort zone, so that they feel they can really step
out and be a part of the larger picture.

            “We also
want local leaders and local government to realize that we are an audience for
them,” she says. “They could be coming to us to say, ‘Hey, here’s a group of
citizens who are young. We need them to be aware of the issues that are going
on. We need their votes.'”

            For more
information, visit www.thecitywalk.com, www.rochesterarea20somethings.com, and
www.RochesterYoungProfessionals.org.

This article appears in Jan 15-21, 2003.