In this grim period of a grim political year, it’s easy to
get sucked in by the negativity. Presumably intelligent Republicans are lining
up to support Donald Trump. A Clinton win isn’t a slam dunk. Two of the most
powerful elected officials in New York State have been sentenced to prison for
corruption. And PreetBharara’s
investigators are sniffing around people close to the governor – including the
SUNY Polytechnic chief who seems determined to control Rochester’s Photonics
Institute.
So it’s a relief to find hope and possibility, not in the
presidential race, not in politics at all, actually, but here at home, in the
substantial number of young professionals who are ready to change the community
and seem determined to do it.
Many older Rochesterians have
watched our adult children leave for larger cities. And we convince ourselves
that everybody’s doing it, that younger generations won’t find anything here to
like. That isn’t the case, though, for the five young professionals who were
featured at last week’s Rochester Downtown Development Corporation program.
These are not the young adults who were starting their
careers in Rochester in the 1960’s and 1970’s, when the Big Three industries
were dominating the local labor force. These young adults are working in some
of the numerous smaller enterprises that seem to be Rochester’s future.
Four of the five on last week’s RDDC panel grew up here,
left for college or work, but came back. Rochester is where they wanted to
live.
Ana Liss was convinced that the
city offered a good career opportunity, and she found it at Greater Rochester
Enterprise, where she is managing director of business development. André
Primus, who came home because he “got the Rochester itch,” is an assistant
planner at Highland Planning community development firm and is also the founder
and director of RocShare, an organization that
encourages sharing economies.
Steve Vogt went to New York City but didn’t like it, came
back home, and is a manager at the data management firm PeerPlace
Networks. Sarah Fitzgerald is a marketing associate at the rapidly expanding
downtown firm CGI Communications.
The fifth RDDC panelist, Seth Eshelman,
came here as a student, got a degree at RIT, and wanted to stay, believing the
city offered “space and opportunity.” The result is Staach,
the furniture-design company he founded 10 years ago in the former main post
office on Cumberland Street.
They like Rochester’s affordability – although they want
lower priced apartments downtown. (“I love the new
developments,” said Fitzgerald, “but I can’t afford them. I’m climbing up the
corporate ladder, but I’m not there yet.”) They like Rochester’s people, the
“walkability” of the center city, the festivals.
And they want to be involved in the community. Several of
them mentioned, unprompted, what some young-professional panelists had said at
earlier RDDC programs: They want to help make Rochester thrive. They want to
help make Rochester a place other young adults want to live. Rochester, said
Primus, is “the right size to get things done.”
Primus, Fitzgerald, Vogt, Liss,
and Eshelman are representative of a large and
growing population of young professionals. Their interest and enthusiasm
suggests that Rochester could be attractive to many of the young people who
graduate from area colleges and universities this time every year. But we all
know what the challenges are. A big one: jobs. Lots more
jobs. And if we want young professionals to live in the city once they
have children, we’ll have to have a school district vastly different from the
one we have today.
Rochester, as André Primus said, is “the right size to get
things done.”
I hope, then, that politics and lethargy and insularity and
risk-averseness – which sometimes seem to overwhelm the best of intentions in
this community – don’t get in the way. We ought to be able to promise André
that we won’t let him down.
A version of this article
appears in the May 18 print edition of City Newspaper with the title “Looking
for Optimism and Finding It at Home.”
This article appears in May 18-24, 2016.
