While there’s been a surge of development of market-rate housing downtown, new housing for the city’s working class and low-wage earners hasn’t kept pace, And city officials want to take a fresh look at how they evaluate proposals for affordable housing. Every year, the city issues Requests for Proposals asking developers to build affordable housing, […]
Rochester housing
Posted inNews & Opinion
Feedback 5/16
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Posted inMusic
Breaking rules to help the homeless
James Jackson, aka Kaiser Solzie, wants to use his story to inspire others going through some of the same struggles he has.
Posted inNews & Opinion
City threatens to take control of ignored apartment buildings
The City of Rochester has threatened to put several of an absentee landlord’s buildings into receivership if past-due violations aren’t fixed
Posted inNews & Opinion
Tenants of Thurston Road apartment building plan rent strike
Tenants at 447 Thurston Road, an apartment building in the 19th Ward, held a press conference Tuesday to protest the building’s terrible, unaddressed conditions, and to announce a rent strike beginning in March. The speakers also praised Assemblymember Harry Bronson’s introduction of a Rochester Housing Court Act into the New York State Legislature. The City […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
City effort aimed at increasing accountability of local landlords
The people in the apartment across the street are still partying, music blaring, at 2 a.m. The next-door neighbors moved out in the middle of the night and left heaps of trash at the curb. These are familiar scenarios for residents in some city neighborhoods, and they’re often left scratching their head and asking: where […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
Elmwood Avenue plan up to City Council
The Terrence Building, the 17-story, 1950’s-era brick building that was part of the former Rochester Psychiatric Center, seems to jut up from the landscape at 1201 Elmwood Avenue. Over the years, there’ve been proposals for redeveloping its roughly 30-acre site – part of which is in the town of Brighton – but nothing has gotten […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
The mortgage drought
Despite the economic recovery, African Americans and Latinos continue to lack equal access to homeownership in Rochester and Monroe County, says a new report from the Empire Justice Center, “The River Runs Dry II: The Persistent Mortgage Drought in Rochester’s Communities of Color.” An analysis of local lending practices from 2010 through 2013 showed that […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
Rochester’s big growth area: poverty
While unemployment is down both locally and nationally, the Dow is up, and the economy is clearly improving, Rochester is bucking the trends and sinking deeper into poverty. And the city’s children are suffering the most. Rochester now has the distinction of being the only one of similar-sized cities to have more than 50 percent […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
Right of refusal
Should renters be allowed to refuse entry to city inspectors?
Posted inNews & Opinion
Rochester’s education, housing, and poverty by the numbers
If you’ve lived in the Rochester region for a few years, the scores on ACT Rochester’s recently released annual Community Report Card probably won’t shock you. Most of us already know that the nine-county Rochester region, overall, is doing better than the state in some areas — the economy, education, health, and housing. But when […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
New life for old Academy Building
The four-story building at 13 South Fitzhugh Street is alive with activity as construction workers in hard hats and dusty dungarees file in and out of the front entry. Some workers haul materials up to the roof, while others caulk the ground-floor windows. Just inside the chain-link fence that guards the building’s perimeter stands a […]
