Rust Belt Cities: Rather Than Patronizing Young People, Give Them What They Ask For

This article was scraped from Rochester Subway. This is a blog about Rochester history and urbanism has not been published since 2017. The current owners are now publishing link spam which made me want to preserve this history.. The original article was published December 17, 2012 and can be found here.

   I want to share with you     an opinion piece from RustWire.com

last week. The article was     reposted on BuffaloRising.com

and it's now made its way down I-90 to RochesterSubway.com. Angie Schmitt begins by blasting attempts to market cities to young people. Angie cites an example from Columbus, Ohio where leaders spent a $30,000 grant to hire a so-called "Gen Y" expert to tell them how they could retain and attract the widely-coveted demographic. "Why didn't they just ask the young people that live there what they want, and maybe put the $30,000 toward that?" she asks...

And she goes on to lambast her own city of Cleveland for     a marketing campaign

which aims to bring back young professionals who have moved away. The problem with this effort as she sees it, is that it's based on the myth that Cleveland has only an "image problem," or that Cleveland is a great place to live as-is. But when Angie looks objectively at her hometown she sees glaring shortcomings. Cleveland's net package of assets are "not compelling enough right now to attract young people...the way they are in places like San Francisco, New York, Boston."

So what exactly is it that Angie and other young creatives find so attractive about San Francisco, New York, and Boston? She boils it down to this... "bustling sidewalks, community spaces," and, drumroll please... "the freedom to get around and lead a fulfilling life without a car. This is exactly what New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and a handful of other cities that are winning the young-people-attracting game are focused on."

   Being from the New York City area myself, I can tell you it's not often realistic for smaller cities like Rochester to model themselves after these places. If only money grew on Lilac bushes, right? "Nonsense," Angie says. Read the following excerpt from Angie's article, and when you're finished tell me if these same observations do not also apply to Rochester:    Young creatives crave walkable urban places. I am one of them. And believe it or not that is the major reason I moved to Cleveland. Cleveland has been blessed, by nature of its old age, with a relatively walkable built environment and even a decent transit system. But somehow Cleveland can't recognize that this is its greatest asset. Cleveland continues suburbanizing the city -- to a greater or lesser extent -- and it embarks on a new marketing campaign to tell the world it's not nearly as bad here as everyone thinks.    Example: If 75 young people show up at a public meeting and demand a bike lane: there -- right there is part of your answer. Cleveland's existing young people want bike lanes. But somehow, in the actual hierarchy of city priorities, 75 young people's wishes rank far, far behind those of favored developers. A young professional attraction campaign that tackled that problem: that would be a campaign I could get behind.

Or what about when the city of Cleveland wanted to tear down a historic downtown building and replace it with a parking garage? And hundreds of young people expressed opposition? Again right there, young people who live in Cleveland were expressing their preferences very clearly: they want a dense, walkable downtown -- not a car repository for suburbanites. Again, that is the moment the city had a chance to win the hearts and loyalty of young people, but again, young people's clearly expressed preferences were outweighed by those of a favored developer.    If Cleveland is losing young people to other cities, the correct response is to look at what is attractive about those places and emulate them to the extent that we can -- and I think we can in a big way. New York has     Janette Sadik-Khan and pedestrian plazas

. Chicago has     Gabe Klein and cycle tracks

. Those are the young professional attraction mechanisms in those cities -- they are city employees empowered to make real changes to the built environment. And they are killing us, while we fumble for our own solution, or deny that we have a problem.

Ok young Rochesterians... Here's your chance to tell your civic leaders what you want (believe it or not they DO read RochesterSubway.com). So drop a     comment below    . Coincidentally, the City of Rochester is also updating the Center City Master Plan, and they're     asking for opinions

. So let's give it to them.