A Walk Through College Town

Five years ago, then-mayor Thomas Richards announced a grandiose project for the University of Rochester-Strong neighborhood. It was going to be an eco-friendly project with green spaces, a transit hub, a book store and most importantly for the neighborhood, a grocery store. Wegmans supermarkets had closed their store on the location several years prior.

So how has this project paid off? Did neighors get the goods and services they expected?  Did the taxpayers get their money's worth? The projected was conceived under Mayor Richards and begun under current Mayor Lovely Warren. Now Green Party mayoral candidate Alex White takes a walk through College Town, The biggest pile of corporate welfare in one place in the city of Rochester.

 

The following was written by White in October of 2013. In hindsight it was almost prophetic:

Recently the city broke ground on a project in Rochester called College Town. This is a half million square foot development on 16 acres of land at the corner of Mt Hope and Elmwood Ave in Rochester. This area plans to have a bookstore, grocery, child care, YMCA, hotel and conference center, restaurants, office, residential, and a parking garage. Like many of these projects, the ground breaking brought out a who’s who of city officials- despite the fact it is bad for Rochester.

 

The project started out as a vision statement from the neighborhood about what they wanted in this area. This process identified a few things the neighbors found important; a grocery store, a locally owned book store, more public spaces, a public transit station, and sufficient parking.

 

With this in mind the City went out and found a developer and unfortunately here is where the problems began. A proposal was made which offered lots of office space, a Barnes and Noble bookstore, 150 apartments, room for some retail, a hotel, and perhaps a small grocery store. They also put in a parking garage but then rented part of it to the U of R. Gone were the public spaces, green space, bus terminal, and sufficient parking and the bookstore was no longer local.

 

So with the project now something much different than what the neighbors requested, the financing turned this into a nightmare. The total project is going to cost around $100 million to build. Of this, $5.4 million is a federal New Market Tax Credit. They then have $20 million section 108 loan from the federal government. There is $2.8 million in Brownfield clean up money, $2.7 in sales tax credits, a $4 million grant from the state of NY, $3.3 million from the city, and almost $7 million in other subsidies. In the end it looks like $45.2 million in public money going to the project.

 

Of this money, two of the largest finances seem misused. The New Market Tax Credit is a program which is supposed to spur revitalization efforts of low-income and impoverished communities across the United States. Now Rochester has many low income areas but the area near Highland Park and adjacent to Strong Hospital is not

one of them. The HUD loan is also suspicious. This program was made for projects which meet one of the four following criteria: benefit low- and moderate-income persons, prevention or elimination of slums or blight, or address community development needs with particular urgency because existing conditions pose a serious and immediate threat to the health or welfare of the community for which other funding is not available. This once more does not seem to fit as the blight was not terrible, slums were non-existent, and there was no health or welfare threat. The housing does have 8 moderate income apartments but that hardly justifies $20 million. Further this loan is being paid back out of taxes the project should be paying and the lower rather than raised the taxes to cover this.

 

Well what are the benefits to the city which this project will bring? They tout the job aspect of this project and claim there will be 582 permanent jobs created by this project. That sounds good but a closer look makes most of these vanish. Of these almost 300 will be office jobs and most of these will be with the U of R or Strong Hospital which is moving units from diverse locations to one closer to the hospital. The book store will be the largest retail in the area but this is only going to be a consolidation of 2 other Barnes and Nobles which will close so this might actually cost jobs. Meanwhile the 60,000 sq ft of other retail will be mostly restaurants which will compete with existing businesses and will only cause other businesses to fail, so it probably will not create any jobs. What will create jobs is the parking garage, maintenance for the apartments, and the grocery store, most of which will be low paying.

 

The city will also receive an estimated $9.6 million in taxes and interest over the next 20 years. This breaks down to only $430,000 in per year, which says the assessment of the property is a mere $10 million, or one tenth the cost of construction, and only $20 a sq ft. Of course the City is rebuilding both Elmwood and Mt Hope, creating new streets, redoing sidewalks, and improving utilities. They have bonded $3.3 million to cover this so they have interest costs as well. All told the City will spend at least $17 million of its own money on improvements around this project which did not need to be done except for this project. So in twenty years the city will lose roughly $10 million on a $20 million dollar investment on a project which meets only one of the items identified by the neighbors as needs of the community.

 

So what will Rochester really get in this project? About a hundred low paying jobs, a lot of construction jobs which will go to workers which will not be local, an increase in the total taxable property value in Rochester, and a very pretty set of buildings owned by an out of town developer. Meanwhile neighborhoods will deteriorate in the crescent around downtown, more houses will become vacant, blight will expand in other sections of Rochester, we will run miniscule smaller deficits every year, and the mayor has a great photo op at this ground breaking. It seems that should be a better way to spend $20 million of our money and a $20 million loan than this.

 

Fortunately there are better ways to spend money than this. Instead of building new buildings we could make loans and grants available to maintain the ones we already have. We could also use some of this money to start new businesses, owned and run by Rochestarians. These new businesses could get contracts from local institutions for products they presently get from out of town. Finally we could fund city services which reduce crime and fight poverty like recreation, libraries, and schools. It is time to focus our spending on people not profits as that is the only way to solve our problems and make the city better.

 

In 2012 this area paid more than $35,000 in taxes and after all this development it now pays less.

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Artist's rendering of how College Town was supposed to look in 2013

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How College Town looks as of 2016
(note: trees at lower right are located in Mt Hope cemetary, not the promised "green space")