Who Owns Downtown Rochester's Future?

Over the last year there's been an intensifying  struggle over the future of our downtown and who gets to be part of it.

We can no longer naively dismiss vacant storefronts and the threat of beloved businesses suddenly closing their doors as random isolated incidents or the benign vagaries of market economics (as if market economics aren’t by their very nature rooted in unequal access to power, wealth, and capital). Theories abound as to why operating a business in downtown Rochester has become so untenable in recent years. They range from uneven post-pandemic recovery to exorbitant rents, the whims of landlords looking to maximize their profits, and of course, the seemingly never-ending construction spurred on by development in our growing city. And then there’s the ICE occupation earlier this year that impacted our city in quieter, more insidious ways than we have yet to fully account for. But the root system of all this runs even deeper, compounded by a myopic vision of growth that centers rising property values and speculative development without proactively addressing the displacement it inevitably triggers. Deeper still is a pervasive community culture that has not yet been able to decouple its collective memory, core identity, and public imagination from our largest institution and employer. In many ways, we are a community that has yet to fully self-actualize. 

The combined impact of these factors threatens the survival of not just one business or space but an entire vital ecosystem. It reveals the repeated failure of our city to cultivate the necessary infrastructure to truly support our local downtown businesses and community spaces. Ultimately, Rochester has become exceptionally adept at organizing itself and its resources around Mayo Clinic’s ambitious future while failing to build comparable infrastructure for the broader ecosystem of locally owned small and microbusinesses, artists, cultural organizations, and third spaces that make this city truly alive. 

The irony here is that I am tempted to make the same tired economic argument for places whose deepest and enduring value in our city cannot be reduced to mere economics. I could cite the countless nationwide studies showing that local businesses and arts and cultural spaces generate billions of dollars in economic activity, support millions of jobs, strengthen tourism, increase spending at neighboring businesses, and return tax revenue. Sure, the numbers tell a compelling story and they matter. But it troubles me that financial and economic impact is the only language deemed worthy of our collective concern and action.   

If the only way we can justify the existence of a historic corridor, a neighborhood restaurant, a record store, an arts space, a bookstore, or a community café is by proving its contribution to gross economic output, then we have already accepted a profoundly limited and extractive definition of what a community and a city should be.

That tension has been playing out most clearly on historic Broadway, where the owners of several of Rochester’s oldest commercial buildings have repeatedly sought permission to partially demolish or substantially alter them to accommodate a large student-housing development. The City’s Heritage Preservation Commission has rejected successive proposals, including a seven-story addition that would retain portions of the nineteenth-century storefronts while demolishing much of what stands behind them. What is at stake, however, is larger than the fate of five buildings. 

Our city only recently designated this commercial historic district and established preservation standards intended to protect against development pressure. If those protections can be overridden because maintaining an older building is less economically convenient than replacing much of it with a larger, more profitable development, we establish a dangerous precedent. Preservation becomes conditional on whether it interferes with the highest-value use of the land (“land”, lest we forget, that is occupied and unceded). And once that logic is accepted, every aging building becomes vulnerable to the same fate. The question before Rochester, then, is not whether our downtown should change (it always has and always will) but whether that growth requires us to surrender the places, scale, history, and locally rooted businesses and spaces that make our downtown unique and vibrant in the first place.

Locally-owned independent shops, restaurants, cafes, record stores, art spaces, and bookstores become key third spaces where connection and belonging thrive. They provide unique venues and community gathering spaces. They serve as cultural archives and as incubators for local artists, musicians, makers, and entrepreneurs. They cultivate joy and safer space and support a vibrant intergenerational community.

What all these businesses make possible in our community far outweighs mere transactions at a register. Together they form a critical network of social and cultural infrastructure. How do we measure that? What is the economic value of all that? What is the return on investment of creative capital? What is the market price of community care? What balance sheet captures belonging? What quarterly report measures real connection in a time that seems hell bent on sowing division and isolation?

We are all out here trying to survive capitalism and its concomitant harms and violence. Prosperity within a capitalist context is primarily measured through capital growth, productivity, tax base, property values, and how well systems are protecting (wholly racialized) private property hierarchies. Those metrics signal whether a city is becoming wealthier (but at what cost?). They tell us absolutely nothing about whether it is becoming more connected, more creative, more democratic, or more liberated and just. 

Our public imagination and our public investment continues to privilege one particular vision of growth for our downtown. Displacement is talked about as necessary “collateral damage” for a future that the community is seldom seen as a true and equal partner in building.

What if Rochester treated anti-displacement as essential infrastructure, just as important as transit lines, roads, and parking ramps? Because infrastructure is not something that gets spun out of thin air. Communities choose to build it. We choose to create tax increment financing districts. We invest in roads, utilities, sports facilities, innovation districts, and public-private partnerships because we decide they matter.

The gaping absence of infrastructure for anti-displacement, cooperatives, and community ownership in our city is also a choice.

We can see these choices in the proliferation of five-over-ones: large mixed-use developments with apartments stacked above ground-floor commercial space, often enabled through density allowances, zoning decisions, or other development and financing incentives. The economics of these projects can be driven by the residential units upstairs, while the required storefronts below are often built at sizes and with rents inaccessible to many local businesses. They are often held vacant while owners wait for bigger tenants capable of supporting the rents upon which their financial projections and property valuations depend. Somehow, we can marshal public policy and financing to make multimillion-dollar new construction feasible while lacking comparable infrastructure to help an existing local small business or arts space remain in place, or own the buildings they are in or even support smaller businesses who might want to occupy these new spaces downtown affordably.

None of this is simply “the market” at work. Zoning, financing, tax policy, development incentives, real estate, and public investment all help create markets, which means Rochester has choices about what kinds of development and what kinds of ownership we choose to make possible.

Imagine a city where locally owned businesses could access long-term stabilization funds that keep commercial rents predictable during periods of rapid appreciation. Imagine cooperatives, community ownership models, and commercial community land and investment trusts designed to ensure that the people already contributing to our downtown vibrancy and economy can remain part of shaping its future. Imagine revolving loan funds and flexible loan guarantees that support visionary microbusinesses that may not have a long financial history. Imagine acquisition funds that help local businesses compete with speculative investors. Imagine grants that helped mission-driven landlords steward and maintain historic buildings and preserve affordable spaces. Imagine a community ownership initiative bringing together local banks, the City of Rochester, DMC, Mayo Clinic, foundations, and private philanthropy to help downtown small businesses and arts spaces purchase the buildings they already occupy. 

These ideas are not radical. Cities across the country are experimenting with them because they have realized that growth is not just about what is built and expanded but what is preserved, sustained, and protected. 

Philadelphia’s Kensington Corridor Trust  is already acquiring commercial property for community stewardship. Portland’s Community Investment Trust allows residents of modest means to collectively invest in neighborhood commercial real estate, ensuring that wealth created by development stays rooted in the community. The  Small Business Anti-displacement Network is a diverse coalition of organizations working to protect immigrant and BIPOC-owned small businesses in areas facing displacement and gentrification across the country. Here in Minnesota, the Shared Ownership Center at Nexus Community Partners works to support real estate investment cooperatives. 

We all have different visions for Rochester’s future, and that is exactly as it should be. But whose visions are actually well resourced? Whose imaginations receive capital support? Whose dreams become anchored in policy? If we truly believe that culture, belonging, small businesses, the arts and community life and well being matter, then our economic and financial support systems should reflect those values.

This week, my family and I purchased the century-old building that houses Griot Arts on the North Broadway block of downtown Rochester, next door to The Castle. We did so not as speculative investors, but as stewards with the hope of preserving the independent businesses, relationships, and sense of community that already give this block its life, while keeping it affordable for the commercial tenants who call it home. 

What I quickly discovered, however, is that our economic systems offer remarkably few pathways for this kind of ownership. There are no creative financing tools for community stewardship or real estate cooperatives, no meaningful incentives for owner-occupied preservation, and no public infrastructure designed to help someone buy a building in order to keep rents stable rather than maximize returns. Instead, we were forced to rely on a system that will always reward capital over community and radical care. 

Over the last several months as I have worked to purchase this building, I have heard this part of downtown described in coded racist, xenophobic, and classist language. We are home to immigrant-owned businesses, transitional housing, and communities that do not align with accepted visions of a prosperous downtown.

The writings on the wall were crystal clear. There was no viable future in which a typical developer or property owner adding to their already vast wealth portfolio was going to buy this building and allow us to remain. Us…three businesses currently owned and operated by people of color and immigrants in an area of downtown that is considered “underdeveloped” and “underperforming” in an old building with considerable deferred maintenance. 

I have learned more about commercial real estate than I ever expected. I have also encountered remarkable generosity. People believed in the vision. They answered my questions, advocated for me, opened doors where they could, and helped me navigate an incredibly complex process. But the question still remains, what kinds of ownership are our systems designed to make possible?

On paper, Rochester actually has a robust financial and economic development system and programs designed to support small businesses and our downtown. The issue is that they are inherently structured to uphold and reinforce conventional models and practices of accumulated capital, financing, and commercial growth. Models that have never actually been neutral and just to begin with.  

In theory, buying commercial property is straightforward. A lender evaluates a building and a borrower, determines the level of financial risk, confirms a loan, structures a mortgage, and the transaction moves forward. In practice, your loan depends on whether your story fits the assumptions embedded within that system. The building we purchased had no usable operating financials from the previous owner, closing the door to several financing options before the conversation had even begun. Griot Arts is a two-year-old microbusiness. We have become a beloved community space, but we do not have cash flow or the balance sheet of a larger enterprise. I could demonstrate stewardship, community trust, and vision, but not years of commercial assets. Our economic development is far less equipped to support community spaces, artists, and microbusinesses seeking to purchase and steward the very places they have helped make valuable.

Ownership is never simply about a property. It is always about power. It determines who builds wealth, who shapes neighborhoods, who remains when property values rise, and who is displaced in the process.

We often talk about real estate as though markets naturally determine outcomes. But markets are not forces of nature. They are designed. Lending criteria, public incentives, underwriting standards, tax policy, development priorities are all human decisions reflecting what a community has decided is worth investing in. We know that ownership has never been distributed equitably in this country. The ability to accumulate property, build equity, access credit, and pass wealth between generations has always been deeply unjust. Risk is socially produced. Every underwriting model reflects assumptions about what stability looks like. Every financing tool privileges certain histories of ownership over others that are always already shaped by class and race. Systems then reproduce this embedded inequality and injustice on autopilot as if were the most natural, fairest thing in the world. 

In the end, there was no viable pathway for me to acquire this building through shared community ownership, cooperative financing, or another model that might have distributed both its costs and its benefits more broadly from the jump. Instead, I had to hack the system that existed, leveraging class privilege and nascent generational wealth to purchase the building in the hope that we might use private ownership to cultivate something more communal: a different model of stewardship, preservation, and sustainability. It is not lost on me how rare it is for a Black woman and a Black family to own commercial property in downtown Rochester, nor do I romanticize what that ownership means. The loan we received is still structured around conventional market assumptions. The building is nearly a century old, sits in an area routinely described as underdeveloped, and carries the considerable tax burden of downtown property. Supporting and protecting its existing businesses—including Griot Arts—while paying the mortgage and maintaining an aging building will require significant labor, resources, and resilience (if not a full on miracle).

Still, I remain hopeful for what this could mean for how we might move forward, how we might start blazing a pathway in the context of all that is shifting and exacerbating systemic barriers downtown. I am committed to figuring out how to actually build the infrastructure that I went looking for and could not find: patient and creative capital, cooperative ownership structures, public investment, preservation tools, philanthropic partnership, and financing designed around the true value that small businesses, artists, and cultural spaces create rather than the value that can be extracted from the buildings and land beneath them. If we can begin building that infrastructure now, it can one day be available to the local businesses, artists, and communities downtown and elsewhere who are struggling to keep their spaces and thrive.