15 McArdle Street in northwest Rochester. PHOTOS BY MARK CHAMBERLIN
occupant would need either a special permit or a use variance; the latter has a higher bar. This allows for a public hearing process, she says, and lets the city regulate the business by setting appropriate conditions on its operation. It also allows the city to do a broader analysis of market conditions, the viability of the property, and other factors that might be contributing to the vacancy, Barry says. What you don’t want to do is make the properties unmarketable and unusable, she
says. That’s bad financially, socially, and aesthetically, she says. “One of the things that we have to acknowledge in Rochester is that the market hasn’t come back to all neighborhoods of the city,” Barry says. “Where parts of the city are thriving and they’re getting all kinds of uses and property values are increasing and whatever, in other parts of the city it’s a little bit slower to reoccupy buildings.” And having mixed uses adds diversity to a
neighborhood, she says, which, historically, is part of the appeal of urban living. “If you look at old city neighborhoods, they all had a little corner store,” Barry says. “You don’t want to wipe that out.” She says that the 2003 code changes were done to protect the city in a time when it was losing population and business. So the question becomes, is the time right to revisit the code once again? There are uses that the code doesn’t even address because they didn’t exist in 2003. Another option is to sit tight until
stronger indicators of an economic bounceback emerge, Barry says. “Zoning code is something you continually look at, because the market does change and times do change and neighborhoods transform,” she says. “Areas that were struggling at one time are now starting to show signs of being restored. “We depend on our residential zoning to stabilize the city,” Barry says. “So we want to make sure that there’s a good chemistry between any commercial and residential use.”
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