I’m going to have to disagree slightly with the last post. It seems to me that one of the biggest problems the city of Rochester faces is that many people from the suburbs view it as a gigantic crime scence consisting entirely of jails and crack houses. As a result they fail to take advantage of the city’s cultural venues, restaurants, and generally non-strip mall feeling. And here’s the thing: actually reducing crime won’t even affect some of these people’s attitudes — I’m talking about people who are afraid to walk from the the Little Theater to Alexander St. at 7 pm (to cite one specific example — and these are people I consider friends, so I’m not making fun of them here, just showing how divorced from reality these attitudes are).

But I think that one of the primary purposes of a city, at least in the eyes of affluent suburbanites (who, like it or not, control local finances to a great degree), is to provide things like museums, theater, restaurants, . Businesses can move their headquarters to the suburbs quite easily (as they are, here and elsewhere), but the suburbs will never have the museums or theaters that a city has or the character that a city has. There’s a certain recognition among most people from Pittsford and Perinton that there are things that you can do in Rochester that you can’t do at Pittsford Plaza (with all due respect to the giant Wegman’s, which I love).

So I think this idea of high-profile projects that will get people’s attention isn’t an inherently terrible idea. I feel that too often the argument about Ren Square or Mid-Town plaza breaks down into this: a reflexive argument in favor of big projects versus a reflexive argument against big projects. I’d be curious to hear a real nuts-and-bolts argument about the affect of Renaissance Square, for example, as opposed to what I usually hear, which is “of course it’s a bad idea, the people who run the city are idiots.” It may very well be that Mid-Town and Ren Square are both bad ideas (my impession is that indeed they are), but I’d be curious to hear detailed arguments from both sides about what the projects will or won’t accomplish.

I do think it’s pretty clear that as Thomas says in the comments “Give the kids of the underclass good reasons (and good ways) to stay in school, and create an education system that all the middle class people from the ‘burbs want to be a part of.” But it doesn’t seem like any other cities have figured out how to do that yet, either.