How One American City Reclaimed a Highway (and It Paid Off Big Time)
The Inner Loop East in Rochester, NY, in 2010 before the highway was reclaimed. (Source: Wikimedia Commons/Aip3745.)
It’s the 1990s, and you’re examining the past—and future—of your midsize, post-industrial American city. Like many of your peers, you have a downtown in decline. Also like many of your peers, there’s an urban highway cleaving your city, a remnant of an era of planning decisions that usurped productive land and hastened the city’s depopulation and disinvestment.
Facing a slew of transportation and economic development challenges in 1990, the city of Rochester, New York, decided to reclaim its urban expressway. Called the Inner Loop, it occupied a 2.68-mile belt around downtown Rochester, cutting off historic neighborhoods and resulting in the destruction of 1,300 homes and businesses. The highway was considered overbuilt almost as soon as it was finished in 1965, with excess capacity for a metropolitan area whose decline led to a diminishing number of inbound commuters and residents.
To reclaim the land and replace the sunken expressway with surface streets, the city broke the project up into two phases. Phase one, called Inner Loop East, broke ground in 2014 and was completed in 2017. Inner Loop North, which will complete the reclamation of the former highway, is in the final planning stages.
The Inner Loop East in 2021 after the highway reclamation project. (Source: Wikimedia Commons/WuTang94.)
Richard Perrin, Rochester’s commissioner of Environmental Services, said city officials and the Metropolitan Planning Organization always viewed this as much more than a transportation project. “We are going to reconnect the city where it was disconnected. And we're going to make sure that we do that in a way that doesn't just do it for the sake of doing it, but doing it based on lessons learned from the past.”
By every measure, the project has been a success. Acres of new downtown real estate have spurred housing and economic growth. Neighborhoods that had been cut off by a large moat have been reconnected. And the financial burden of highway maintenance is off the books forever. But even with the table set from the visionary decision to pursue the project, Rochester faced a decades-long planning and construction labyrinth that reveals the interconnected challenges of undoing the harms of highway building.
Easy to Decide, Hard to Execute
From a straight infrastructure perspective, the decision to reclaim the Inner Loop was not a difficult choice. By some estimates, the entire road project for the first phase cost the same ($21 million) as rehabilitating just one bridge in the city. Because it was a sunken roadway, replacing it was a less daunting prospect than the costlier job of removing an elevated highway.
A city analysis of the project put the math more starkly: “Maintenance of this portion of the Inner Loop would exceed the cost of filling the below-grade expressway in and creating an at-grade street, while providing none of the benefits.”
What to do with the six acres of reclaimed land and streetscape was the greater challenge, and also the greatest opportunity. The city put out requests for proposals on several parcels in the infill areas of the city, seeking compatible projects for housing and economic development.
Bret Garwood, a local developer and former city official, responded to those requests for proposals. His firm, Home Leasing, executed the first project on the Inner Loop, Charlotte Square at the East End, which opened in 2017. Garwood specializes in attainable and affordable housing development, but for the first project he felt “it was important to start with a market rate project because it proved the market was there.” Home Leasing has gone on to do four communities with 204 new housing units, with an overall investment of $52 million, on land that ten years ago was home only to rapidly moving cars.
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One of Garwood’s greatest points of pride is responding to critics concerned that the Inner Loop would just be “condos for rich people,” using data showing the new housing developments are among the most economically diverse in the city. Garwood says the local housing market is mismatched with many large, older homes, and that the new smaller-scale developments are filling an important void. Home Leasing’s properties now include market-rate housing, rent-subsidized tenants, rehabilitative housing for residents with medical frailties or recovering from homelessness, and ground-floor retail.
Overall, five of the original Inner Loop parcels have already been built, adding over 500 new housing units in those neighborhoods, while two have yet to break ground. Of those new units, more than half are affordable for incomes at 80% of the area median income or below.
Elsewhere along the reclaimed roadway, Rochester’s Strong Museum, home to the National Toy Hall of Fame, has expanded by 90,000 square feet, and the surrounding area has seen new businesses in addition to all the new housing. In an excellent photo essay from the revitalized area, Arian Horbovetz of The Urban Phoenix describes the transformation: ”The Inner Loop infill, buoyed by the activation of several new restaurant, retail and brewery establishments, has comfortably reignited an area just outside of Rochester’s downtown, and the city is better for it.”
Lessons Learned From Reclaiming Highways
For cities contemplating similar highway-reclaiming projects, Rochester officials have hard-earned words of advice. By all means do it, but “expect it to be a bit messy,” says Perrin. A project of this scale requires buy-in from a massive array of entities, from local planners to elected officials to state transportation agencies, and, because the Inner Loop was primarily funded by a Transportation Investment Generating Economic Activity (TIGER) grant, the federal government.
And then there’s the public. Erik Frisch, Rochester’s deputy commissioner of neighborhoods and development, acknowledged the fraught history of urban planning when pitching this project to the affected communities. “Sixty years ago, somebody who looked a lot like me came into the neighborhood and said, ‘I've got this great idea, I'm gonna put a highway here, it's going to improve the community’ … And then, you know, 60 years later, I come in saying, ‘Hey, I've got this great idea, we're gonna remove this highway.’ It's understandable that there are trust issues,” says Frisch.
Both officials advise flexibility and complete transparency. Feedback needs to be continuous because plans change and stakeholders often need to see specifics before responding. And even the best ideas require considerable patience, as evidenced by the 25 years it took Inner Loop East to come to fruition. Because of all those factors, Rochester’s experience can’t be a direct playbook for other municipalities. “You can look at what we've accomplished, you can do this as well, but it's got to be yours,” says Perrin.
That said, the math tells the story of why other cities might try. “This $24 million public infrastructure project [to reclaim the highway], that's soup to nuts, from design to complete construction, led to well in excess of $200 million in private investment,” notes Frisch.
That success has also greased the skids for the Inner Loop North project. Having seen the success, both economically and in terms of livability, of the first converted neighborhood, community feedback was largely positive. This project will convert a longer stretch of roadway and create more than 20 acres of infill space, and is designed for a different urban context than Inner Loop East.
Perrin urges transportation officials to resist the mindset in which “things get fixed because they need fixing,” and to always work with the guiding principle that “people are the customer, not the infrastructure.”
Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.