The vacant, half-acre lot at the corner of Pitkin and Charlotte streets in the East End isn’t much to look at.
An open space of trimmed sod is broken up by concrete slab at its northwestern tip, with eight benches surrounding the square.
But this plot has become the center of neighborhood controversy.
City Council members were slated to vote this month on selling the land to the grassroots organization Hinge Neighbors for $150,000. The group’s plan is to create a collection of town-houses that would be sold specifically to low-income Rochesterians. The sale is now on hold.
The plot is in a middle-income neighborhood, with the median household making about 39% more than the median Rochester household, according to 2024 data from the U.S. Census. Its property values will likely only increase in value with the filling in of Inner Loop North in coming years. The development’s focus on homeownership is seen as a means for Rochesterians to build generational wealth through homeownership.
“This is a point of reparations,” Hinge Neighbors executive director Shawn Dunwoody said during a recent recording of "The Big Dig" podcast at WXXI. “You really want to figure out how you do something, you create equity, home ownership, and this is what you do to create the model of how we can do it.”
But some neighbors of the current green space don’t see the project as adding an asset to the neighborhood as much as taking one away.
“This square is akin to other squares that Rochester has in the city,” said Linda Reilly, president of Keep East End Green, an advocacy group formed to preserve the space as a green space or park. “There's Wadsworth Square, Aberdeen Square, the Susan B. Anthony Square, and these are places that have a sort of gravitational pull to pull a neighborhood together, and that's what I think can and has already started to happen over here.”
The plot, and the project
While the plot has been a green space since 2023, it has always been planned for development.
The plot was one of the first shovel-ready sites made available after the city filled in and removed the Inner Loop’s east section in 2017. In 2022, the land came back to the city’s possession from CSD Housing. That developer, which built the nearby housing project Charlotte Square, had planned a commercial building on the site, but never followed through.
After complaints from neighbors about the rubble-strewn eyesore left at the site, the city took it back, put down grass and paved the slab.
It was billed as a temporary green space, and the city sought development proposals again last fall — selecting Hinge out of four applicants. The firm plans to develop 11 townhouses at the site that would be sold specifically to people making 60% or less area median income, or $62,340 for the median family in the Rochester area.
Of those 11 houses, nine would include an additional unit that the buyer could lease out, creating a total of 20 housing units.
The project is expected to serve as something of a model to how affordable housing can be built on the developable lots to be created when the remaining Inner Loop highway north of downtown is removed.
“We have a chance to build real homeownership opportunities for families who otherwise have probably been boxed out of home-ownership in a neighborhood that is only going to increase in value,” said Rochester City Councilmember Mitch Gruber. “It’s really a game-changing opportunity.”
A campaign for green spaces, or NIMBYism?
Just across the street from the site is Ugly Duck Coffee. It’s the only business whose frontage faces the site, and owner Rory Van Grol has come out against the project.
While he supports the mission and the goal of the development, Van Grol said he worries about his business. Previous construction on a nearby apartment complex on Pitkin Street had blocked customers from being able to easily access the coffee shop, Van Grol said.
“I don’t want to play the game of, ‘Well, what about this space, what about that space?’” Van Grol said. “I think there’s so many un-activated places in this city right along Union, right along Main Street, that are privately owned and that are crumbling. But the city isn’t taking action on those properties or instilling a purpose.”
Reilly, in her mission to preserve the green space, insisted she has no opposition to affordable housing developments. She noted that a portion of the housing developments surrounding the site already have requirements for affordable housing. She said the plot is of use to everyone who lives there.
“We have people from all of these buildings and downtown workers coming over, sitting on the benches, using it,” she said. “We have children who live in the townhouses here play here in the park.”
Instead, she said there are better plots in the city. She provided a list of vacant lots that could be better suited for the project. All of the addresses were north of Main Street, in an area with generally lower property values.
About 800 people signed a petition to save the green space, although many of the supporters do not live in the surrounding neighborhood.
Opponents’ concerns are echoed by Councilmembers Mary Lupien and Stanley Martin. The project would be built in Lupien’s district.
“We are talking about 11 homeowners versus a whole community that really values this space,” said Lupien, who also questioned whether the townhouses would be truly affordable to low-income residents. “This, for me, is how many people does this serve, and does this serve our residents?”
The legislation seeking to sell the property has to move out of the City Council’s Neighborhood and Business Development Committee to get to a vote. That committee is lead by Councilmember Michael Patterson. He is openly suspicious of the opposition to this development, noting that he rarely sees as much outrage on market-rate housing developments.
“For me, the question is who are those people that you don't want?” Patterson said. “Is it those Black or brown people that you don't want? Is it those older people, those senior citizens that you don't want? Is it those low-income people that you don't want? Or is it all of the above?”
He likened the resistance to developments like the Hinge project as akin to red-lining. And noted there was no pause or debate over the First Genesis housing project, which aims to build a series of affordable houses and senior apartments on vacant lots in the lower-income Upper Falls neighborhood.
“Twenty-first century restrictive covenant,” Patterson said in an interview. “Instead of saying who can’t live there, you just don’t let anyone live there."
