When Lois Giess and Bob Stevenson joined City Council, the crowds of shoppers crossing Main Street between Midtown and Sibley's were beginning to thin. Kodak, the city's largest employer, was starting to trim its workforce. And a population shift away from the city to the suburbs was creating a housing glut. Almost every indicator was pointing to Rochester as another Rust-Belt city in decline. While many of the problems remain, Giess and Stevenson say there is reason to be optimistic about Rochester's future.

Giess and Stevenson are longtime, active city residents. As Council members, they have dealt with everything from the city's staggering loss of jobs to the failed ferry venture. They share a perspective of the city and its neighborhoods that spans more than 20 years.

Giess was elected in 1986, and has served as Council president since 1994. Stevenson has represented the city's Northwest District since 1988. Both will retire at the end of this month.

When Giess and Stevenson talk about Rochester and its transitions, they often frame their descriptions in terms of the neighborhoods they represented. Giess has been a strong voice for the city's southeast neighborhoods. And Stevenson has worked hard to support residents and businesses in the northwest section of the city, particularly the Lyell Avenue area in its struggle to eliminate prostitution and drug dealing.

The city's neighborhoods, they say, are a key ingredient in the city's overall health and vitality.

A shrinking job market combined with poor zoning enacted in the mid-70's, Giess and Stevenson say, had a debilitating impact on Rochester's housing. But some neighborhoods have shown remarkable resilience. Others have continued their downward slide.

The changes in these individual neighborhoods provide insights, they say, into what has happened in Rochester during the past quarter-century.

In some respects, Giess and Stevenson describe two cities. Property values have continued to rise in the southeast neighborhoods, and the success of new housing development downtown is beginning to counter the loss of retail. But, with few exceptions, revitalization has stopped there.

Though it may be hard to imagine now, Giess says, a lot of the homes along East Avenue, were once drug and rooming houses.

"The only street that was showing some signs of health was Park Avenue," she says. "But it was nothing like it is today."

 Store vacancies and "problem" houses populated South Avenue and South Clinton, Giess says, and downtown retail, while still healthy, was beginning to feel the drain from suburban malls.

"It just sapped the life and vitality out of some neighborhoods," she said.

At the same time, parts of the city struggled with poverty and violence. Stevenson's northwest district - which has about 95 percent of the city's properties zoned for manufacturing - has been heavily impacted by changes in Rochester's old industrial base.

"We've had all the big employers like Kodak, General Motors, Delco, Dupont, and everyone else," he says. "The employment opportunities began to disappear, and once it began, they started to disappear rapidly. I always take the position that people tend to live where they can work. Absent a place to work, where do they live?"

And as the manufacturing downsizing continued, neighborhoods in the area changed dramatically, says Stevenson, "from owner-occupancy to people buying up blocks of property and converting it to income property."

As the city's jobs and population declined, Rochester found itself, Stevenson says, with "a housing glut."

"We were a city of 332,000 in 1950," he says. "And now we are at about 212,000. We lost a major portion of our population, but we had the infrastructure for a much larger population."

Public policy compounded the city's problems. As manufacturing jobs began to disappear, Stevenson says, a zoning ordinance adopted in 1975 accelerated the shift in city housing to absentee ownership. Many city neighborhoods suffered, Stevenson says, because of the zoning changes.

Large, single-family homes were being converted into apartments, and the new ordinance legitimized the break-ups, rezoning those areas from single-family to multi-family use.

"Along Lake Avenue, there were some magnificent, absolutely beautiful houses," says Stevenson. "But they were being chopped up into 10, 11, 12 units, or they were turned into rooming houses. That was result of the multifamily zoning."

The 1975 ordinance was "a terrible thing," Stevenson says.

 "We took some of our grandest old houses and some of these lovely neighborhoods and just destroyed them. And we asked ourselves: What in the world are we doing to our city?"

Landlords, Giess says, began buying up the city's single-family homes and renting them out.

"We found that huge sections of neighborhoods were trashed in the process," she says.

This was when Kodak employment was really going down, says Giess. "Mom or Grandma would die, and people would just want to get rid of those homes. The families just sold the house to whoever was willing to buy it quickly."

Or worse, "they became amateur landlords," says Stevenson. If they tried renting the houses out as doubles or triplexes, the city's Certificate of Occupancy was an effective tool for stopping the misuse of the property.

"But if they rented them as singles, we didn't have any tools for dealing with this," says Giess.

The neighborhood movement was really strong in the 1970's and the 80's, Giess says. During that period, the city's first preservation districts were created to counter some of the city's destabilizing zoning decisions. Neighborhood and environmental activists stopped the construction of a multi-lane expressway through the southeast area of the city, and neighborhood associations helped spur the revitalization of areas like Park Avenue and Corn Hill.

Then, Giess says, there was a period when the neighborhood movement seemed to lag, until 1993 and the beginning of the Neighbors Building Neighborhoods program.

"It really helped the neighborhood movement to continue with some momentum," says Giess.

The city threw substantial efforts and staff into helping neighborhood residents and business owners form what have been known as sector groups throughout the city. Each sector assessed its strengths and its problems and set improvement goals.

The city revisited the zoning ordinance in 2003, and lowered the density in many neighborhoods. The new zoning was designed to stabilize neighborhoods and encourage more home ownership. Council members and zoning department employees visited nearly every street in every neighborhood to get a visual impression of the city's housing. And they met with neighborhood associations to hear firsthand what improvements were needed.

Improving the city's northwest neighborhoods has been harder, says Stevenson. Some improvements have come at the expense of nearby neighborhoods. A police crackdown on hookers and drug dealers on Lyell Avenue simply pushed the problems next door into the Maplewood neighborhood, says Stevenson.

Young people were coming to the southern end of Maplewood, trying to form gangs, promote prostitution, and set up drug houses.

Block clubs - small neighborhood groups - have been a redeeming influence in Maplewood and Charlotte, Stevenson says.

Giess seems more optimistic about her district than Stevenson about his. That may be because much of Giess's district has greatly increased in value during the last 20 years. Stevenson's, however, has struggled to maintain itself. And he's worried about the Maplewood area.

"Maplewood was Kodak's bedroom community," he says.

During the last 20 years, Stevenson says, Kodak has gone from 60,000 employees to 12,000 and "that has had a profound impact on home ownership in the Maplewood neighborhood."

The Maplewood Neighborhood Association is still strong, says Stevenson, but the demographics are changing.

"There's less owner-occupancy, and we're not seeing the new residents becoming members of the association," he says.  "I'm worried about it. You have a neighborhood of 18,000 people living down there with a much smaller Kodak presence, so what's to become of this neighborhood?"

Despite his concerns about the Maplewood area, Stevenson notes positive signs, such as major investments in Aquinas Institute and Nazareth Academy. "And it looks like we're going to get a $5-million infusion for a phenomenal upgrade into the Maplewood Y," he says.

Charlotte, Stevenson says, is holding its own. It remains one of the few northwest neighborhoods with owner-occupied homes. And young families are moving in, "which has been a stabilizing influence," he says.

A consultant has recommended new housing development along the river.

"The marketing studies show that there are enough people who are tired of the 200 yards of driveway and a half-an-acre of grass," says Stevenson. "Their kids are all gone, and they would like to have something that doesn't have all that work. They don't want to live on the water, but they want to live near it."

Giess and Stevenson are stepping down, they say, on a positive note.

"I think we're at a plateau," says Stevenson. "I talk to every small business person in my district at least once a year, and what I'm hearing is we're growing. A lot of manufacturing, it's true, has been lost to China. But some of it is coming back."

Every city goes through difficult times, Giess says, but recent announcements are reason for optimism.

"The assessment value of the city's housing has gone up by 10 percent," says Giess. "This is the first time we have seen any improvement in four years."

Developers are buying downtown real estate and, "We're actually seeing significant movement to fill what I call the ‘hole in the donut,'" says Giess. "We know the entire region depends on a healthy center city, and we have been trying for years to rejuvenate downtown. Finally, that's happening and it is gaining momentum."

Smaller retail space is also tightening, Giess says.

"We're seeing more small businesses making the investment in the downtown area, and they are staying in those locations longer, which are good signs," she says. "It says the health of the city is improving."

Though retail may never be the same as it was, Giess says, "I think we're at a tipping point. I think we're turning a corner."