From Next City: "What could you do with $1.7 billion in a city of around 200,000, where 33 percent of households live below the federal poverty line? The city of Rochester, with Mayor Lovely Warren at the helm and supported by partners and allies across New York State and beyond, has hatched a plan to tap into at least that much to help level the economic playing field for Rochester’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods. 'It’s about being able to give employees an opportunity to have ownership and to build wealth within their own communities,' says Warren. The plan consists of supporting the creation or growth of cooperatively owned businesses located primarily in the city’s most distressed neighborhoods, collectively known as the Northern Crescent..."

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From the Democrat and Chronicle: "In three neighborhoods on the east side of Rochester, nearly half of the residents subsist on food stamps, and 40 percent of households are scraping by with incomes below the poverty line. Good luck finding a job in these parts of the city, where fewer than one in 10 residents is employed in the neighborhood where he or she lives. More than half of residents who do have jobs are forced to commute to the suburbs. Creating sustainable, living-wage jobs in parts of the city like these is a top concern for local leaders as they work to unravel deeply concentrated pockets of poverty that threaten to undermine the region's economy and quality of life as a whole. Rochester's leaders are looking well beyond New York state's borders for ideas. And led by Mayor Lovely Warren, they've seized upon a model about 250 miles to the west, in Cleveland, Ohio...."

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