September 22, 2026
For a long time, a Rochester area home search followed a familiar order. Brighton and Pittsford usually led the conversation. Fairport was a strong option, but it sat just behind them. Jill Wiedrick hears a different conversation now. The Village Planner sees the shift in the crowds, the businesses opening, and the people who come to Fairport simply to spend an evening.
Episode 257 begins with a direct question: how did Fairport become such a draw? Wiedrick does not claim the village arrived there through one master stroke. She describes a place that built momentum through a collection of practical choices, private investment, public process, and an understanding of what makes a compact canal village worth visiting.
Wiedrick came to planning through development work, not from a desk alone. Her father, a professional engineer, urged her toward planning when she was deciding on graduate school. Before long, she was testing materials, checking soil compaction, putting in utilities, and paving roads. The work gave her a practical view of the systems that sit beneath every site plan.
Her career took her through Genesee County, where a senior planner could touch mapping, GIS, health department work, and sheriff's department projects. She later joined the City of Rochester, where she spent eight years learning the detailed work of zoning, permitting, and development review. A role as assistant city manager in Batavia followed. Development called her back, and Fairport's opening for a Village Planner gave her a reason to return to the Rochester area.
She remembers driving through Fairport before her interview and calling her husband with a simple reaction: the village had changed. Streets she knew from earlier visits felt different. New places were open. There was activity in spots that had once felt quiet. That first drive helped make the decision for her.
Wiedrick pushes back on the idea that Fairport's growth came because Rochester lost its appeal. She sees the village and the city as related places offering different experiences. Fairport attracts people looking for a smaller urban setting with density, walkability, and a tight main street. Rochester still attracts businesses and people looking for something else. Regional success does not need one place to lose for another to gain.
Walkability matters. So do two features that many communities treat as background conditions: the Erie Canal and the railroad. Fairport put a train viewing platform in the Junction parking lot near the Box Factory. Visitors can stand on the platform, watch trains pass, and hear conductor conversations through speakers. It is a small example of a village treating an existing piece of infrastructure as an experience.
The canal does even more of that work. People want to sit near the water, watch boats, rent a kayak, or build a day around the path. Fairport can offer all of it. The canal also brings responsibilities. It is owned and managed by New York State, and commercial activity must fit alongside homes that front or back onto the water. Good planning has to hold those relationships together.
The Cannery helped give the village a different center of gravity. Wiedrick calls it transformational, while also noting the risk that comes with a project built around parking, shops, food, offices, and other uses. The mix is part of what makes it work. People arrive for coffee, food, eye care, or a meeting, then stay because the place gives them more than one reason to be there.
The Box Factory tells a longer version of the same story. In the 1970s and 1980s, the old building needed serious attention. Today it holds restaurants, coffee shops, and offices, and it acts as an anchor on a prominent corner. That kind of progress can appear sudden to someone returning after a few years away. Wiedrick sees it as incremental work that kept adding up.
Fairport adopted a new zoning code in February. Wiedrick sees zoning as one of the clearest ways a community can either invite good development or make it harder to happen. The code has to protect the direction residents set through the comprehensive plan and public meetings. It also has to leave room for an idea nobody predicted when the code was written.
The goal is not to make every proposal easy. The goal is to make expectations clear. A developer should know what the village wants, what the design must accomplish, and how the review process will work. When a proposal fits the code and the community's stated direction, the process does not need to drag through months of public hearings.
Wiedrick offers three habits for communities trying to grow with purpose. Review plans and zoning rules every year. Be willing to say no to a project that does not fit the direction the community has chosen. Keep talking with residents, businesses, and neighbors before a project reaches a formal vote. Fairport uses public meetings, recorded meetings, online notices, staff reports, and ordinary conversations to keep those lines open.
That last part shapes the tone of the work. Wiedrick starts meetings by reminding people that everyone in the room cares about Fairport, even when they disagree. Her point is simple. A planning process can be collaborative instead of combative when people have real chances to understand a proposal before the hearing room fills up.
The new code allows residential, commercial, and mixed uses near the canal, then asks the market to show what belongs where. Wiedrick does not want Fairport to settle on one housing type. A healthy community needs options, just as a good shoe store carries more than one kind of shoe. Apartments, single family homes, and smaller housing choices each serve different people.
Fairport also added an attainable housing requirement for larger development. New construction or redevelopment with ten or more units must include one unit that meets the village's affordability threshold. When the code was written, the benchmark was 80 percent of area median income, about $84,000 for a family of four. Wiedrick measures a balanced community in everyday terms: can a public works employee or a dishwasher afford to live there?
The same balance applies to commercial growth. Fairport has new restaurants on the way, but Wiedrick does not see restaurant count as something the zoning code should set. The market will show when a category has reached its limit. A bookstore can be as meaningful as a restaurant if it brings people together. Another Chapter Bookstore, she notes, runs book clubs that turn a purchase into a connection among neighbors.
Asked for the one thing a first time visitor should do, Wiedrick turned one stop into a full day. Walk across the lift bridge. Shop on Main Street. Get coffee at Clementine. Have lunch at Donnelly's with homemade chips and horsey sauce. Rent a kayak by the canal, then return to explore the library, Red Bird Market, the museum, and a slice at Salvatore's.
The itinerary sounds like a visitor's guide, but it also explains the village's momentum. Nothing in it depends on one attraction carrying the whole place. Fairport works because a walk can become a coffee, a bookstore visit, a meal, a kayak trip, a conversation, and a reason to come back. That is the kind of growth Wiedrick wants for Fairport and for the whole Rochester region.
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