It's a complicated place, this place we live in. And while the bad news often overwhelms the good, there's plenty of good. The Rochester Downtown Development Corporation's latest report on downtown housing is one of the "goods."

The developments that often get our attention are the big projects: ferries, stadiums, Ren Square. But piece by piece, a handful of units at a time, housing is being developed downtown.

And people are snapping it up.

How much longer can this continue? Hard to say. RDDC officials are enthusiastic, insisting that we haven't come close to tapping the market yet. Obviously, at some point that market will be exhausted. The number of people who like living right downtown isn't unlimited, and the region's population isn't growing.

Think, though, what downtown would be like if our population were growing.

That, of course, is heavily dependent on new jobs. And the data in that area continue to be discouraging. Despite everything this region has going for it, we're not a magnet for new business.

When Bill and I moved here, Rochester was growing. And the growth was expected to accelerate. Not only did that not happen, but we've shrunk. The manufacturing job loss has been enormous, and we haven't been able to replace it. Business leaders hope that the answer is arriving in the form of medicine, research, and high-tech. I hope so, too, and as with downtown housing, there are encouraging signs.

But we're no longer a major, nationally known corporate center. There's a disconnect somewhere, and business leaders' pronouncements to the contrary, I don't think the major problem is taxes. And it most certainly isn't the weather.

This is a wonderful place to live.

A few years ago, during a week of poking around the Yorkshire Moors, we drove over to England's Lake District. The last quarter of the trip, we endured bumper-to-bumper traffic, reached the crest of a hill, looked out, and saw: the Finger Lakes region.

A couple of Sundays ago, we drove around our own Lake District for the afternoon, stopped in Dansville to watch the hot-air balloon festival, and drove back to Rochester, watching the sun setting over Upstate's hills and forests and farms.

The Finger Lakes and vineyards, our Big Lake, a river and a canal, a city full of art, music, theater, and festivals: there are few places like this in the country. Why can't we figure out how to capitalize on all that?

Meantime, there's the "other Rochester," the pockets of poverty where violent crime is a common occurrence. Almost every day, the news media get an e-mail from the Rochester Police Department describing the latest violence. A few weeks back, the e-mail gave these details on a single day's events: man shot and wounded; man "very uncooperative with both police and medical personnel." Woman found shot dead in front of a school. Man shot and wounded; "very uncooperative." Two men shot and wounded; four handguns recovered.

How do we fix that? Goodness knows we're trying, but I sometimes wonder whether what we're doing is any more effective than shouting "cut the taxes" is at creating jobs. City Council has extended the youth curfew for a year, despite lack of evidence that it's accomplishing anything. The idea behind it - to link troubled families with social services - seems good. But we're a long way from creating that linkage.

And cameras on street corners? To paraphrase Councilmember Carolee Conklin's criticism of the curfew, the drug dealers and gang leaders are smart enough to figure out where those cameras are.

The only proposal I've seen much promise in is the Children's Zone. It'll take a broad, intensive, communitywide effort to break the chain of poverty and violence that's afflicting this city. The Children's Zone could provide that. But it, like our dream of bringing new business and new jobs to the region, is a long way from reality.

And those two big challenges are, unfortunately, inextricably linked.