All posts by inthesaltcity

Zoning Reform: ADUs

Planning,

By Alex Lawson

One of ReZone’s most innovative changes was to make Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) legal in every residential zoning district. This (along with the legalization of townhomes) was the move that ‘ended’ exclusionary single-family zoning in Syracuse, because it meant that there were no longer any residential lots where a detached single-family house was the only type of housing allowed, and any residential lot could theoretically hold at least two housing units.

However, in the almost three years since ReZone made ADUs legal, only a handful have applied for building permits and none have actually been built. There are reasons for this beyond zoning, and the problem isn’t unique to Syracuse—plenty of places that legalized ADUs had to tweak their laws to actually get anything built—but if City Hall is actually committed to making ADUs part of the solution to our housing crisis, then the zoning code needs to change to make them easier to build.

OWNER OCCUPANCY REQUIREMENT

The biggest problem for ADUs in Syracuse is that the zoning code only allows them to be built or occupied if the owner of the property lives in either the ADU or the principal residence on the property. This kind of restriction is common in municipalities. because people don’t like rented housing, and they don’t like the idea of landlords building new rental housing in their neighborhoods.

This means that only homeowners can build ADUs, and each homeowner can only build one ADU. There are a couple of problems here. First, most homeowners aren’t developers or contractors, and they don’t have experience managing a construction project. This essentially means that only amateurs are allowed to build ADUs, so it’s not surprising that not many are getting built. 

The second issue with the owner-occupancy requirement is that it restricts financing for ADU construction. Banks aren’t keen to lend for the construction of a rental unit that they won’t be able to rent if the borrower defaults on the loan. This leaves home equity lines of credit as the only real option for financing ADU construction.

Finally, the owner-occupancy requirement makes ADUs less attractive investments for property owners themselves because the value of their investment in the property is dependent on the purchaser. A house with an ADU should be worth more than one without because it can generate rental income, but that’s only true if the property owner lives on the lot, so a bank might not recognize that additional value. This hurts resale value, and it is a disincentive for homeowners to build ADUs instead of putting their money somewhere it may get a better return, like the stock market or a kitchen remodel.

For all of these reasons, owner-occupancy requirements are widely considered to be a ‘poison pill’ for ADU laws, and experts agree that municipalities should eliminate them. In Syracuse, City hall should amend the zoning code to remove the ADU owner-occupancy requirement and allow ADUs to be built as accessories to any single-unit dwelling.

CONSISTENT RULES

Cost will always be a barrier to ADU construction, but consistent regulation can help by allowing specialization and economies of scale. When California adopted statewide design standards for ADUs, several companies responded by designing free-standing ADUs that could be mass-produced and installed in any qualifying lot in the state. Standardization and mass production offered a lower-cost option than forcing every property owner to hire an architect to create a bespoke one-off design for every ADU.

Syracuse isn’t the State of California, but the same principle can apply here: consistent rules for ADUs can allow local builders to design an ADU that can go in anybody’s backyard, and repeated construction can allow for bulk materials purchasing and specialization that can lower costs.

In order to unlock these lower costs, City Hall needs to amend its zoning ordinance to make rules for ADUs consistent between lots. One glaring issue is the new rule (adopted in 2025) that sets the maximum size of every ADU at 50% of the size of the primary dwelling. That means identical adjacent lots can have different standards for ADU design if the houses that sit on those lots are different. Another similarly problematic regulation is the one adopted in 2024 that requires detached ADUs to be decorated similarly to the primary dwelling. This, again, creates different standards for different ADUs based on the appearance of whatever house is already on the lot, and it can frustrate attempts to lower costs by streamlining ADU construction.

ALLOW ADUs ABOVE GARAGES

One of the best places to put an ADU is above a garage. This arrangement minimizes impermeable surface coverage and maximizes parking and yardspace while providing the additional privacy of a detached ADU. This arrangement is so popular that you can buy predrawn plans for garage/ADU combos on the internet.

However, several details in Syracuse’s zoning code makes this popular and practical ADU option functionally impossible to build.

The most glaring issue is the code’s 16’ height limit for accessory structures. It’s essentially impossible to build a two-story structure when the highest point of the roof cannot be more than 16’ above the ground. This plan for a garage/ADU combo, for instance, is 28’ tall.

The second problem has to do with restrictions on total square footage of all accessory structures. The zoning code limits ADUs to a maximum of 800 square feet of finished area (or 50% of the square footage of the primary dwelling, as previously discussed). That’s pretty generous, but the code also limits the total square footage of all accessory uses and structures to 1000 square feet. That means any ADU above a garage could be, at most, 500 square feet because the garage below has to be at least as large, and the 1000 square foot limit applies to the garage and ADU’s combined area. This area restriction would prohibit the construction of this garage/ADU combo, for instance, despite the fact that both the garage and ADU would be allowed on their own.

Restricting the total square footage of accessory structures in this way is nonsensical because it encourages people to build other designs with less favorable outcomes. A side-by-side 600 square foot ADU and 400 square foot garage, for instance, would be allowed under current rules, but that structure would cover an additional 400 square feet of the lot with an impermeable surface compared to a 600 square foot ADU stacked on top of a 600 square foot garage.

To fix these problems and make garage/ADU combos easier to build, the code should make two changes. First, eliminate the separate height limit for accessory structures and apply a single height limit to all structures in any zoning district. Second, eliminate square footage restrictions on accessory structures and allow the code’s maximum impermeable lot coverage requirements to regulate their total size.

ADUs are good. They create badly needed new housing options in existing neighborhoods. They allow homeowners to generate income from their biggest financial asset. They allow families to stay together even when they outgrow a single house. It is a good thing that ReZone made them legal in Syracuse. Now, City Hall needs to further amend the code to make ADUs not just legal, but practical so that more people can benefit from these types of homes.

Reform Zoning to Solve Syracuse’s Housing Crisis

Planning

By Zach Zeliff

Syracuse is in a housing crisis. Monthly rents and home sale prices are shooting up faster than we’ve seen in a generation. Our aging housing is falling down and poisoning the people who live in it. Homelessness is on the rise, and 1 in 8 kids in the Syracuse school district will face homelessness at some point this year. Too many people live in dilapidated housing, too many people can’t afford their rent, and too many people have slipped into homelessness. In short, there’s a fire, and population growth from Micron and other macro-demographic patterns are poised to pour on more gasoline.

There are many ways to fight that fire, but all of them require more new housing. That’s new housing supply of all kinds—market rate and affordable, and everything from high-rise apartments to small accessory dwelling units.

The data makes it clear that not building new housing pushes up prices. This chart (from a report by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies) shows housing price changes versus housing supply growth. Cities that built the most new housing also the most had the least housing cost growth. Conversely, you can see in the other corner of the chart Buffalo and Rochester (very similar cities to us, and facing similar trends) have low inventory and high cost growth.

Want to do some further reading? Here is a paper that summarizes a whole bunch of research on the topic. Here’s a less academic take from a labor perspective. And here is something very pithy – a statement from the CEO of Avalon Bay, an extremely large landlord, saying their company is well positioned to push rent costs because they operate in markets where it’s hard to bring new supply online.

“Supply dynamics favor owners. Grout-up states have slowed nationwide, and New York’s pipeline has contracted more than any other major U.S. market. That means fewer completions through 2026 and 2027—less new competition, a firmer rent floor, and a more predictable revenue base for multifamily assets.”

There’s also good evidence that building more housing constrains housing costs. New Rochelle has recently been recognized for its housing growth. Accordingly, rents have only risen 1.6% since 2020—a time when rents in the rest of the NYC metro area and NYS have exploded. The city adopted a suite of policies—including land use, permitting, and financing/tax incentives—designed to boost housing production, and these are the results. Jersey City has long been known as a housing production focused city, and they’ve managed to contain costs for existing residents even in the wildly competitive NYC rental market.

An interlude here about Good Cause – given the recent discussion in town. New Jersey has had good cause since 1974, and yet has still built a significant amount more housing than New York over that period. New Rochelle experienced their building boom while opting into good cause in 2025. There is no data to suggest good cause inhibits housing production. Good cause and new supply are two good tastes that taste great together. 

Syracuse needs to embrace a policy paradigm designed to get new units built, and quick. Over the next few weeks, we will flesh out the details of specific zoning reforms that could actually move the needle on Syracuse’s housing crisis. ReZone made some good first steps in 2023, but we need to go farther. We’ll get into the weeds of discretionary review processes, density restrictions, and use types.

But before all of that, let’s just agree on a basic premise. Syracuse needs new housing. We need it to fight segregation, we need it to meet modern needs, and we need it to make housing affordable. Zoning can do a lot of different things, and it has been deployed to achieve all kinds of—mostly exclusionary and mostly discriminatory—different ends over the last 104 years in this town, but none of them are as important as building new housing. Not promoting economic development, not preserving neighborhood character, not ‘protecting’ single-family neighborhoods. None of those things matters as much as solve Syracuse’s housing crisis, and that means building more new housing.

Commemorating Cook’s Coffee House Riot

Community

By Alex Lawson

Syracuse should make a bigger deal out of January 1. That’s the date of the Cook’s Coffee House Riot—the delightfully weird event that birthed the City of Syracuse.

Before 1848, what we now call the City of Syracuse was a collection of independent villages. Syracuse—centered on Clinton Square—was the largest, but it was surrounded by Salina, Geddes, Lodi, and Onondaga Hollow. These little settlements jockeyed for primacy during the first fifty years or so of their existence by competing for the County Seat, the Erie Canal, the salt industry, and other markers of early American urbanism.

The Village of Syracuse’s greatest rival was Salina—the older settlement centered on Washington Square on today’s Northside. Salina was older than Syracuse and had been the earliest site of salt production, but Syracuse outgrew its northern neighbor after successfully routing the Erie Canal through Clinton Square and developing a new way to harvest local salt. Although both villages prospered through the first half of the nineteenth century, Syracuse was clearly on pace to become Onondaga County’s preeminent municipality.

Cook’s Coffee House was located on the southeast corner of Washington and Warren Streets—the current site of Key Bank. Cook’s was a local institution with a striking interior. From a Forest to a City describes the decoration:

“[The] bar was made very attractive by placing mirrors back of the numerous decanters of liquors, and to add to the attractions was a collection of birds, the cages being hung in such a manner that every movement of the inmates was reflected in the mirrors. Chief among these attractions was a parrot whose powers of speech were most remarkable… The parrot seemed to be well informed of bar room etiquette, and he would call in the most deliberate manner for different kinds of drinks; he was cunning and mischievous, but, unfortunately, a most profane bird, and when giving utterance to his profanity the harshness of his voice was most remarkable.”

Cook’s Coffee House Riot took place during a New Year’s Ball on January 1, 1844. Several “roughs” from Salina attended the ball with the intention of picking a fight with citizens of Syracuse. The brawl escalated quickly, several people were shot—all survived—and the Sheriff called out the local militia to break it up. Although the militia arrested several people for the violence, all were acquitted the next day.

This fight was so large and so embarrassing to local leaders that it spurred a movement to merge the villages of Salina and Syracuse as a single City in order to eliminate the rivalry that had led to the riot. Syracuse received its City Charter four years later, and the new municipality encompassed the former villages of Syracuse and Salina.

The details of this story suggest a few ideas to commemorate the event. It took place on New Year’s Day—an annual holiday that already provides an excuse for festivity. A simple party is one option, or Syracuse could host a New Year’s parade like those in Philadelphia and Pasadena. A parade could trace the route of the Salina ‘roughs’ from Washington Square down North Salina Street to Downtown. Cook’s Coffee House is gone, and the bank that now occupies its site probably isn’t a good venue for a party, but the parade could end at Clinton Square or indoors at the event space in the lobby of the old Onondaga Bank. Cook’s well-documented interior suggests an obvious theme for party decorations—birds and mirrors—and the cursing parrot makes a great mascot. Any of these motifs would also work well for any bar that wants to host a New Year’s Bash or even for any private party.

As city origin stories go, Cook’s Coffee House Riot doesn’t have the mythic grandeur of Romulus and Remus or the principled optimism of Penn’s charter, but it’s fun, and it’s ours. This is the sort of story we should tell to build up a shared sense of our community’s history. And if we can throw a big party while we’re at it, that’s all the better.

We Need a Better Solution for Failing Buildings

Power

By Zach Zeliff

A disturbing trend is emerging among large midcentury apartment buildings in Syracuse. Buildings that used to provide quality housing for hundreds of people have fallen into disrepair and become uninhabitable. The Skyline and Vincent—both run into the ground by local slumlord Troy Green—are the highest profile examples of this trend in recent years, and a similar fate threatens Nob Hill and Parkside Commons. We need a way to stop the negative spiral of deferred maintenance and poor management leading to reduced cash flow through vacancies and rent abatements that leads to further deferred maintenance until these buildings fall completely out of the housing market.

Currently City Hall and the County Health Department only have enforcement tools. They can cite buildings for code violations or fine owners for health violations. In the high profile cases of Green National, the Attorney General eventually sued them out of owning property. The outcome of two of the largest of those buildings, the Vincent and Skyline? Every tenant was forced to move and the buildings are still totally vacant. Beyond the impact on individual tenants whose lives are upended and their homes are gone, I believe that the loss of these units is an underappreciated factor in why rents have increased so dramatically at the lower-cost end of the rental market.

Now we are seeing dramatic building decline at Nobb Hill, and Parkside Commons in a different way (buildings built with subsidy often have different funding streams/economic models). With our aging housing stock, it’s likely to happen again. Code and health enforcement are important tools, but obviously given the past failures described they are not sufficient. While discussing Skyline during its downward descent, a friend asked if the building could be seized by the city. My response: What would happen next? City Hall isn’t a property developer. It doesn’t currently have the capacity to finance or implement the kind of renovation these buildings need.

Given the frequency of this situation, I believe the “what next” should be built. An institution which has the capacity to take over distressed buildings, fix conditions crises, restore dignity to the lives of tenants, and stabilize the physical and financial health of buildings is sorely needed. If the landbank’s proposed Invest Syracuse gets started, this can be precisely that type of institution. The ability to acquire buildings, real estate expertise, a robust balance sheet and the ability to finance projects through its own capital and obtaining various subsidies.

We know Syracuse’s big mid century apartment buildings can be successful. Right across the street from the Skyline is the Regency Tower—another large apartment building constructed in 1960. It houses hundreds of tenants without any of the kinds of problems that plagued its neighbor across the street, and it’s an asset to its neighborhood and the City at large. The Skyline and the Vincent and Nob Hill and Parkside Commons could all contribute to Syracuse in the same way, but when private ownership and market conditions put them on the path to disrepair, we need a public solution. Hopefully the owners of Nob Hill can turn things around for the good of the tenants. But no matter where, whether it is Invest Syracuse or something else, we need an institution that goes beyond just enforcement, and has the ability to turn things around at failing buildings for tenants.

Syracuse: Four Sport Town

Community

By Alex Lawson

Syracuse is America’s premier second-tier sports town. In Spring and Summer we have the Syracuse Mets, in Fall it’s SU football, then in Winter through to Spring it’s the Crunch and Orange Basketball. With the Crunch, the Mets, and Orange football and basketball, we’ve got teams competing in the second-highest league of each of the ‘big four’ sports: the AHL, AAA baseball, Power Four college football, and Power Five college basketball. All twelve months of the year, you can catch a pretty well-attended game featuring a pretty high level of competition for a pretty reasonable price.

That’s pretty cool for a metro area this size, but what’s even cooler is that Syracuse is the only town in America where this is true. Of the more than 100 cities with a AAA baseball team, and AHL hockey team, a Power Four college football team, and a Power Five college basketball team, none besides Syracuse has all four.

Some come close. Bigger cities like Chicago and Los Angeles boast big universities and one or two minor league teams, but those are really major league towns. Others—like Columbus, OH—overshoot the mark by having one major league team alongside a few minor league and college programs. Places like Des Moines have a nearby neighbor like Ames that round out their complement of second-tier teams, but they can’t make it on their own.

The four other towns that come closest are Durham, Louisville, Tucson, and Austin. Durham has the Duke Blue Devils and the Durham Bulls, but no AHL team (the NHL Hurricanes play in nearby Raleigh). Louisville has the AAA Bats and the Cardinals competing in the ACC, and they used to have an AHL franchise too, but the Panthers left town in 2001. Tucson has the AHL Roadrunners and the University of Arizona Wildcats, but their pro baseball team plays in the Mexican Pacific League—well below AAA. Austin is home to the Texas Longhorns, and the Austin metro area includes the suburban municipalities of Round Rock, TX (with their AAA baseball team, the Express) and Cedar Park, TX (home of the Texas Stars).

Tonight, ESPN is televising the basketball game between the Tennessee Volunteers and the Syracuse Orange to a national audience, and you can still buy pretty cheap tickets to join fifteen to twenty thousand other people in watching that game in person. It’s a little thing, but it’s part of what makes this a fun place to live, and we are uniquely lucky to have it.

The Square

Community

By Zach Zeliff

It can be difficult to have a frank, public, political conversation in Syracuse. We are often very polite and rarely direct. You hear things around town, but we don’t really have it out. Yet there are real issues facing our City where people sincerely disagree, and in those cases our civic discourse would really benefit from a blunt exchange. 

Take one of the most controversial, and important, local governance issues of the past two years: Good Cause Eviction. Sure, there was a lot of discourse about it. People wrote op-eds, the Common Council invited interested parties to speak at committee meetings, the Post-Standard reported on all of it. But never was there a public confrontation between the parties who disagreed about the law. You’d hear landlords make their case, and then—at a separate time—tenants would make theirs. Even people who followed all this talking could be left confused about what Good Cause would actually do because there was never an opportunity for a back-and-forth discussion to clarify what disagreeing parties actually disagreed about.

To opponents of this incredibly common sense measure, I would like to ask a series of questions:

If a tenant calls codes/otherwise advocates for conditions to improve at their home, what is preventing a landlord from non-renewing their lease in retaliation the next time it is up? Should the landlord be able to do that? How would a tenant be able to prove this was retaliation and stay in their home? If this isn’t acceptable to you, how can you vote against good cause eviction?

Maybe they have good answers I haven’t thought of. Maybe they will realize the overwhelming error of their ways and come to have correct opinions. Either way, we will have had it out and clarified what it is we’re actually talking about when we talk about Good Cause.

There are probably a bunch of different ways to facilitate more honest public conversations like that, but I have one idea that would also be a lot of fun. I call it The Square. 

We get people together on a Friday around 5 PM in a public square-shaped space—Lemp Park, maybe—and hash out some disagreement in a very loosely structured way. The interested public are all invited, and encouraged to picnic, and maybe bring travel mugs filled with various beverages. It will be festive! 

Some of the conversations would be confrontational, some may be more chill and informational, some might even end in agreement, but they would all help fix the issues in the town.

Centro’s Better Bus Proposal

Transportation,

Centro just released the first draft of its proposed network redesign—Better Bus. The transit agency is proposing its first full network redesign in decades in response to changes in regional travel patterns (fewer riders need traditional Downtown-centric 9-to-5 rush hour service), changes in staffing (Centro has not been able to hire a full complement of bus operators since the depths of the pandemic, and this has forced service cuts), and changes in service type (planned BRT or Bus Rapid Transit lines and on-demand service similar to Uber pool will offer fundamentally different services that affect the entire network). This is just a first draft of the network redesign and will likely change in response to public feedback, but Better Bus is on track to go into service in early 2027.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the changes they’re proposing:

Better Service Frequency

The number one thing riders and non-riders alike want from Centro is for the buses to run more often. Existing service frequencies fluctuate across the system but rarely get better than 2 buses an hour. This makes transit a poor choice for most trips and wastes the time of the people who do ride the bus.

Better Bus significantly improves service frequencies along three planned BRT corridors. Lines operating along South Salina, James Street, South Ave, North Salina, and to University Hill will see buses running every 20 to 25 minutes all day every day. (These frequencies will get even better—10-15 minutes headways—once Centro implements BRT in 2028.)

Another two lines have significantly improved service frequencies that bear mention. The Grant Boulevard bus to Shop City will run much more frequently than it does now with 25 minute headways during the morning and evening rush and 40 minute headways midday and evenings. East Genesee Street will also see significantly improved service between Salt Springs Road and the Hub where two separate lines—the 76 and 62 buses—will each run every 45 minutes but be staggered so that they provide 22.5 minute headways where they overlap. These two corridors would be good candidates for future upgrades to BRT service when the resources become available.

Almost all other lines will run with headways between 30 and 60 minutes. Although this is still well below the service frequencies people need, they are a significant improvement over the status quo.

Expanded Night and Weekend Service

Right now, Centro runs buses once every 80 minutes on nights and only slightly more frequently on weekends. If you’re Downtown after 5 PM, you have the option of catching a bus home at 6:20, 7:40, 9:00, 10:20, or 11:40—if your bus even runs at all. This is a massive gap in service that makes public transit a poor option for both increasingly common non-traditional commuting and the non-work trips that make up so much of people’s social and family lives.

Better Bus would massively improve service frequencies on nights and weekends. 14 proposed lines run service at least once an hour into the evening, and 3 will provide service every 30 minutes or better. Many routes will also run later into the night. Better Bus proposes similar service improvements on Saturdays and Sundays for most routes.

Multiple Transfer Points

Currently, all connections between different bus lines occur at Centro’s Downtown Hub. The entire network is designed around bringing multiple buses to that single point at the same time to facilitate transfers, and there is no other spot in Onondaga County where route designs and timetables line up such that it would make sense to try and change buses. That allows Centro to provide seamless transfers between low-frequency routes, but it also reduces service frequency and requires many riders to ride all the way Downtown even when it’s well out of their way.

Better Bus proposes several changes to this system. The first and most obvious is that there will be several bus lines that do not run through the Hub. These include the crosstown 64 bus which will run through Downtown without stopping at the Hub, the 10 and 40 buses which act like extensions of Downtown-bound buses, and the 26 and City Loop buses which run circumferential routes connecting points outside of Downtown.

Beyond those route design changes, Centro is also amending its timetables to get away from the lineup. Proposed headways suggest that redesigned routes will take different amounts of time to complete, so it won’t be possible for all the buses to depart from and then return to the Hub at the same time. Instead of a series of lineups throughout the day, the Hub will see single buses running different routes arriving and departing almost constantly.

Rome MOVE

MOVE On-Demand Service

Centro hopes to find the operating resources for all of these service improvements by saving money on low-ridership corridors. In particular, it is replacing fixed-route service in three zones—Fayetteville/Manlius, Malloy Road/Carrier Circle, and Liverpool/Henry Clay Boulevard—with MOVE, a new-to-Syracuse on-demand transit service. MOVE will work like Uber Pool and dispatch small ADA accessible transit vans in response to real-time requests from riders. Centro has already launched this type of service in Rome where it has freed up resources to provide better frequency on remaining fixed-line service and led to substantial ridership gains across the system.

Service Cuts

Centro is also eliminating service in areas not covered by MOVE. In some cases, that means removing route deviations. Deviations on the current 64 bus to Western Lights, for instance, essentially mean that it is actually four different routes. All of those deviations add complexity and reduce frequency, and Better Bus proposes eliminating them on the 64 bus and many other routes to focus on one core line to provide better predictability and frequency.

In other cases Better Bus proposes removing routes entirely. The most notable is the 54 bus on Midland. Some portions of that route will be covered by other lines, and other portions are within walking distance of improved lines, but fewer people will be able to catch a bus on Midland if Better Bus is implemented as proposed. That’s the kind of tradeoff many current riders have expressed a willingness to make, but it is worth scrutinizing the tradeoff all the same.

Centro released this draft proposal to get the public’s feedback, so let them know what you think! There are more tools to explore the proposed changes at the project’s website as well as an online survey that will allow you to make route-specific recommendations. You can also view the below map that shows the proposed lines in different colors. You can interact with this map and filter the system by frequency at this link.

Centro made a lot of small decisions in the process of redrawing these bus lines and reworking these timetables, and there is ample opportunity to point out places where any specific line’s zig might work better as a zag or where better midday frequency might be preferable to robust rush hour service. That’s all great feedback that should inform a second draft of the plan.

Keep in mind, though, the tradeoffs involved. Adding frequency to any line or making it longer necessarily requires reducing frequency somewhere else. Centro simply does not have enough bus operators to provide high frequency service in every neighborhood.

The good news is that Centro is moving in the right direction. The principles that lie behind Better Bus—focusing resources to improve service where it will help the most people and yield the highest ridership—are good ones. If Centro continues to follow them and if we can get them more operating resources, Syracuse will build the transit system we need and deserve.

A Land Value Tax for Syracuse

Planning

By Zach Zeliff

Must this be the place? It’s a good mural and a great song, but seeing such good public art surrounded by a sea of surface parking is….. depressing. Is this the highest and best use of a large lot Downtown, directly across the street from one of the highest rent apartment buildings in the region? Is the amount of property tax, or lack thereof, generated helping the fiscal health of the City? How can we encourage a better future for the block surrounding the mural? 

Luckily, there may be a solution to this problem that generates more housing, economic development, and tax fairness. It’s also the policy with maybe the highest amount of internet fanatics: the land value tax.

An idea most associated with 19th century thinker and NYC mayoral candidate Henry George, a land value tax—also sometimes called a split-rate tax—assesses property taxes according to the value of a piece of land rather than the value of any building constructed on top of it. This means that underused land in high value places—like surface lots downtown—typically have a higher proportionate share in taxes while residential properties in lower land-value neighborhoods typically see their assessments go down. This incentivizes highest and best use in high value Downtown lots—if empty or underutilized parcels pay the same tax as fully developed land, then owners are more likely to build or sell to someone who can.

The Center for Land Economics recently published a study of how a hypothetical land value tax would affect tax rates in Syracuse. It found that most tax increases be downtown while the highest share of tax decreases would occur in the south and west sides. They also published this really interesting map charting land values in the city.

Greg Miller, author of the report, is coming to present his research as part of our In The Salt City Policy Happy Hours. October 8th at Harvey’s, we will gather starting at 5 with the presentation starting at 5:30. Please join us, the first two events have been a mixture of fun and informative with a good conversation, this should be the same!

Pedestrianizing Westcott Street

Planning

Every year the Westcott Street Cultural Fair opens Syracuse’s eyes to what a city street can really be. For a few hours, Westcott Street—normally a no-man’s land reserved for the operation of heavy machinery—is given over to the community and filled with people, and it’s great.

Streets are Syracuse’s primary public space. They take up 3,270 acres. That’s 23% of all the land in Syracuse, and it’s three times more space than all city-owned parkland. There’s plenty of room to pedestrianize a few blocks and improve the public space that’s right outside people’s front door.

Streets in neighborhood commercial districts like Westcott are particularly well-suited to pedestrianization because surrounding businesses give lots of different people a reason to be in the space. This maximizes its use and fills it with the eyes and ears that are the best way to make public spaces feel safe. That’s what makes Hanover Square so successful, and it’s why City Hall should replicate this kind of public space across Syracuse in places like Walton Street, Amos Park, and Hawley-Green.

But pedestrianizing Westcott Street—between Harvard Place and Victoria Place, say—would differ from Hanover Square because it would make a much larger impact on traffic patterns in the surrounding blocks. The 100 block of East Genesee Street is—in terms of traffic circulation—redundant. Nobody needs that blocks to get from point A to point B, so closing it to cars didn’t really matter to most drivers. Hanover Square is a destination rather than a through-route.

Westcott Street is both a destination and a through-route. A lot of the traffic on Westcott is definitely bound for the business district and wouldn’t be particularly affected by pedestrianizing a single block. But Westcott is also part of a north-south route that links Teall Avenue, 690, and Colvin Street, so a lot of car drivers on Westcott Street are on their way somewhere else, and turning a portion of that route into better public space would change their behavior.

This makes pedestrianization on Westcott more complicated, but it also would make it more impactful. It would be more complicated because City Hall would need to account for changes in traffic patterns. It will be important to beef up traffic calming on surrounding streets like Columbus and Fellows Avenues so that they don’t see increases in the kind of speeding already so common on Westcott. Two Centro routes currently use this part of Westcott, and they would need to be accommodated as well. Those are solvable problems, but they present technical—not to mention political—challenges that would make pedestrianizing Westcott a harder lift than Hanover Square was.

But solving those challenges would have enormous benefits that go beyond what Syracuse has already seen in Hanover Square. Turning 1 single block of Westcott Street into public space would significantly reduce car traffic—and particularly high-speed through-traffic—on many surrounding blocks. This would make the neighborhood significantly safer, healthier, and livelier. Existing surface parking lots fronting the new pedestrian square would become much more valuable for new retail space and much needed housing, and the resulting increase in foot traffic would support more of the kinds of local businesses that make Westcott such a popular neighborhood.

This virtuous circle—walkability reduces car dependence, which allows increased residential density, which creates demand for neighborhood scale retail, which improves walkability, which reduces car dependence, which…—is the core of what makes urban neighborhoods successful and resilient, and City Hall should be doing all it can to jumpstart that cycle in neighborhoods across Syracuse.

Syracuse absolutely needs more quality public space, and the easiest way to build it is repurposing portions of our most common public property—city streets—into city squares. Existing projects like Hanover Square have tried to accomplish this without changing car traffic patterns too much, but Westcott Street shows how a bolder strategy could have a bigger impact and make our neighborhoods safer, healthier, and livelier.

Building Bus Ridership Back

Transportation

Centro buses carried almost 10,000 fewer people in May 2024 than they did in May 2023. That’s the second time year-over-year ridership has declined in the last 3 months after 35 straight months of growth. With overall ridership still 25-30% below pre-pandemic levels, the causes of the drops need to be identified and addressed.

One obvious culprit for lagging ridership is insufficient service. May’s drop in absolute ridership (1.8%) was accompanied by an even bigger drop in service (2.7%), so ridership per revenue hour actually increased for the 36th month in a row. Syracuse’s transit service still hasn’t recovered from the drastic 2021 cuts caused by Centro’s inability to hire and retain bus drivers—scheduled weekday hub departures are down 17% compared to 2020—and fewer buses on the streets mean riders have fewer opportunities to catch a ride. It’s a fair bet that total ridership would have continued its post-pandemic recovery if service levels had remained stable or improved.

May’s ridership decline is complicated by the new service model in Rome. Centro combines Syracuse and Utica-Rome in its monthly reports to the Federal Transit Administration, and recent drops in overall ridership have coincided with Centro’s rollout of a new two-tiered service model that pairs higher frequencies through high-ridership areas with on-demand service for lower-ridership neighborhoods. In theory, that model could improve overall ridership by focusing service where it’s most likely to be ridden, but those service improvements might take time to generate increased ridership while cutting lines from lower-performing areas might have an immediate negative effect on ridership.

So it’s possible that the moderate declines in total ridership over the Syracuse-Utica-Rome area are the result of a transition to Rome’s new service model, or it might be the case that the new service model is improving ridership and covering up even greater losses in Centro’s other markets.

Whatever the explanation for May’s ridership declines, it’s a worrying sign. Syracuse needs and deserves better transit service—we punch above our weight nationally on bus ridership, walkability, and car-independence. All of that makes this a better place to live, and all those good things are only possible with a useful and reliable public transit system.

But the past few years of poor service are enough to push people into cars. When the bus runs less than once an hour, when it doesn’t run past 7pm, when it can’t get you where you need to go when you need to be there, people are going to look for other options to get around. A lot of the time that’s going to mean buying a car, and once someone has made that investment they’re not coming back to the bus even if service does eventually get better. In order to build a better Syracuse, we need to keep that from happening by getting buses back on the streets.