All posts by inthesaltcity

Working for the Whole Neighborhood

Community

On Sunday October 22, the West Onondaga Street Alliance (WOSA) announced that it would repaint the railroad bridge that crosses over West Onondaga Street at the edge of Downtown Syracuse. Currently, that bridge highlights the Rescue Mission’s work feeding the hungry and housing the homeless on its campus between the train tracks and the Adams Street Expressway. It’s painted bright red with the words “Mission District” on one side and “Lives Change Here” on the other. Soon, the bridge will instead read “City-Gate,” a name that WOSA has made up for what it’s calling a “new” neighborhood.

wosanewtext

This stretch of West Onondaga Street is not a new neighborhood. People have been living in this part of town since 1824. A lot of the people who lived there over the years were very rich, but now a lot of the people living there are very poor. WOSA worries that all that poverty makes some people from outside of the neighborhood feel like they’re not “invited” into it. WOSA told the Post-Standard that, while the words “Mission District” focus people’s attention on homelessness, the words “City-Gate” will get them to think of something other than poverty when they pass under the bridge on their way out of Downtown.

But poverty isn’t a problem that goes away when you stop thinking about it. Making up a new name won’t change the truth that people living just southwest of Downtown face everyday. It won’t bring Nojaims back. It won’t fix up Blodgett. It won’t shorten SHA’s waitlist for rent vouchers, and it won’t cosign anyone’s mortgage. There are all kinds of real problems that have entrenched poverty in this neighborhood and in this City, and they’re what people need to be working on.

Until that work is done, the poorest members of the community deserve our full attention. That’s what it means to be a community–to recognize that my life is tied up with yours, so I can’t pretend that my good fortune is unrelated to your daily hunger. Attempts to cover up part of a neighborhood–or to pretend that you belong to a “new” neighborhood that doesn’t have the same problems as the old one–sever those ties. The result is a community that’s poor in spirit, no matter how rich any of its members may be.

Centro’s Proposed Weekly Pass

Transportation

On September 27, Centro proposed a new transit pass that would offer unlimited rides for seven consecutive calendar days. These new MAX passes would cost $20 ($10 reduced fare), equivalent to the cost of paying the full cash fare two times each day of a five-day work week.

Centro had sold 7-day unlimited passes for $15 prior to 2015. The transit agency stopped offering unlimited passes in order to save enough money to maintain its late-night and Sunday service during a budget crisis in the Spring of 2015. Since that time, the only way for people to get a deal on their fare has been to buy 10-ride passes for $18, 20-ride passes for $36, or 30-ride passes for $54. Centro also sells unlimited single day passes for $5.

The new MAX passes are definitely a good thing. For anyone who takes the bus at least 12 times a week, the $20 MAX passes will be cheaper than the cheapest option currently available–the multi-ride passes that price out to $1.80 a trip.

Unlimited passes like these also remove the stress of choosing which trips to make in any given week. An unexpected trip to the doctor won’t take away the fare that you’d intended to use to get to the grocery store. With unlimited rides, each extra trip you take makes the pass a better deal.

This benefits Centro as well, because part of their funding from the State is determined by the number of rides they provide. If these passes allow people to afford more bus rides, then Centro will receive more State funding automatically.

Although this is all good news, the MAX pass still won’t make transit as affordable in Syracuse as it is in Rochester or Albany.

transitfarecomparison

RTS and CDTA provide Rochester and Albany with more extensive service than Syracuse gets from Centro, and they do it while charging their riders less money. Syracuse should be getting better transit service for the price its people are paying. NFTA in Buffalo charges the same $2 cash fare as Centro, and they’ve got a subway to show for it.

An unlimited monthly pass would go a long way towards making the bus more affordable in Syracuse. Before that 2015 budget crisis, Centro had offered monthly passes for $60. If they reintroduce an unlimited monthly pass for something like $65 or $70, that would put a little more money in people’s pockets, and it would encourage more people to ride the bus. Hopefully, this weekly MAX pass is the first step towards bringing the monthly passes back.

Centro is hosting an information session from 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm on Wednesday October 18 at OCPL’s Central Library. At 5:30 pm they’ll begin a public hearing. Show up, find out all the details, and let them know what you need out of your transit system.

The Real Reasons it’s hard to Run a Business on the Near Westside

Community

On September 12, the Post-Standard reported that Nojaim Brothers Supermarket, a 98 year old grocery store located in one of the City’s poorest neighborhoods, planned to close up shop. Within a week, the paper published several pieces analyzing effect on the neighborhood and Nojaims legacy in the community. Since that time, nothing has been put out, and it seems like Nojaims really might be on its way out.

That’s a shame. It’s a shame because the store is a good community member. It’s a shame because it’s well known throughout the county, showing people that good things happen in poor neighborhoods like the Near Westside. And it’s a shame because the people living in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the entire metro area should be able to walk to a store where they can buy healthy food for themselves and their families.

It hasn’t been enough for some people to note that this is a shame. Local luminaries have asked, sensibly, whether or not the community’s elected representatives could have done something to avoid this problem.

The Post-Standard mentioned competition from the recently opened Price Rite on South Ave when it broke the story. Within minutes, EJ McMahon of the Empire Center blamed Price Rite and the tax breaks it received from the City. The Post-Standard published a follow-up article developing this case. Republican mayoral candidate Laura Lavine agrees with this assessment, and says that it’s independent mayoral candidate Ben Walsh’s fault for helping make the deal that brought Price Rite to South Avenue. Every other news outlet that has reported on Nojaims closing has mentioned competition from the South Ave Price Rite and the tax exemptions that it received.

This is all very small thinking. Anyone seriously interested in the effects that local government policies have had on the ability of a business like Nojaims to make it on the Near Westside can’t just look back a few months. Local government made it difficult to run a business on the Near Westside 62 years ago when it built the James Geddes Rowhouses to concentrate poverty in the neighborhood. Local government made it difficult to run a business on the Near Westside 53 years ago when it turned West Street into an expressway and demolished the neighborhood’s business center. Local government made it difficult to run a business on the Near Westside 42 years ago when it cut corners and built Fowler High School to be structurally unsound. Local government made it difficult to run a business on the Near Westside 23 years ago when it wasted the opportunity that Ontrack provided to connect the neighborhood to major employers via rapid transit. Local government made it difficult to run a business on the Near Westside 9 years ago, and again this year, when it declined to renovate Blodgett Elementary. Local government made it difficult to run a business on the Near Westside a year ago when it built a police substation in the neighborhood but neglected to staff it with officers. Local government made it difficult to run a business on the Near Westside over, and over, and over again when it’s called for a grocery store to serve Downtown’s new residents even though Nojaims is less than a mile away from Clinton Square.

When you’re dealing with a history of government abuse and neglect that stretches over seven decades, it takes some severe myopia to just see back as far as April.

There are a lot of good lessons to learn from Nojaims difficulties. The grocery store got government help to build an expansion, but the associated mortgage payment was too expensive–government might have pushed the store to grow too big too fast. The City of Syracuse put in a signalized cross-walk at Otisco Street, but couldn’t do enough to slow the traffic coming down West Street to make the crossing feel safe–maybe NYSDOT’s plans for the corridor will have more success. Syracuse University had been doing a lot to bring investment to the area, but the new chancellor is less interested in community outreach and has pulled back–maybe we shouldn’t rely on private institutions to do the necessary work in our communities.

With all of those lessons worth learning, it’s too bad that the Post-Standard and the Empire Center and Laura Lavine have learned a worthless lesson instead. They see the bad thing happening in the Near Westside and have blamed it on the good thing happening on the Southside. They think that it’s too hard to get healthy food in two adjacent poor neighborhoods, so we might as well not even try. They see the status quo as unfortunate but intractable–worth talking about but not worth fixing.

That’s not good enough for this City. Syracuse is facing some big challenges, and it needs a Mayor committed to making life more liveable in all of its neighborhoods, a press that calls for the changes that will make that happen, and it needs critics capable of showing the real causes of the City’s problems as well as actual solutions. If the leaders of the community understand what’s really going on and act intelligently, the City can fill the hole that Nojaims is leaving in the Near Westside, and it can build neighborhoods where people can find healthy food within walking distance.

The Threat of Consolidation Undermined the Shared Services Proposal

Power

On Monday September 11, Onondaga County held the final public hearing on its shared services plan. After that hearing, the County amended the plan. The new draft includes only one item of cooperation between Onondaga County and the City of Syracuse–a joint application for Medical Insurance for employees of the County, the City, and the City School District.

This is a pretty shallow agreement coming on the heels of two years of public debate about the possibility of merging City and County government. Beginning in 2014, the Consensus Commission began its work on a proposal for government consolidation in Onondaga County. In 2015 the Central New York Regional Economic Council included such a merger in its successful application to the Upstate Revitalization Initiative. in February of this year, Consensus released its final report recommending more than forty different ways that local governments could save money by sharing services. The most explosive recommendation was to dissolve the City of Syracuse, transfer its powers and assets to the County, and maintain the old city line as the boundaries of “debt district” responsible for payments to the Syracuse City School District’s pension fund.

Ask about the wide gap between those ambitious proposals and the small ideas that made it into the plan’s final draft, and Onondaga County Executive Joanie Mahoney will point out that this shared services proposal is distinct from the efforts of the Consensus Commission and the Regional Economic Council. Every County in New York State was required to write a shared services proposal as a result of legislation passed along with this year’s state budget. A City-County merger can still occur separately through a local referendum.

It’s telling, though, that even the Post-Standard and citizen groups like Uplift Syracuse were confused about the relationship between shared services and consolidation. The community has been reading similar reports on both types of proposals for years now–lists of government services that could be made more efficient if administered at a higher level accompanied by estimates of potential savings. The same politicians offered the same rationales for both consolidation and sharing services.

The people pushing shared services in Onondaga County–namely County Executive Mahoney and New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo–missed a chance to show that their ideas could work. They muddled their message so badly that the modest shared services plan became identified with the politically toxic proposals for consolidation, and that doomed the discussion from the start.

That’s too bad, because the City and the County should work together on certain things. Economic development is one example. That’s something that City leaders could get behind, but not when they have to reassure their voters that suburban politicians aren’t trying to undermine City communities.

The shared services debacle should be a lesson to the half dozen people running for the mayor’s office. There’s a narrative in this election that Syracuse just needs someone nicer–that a lot of the City’s problems stem from Mayor Stephanie Miner’s bad relationship with the County Executive and with the Governor. That narrative assumes that all the responsibility for those relationships rests with Mayor Miner–it doesn’t. All three politicians answer to their own constituencies, and too often the County Executive and the Governor have ignored the Mayor’s position when pushing some policy or proposal. Unless the next mayor plans to just roll over, he or she is going to have public disagreements with both the County Executive and the Governor.

Bus Service at the Community Library of Dewitt and Jamesville

Transportation

On August 20, the Community Library of Dewitt and Jamesville will open its brand new building at 5110 Jamesville Road. This new location is two miles away from Shoppingtown Mall where the library had been a tenant for 55 years. On August 2, the Post-Standard reported that Centro would not divert an existing bus line to service this new location. Wendy Scott, the Dewitt library’s executive director, told the Post-Standard that “we would welcome a bus route to the new library and plan on revisiting the issue after we open at the new location.”

DewittLibraryTransit

This should be obvious, but Centro can’t just change a route because the library’s moving. All of its routes are timed in relation to each other in order to facilitate transfers. If Centro extends the 62 route to service the new library, then that bus would miss the lineup at the end of its return trip to the Hub, and people trying to get across town would have to wait until the next lineup to make their transfers.

It’s also unreasonable to expect Centro to run a bus line down Jamesville Road just to serve the library. Transit only works when it links lots of riders with lots of destinations. Buses travel along Erie Boulevard and Genesee Street because lots of people need to get to the many destinations along those corridors. Jamesville Road doesn’t have enough destinations to support a bus line, and adding a single destination like a library is not going to change that.

Since Centro can’t just change its bus schedule to cater specifically to the library’s needs, the library should have moved to a location along an existing bus line. This is something bus riders understand. When you rely on the bus to get around, decisions about where to live or where to work or where to hang out depend on the presence of a bus line–it’s non-negotiable.

Director Scott doesn’t see bus service as something that the library needs. She sees it as a luxury–an option that she would like for the library to have, but not one that’s important enough to really drive big decisions. It certainly wouldn’t have been impossible for the library to find a location along an existing bus route–every single one of the other 31 libraries in Onondaga County is accessible by bus–but access for bus riders took a backseat to other concerns when the library’s board decided to move to Jamesville Road.

As a public institution committed to the empowerment of the entire community without regard to income, the library is its most effective when it’s accessible to the entire community–especially those members of the community who can’t afford to buy books or access technology on their own. These are the same people who also can’t afford cars. It may be that “less than 2 percent of library users said they take the bus to the library,” but that’s no reason to make the library inaccessible to that two percent. If only 2 percent of library users need wheelchairs, that wouldn’t be a reason to remove the handicap ramps. The library’s decision to move to a spot inaccessible by bus was a decision to exclude part of the community from a valuable public resource, and it was a mistake.

The Difficulty of Finding Compromise on I81

Planning

This past week, both Central New York’s federal and state legislators have made noise about I81. The region’s congressional delegation sent a letter to Governor Andrew Cuomo asking that NYSDOT not focus on money when deciding how to replace the current viaduct. Then, Senator John DeFrancisco and Assemblyman Bill Magnarelli held a contentious press conference where they claimed that traffic would get really bad if NYSDOT doesn’t spend the money to rebuild I81 along its current path through Downtown.

This decision should be about more than money. New York State spends a lot of money on cosmetic frills, and it shouldn’t turn cheap when it comes to a project as important as this one. Governor Cuomo and Senators Schumer and Gillibrand have repeatedly said that once the community unites behind a proposal, they’ll find the money to build it.

Unfortunately, money isn’t what’s gotten in the way of consensus on this project. The problem has been that different interest groups want mutually exclusive results from whatever NYSDOT builds after it demolishes the current viaduct. It will be difficult for any design to satisfy city resident groups who want to improve the area around Almond Street, businesses who benefit from proximity to interstate exits, suburban politicians who want to keep vehicle traffic concentrated in the City, and University Hill interests who want easy interstate access and room to expand.

So far, NYSDOT’s plans to replace the viaduct have split these four interest groups into two camps. Plans for a new tunnel or viaduct keep traffic concentrated on I81’s current path and have satisfied suburban politicians and interstate businesses. However, because these plans include lots of on/off ramps and a 4-way interchange between I81 and I690, they also use up a lot of land around Almond Street, sever local streets, and make the area undesirable for development. Those problems have led city residents and University Hill interests to oppose the viaduct and tunnel options.

Plans for a street-level option make the area around Almond Street more attractive and maintain easy access to University Hill from the interstate, satisfying city residents and University Hill interests. However, routing through traffic around the City also sends more cars to the suburbs, and it diverts traffic from businesses located along I81’s current route between the I481 interchanges (Dunk and Bright, DestinyUSA, 7th North Hotels).

Senator DeFrancisco and Assemblyman Magnarelli represent interests on both sides of this divide, and they hope that a hybrid tunnel/street-level option can unite the community. The ‘hybrid’ idea first popped up in 2014 when DestinyUSA began pushing the Access Syracuse Plan.The-Access-Syracuse-Plan-MODIFIED-v2-8-25-14

This plan maintained I81’s current path almost exactly, but it buried the interstate between Van Buren and Townsend Streets. North of Townsend Street, the interstate continued as a depressed highway with bridges carrying State, James, Willow, and Salina Streets over top of it. North of Salina Street, the interstate linked up with its current depressed route and continued unchanged. The real compromise of this plan was that it eliminated much of the interchange between I81 and I690, thus freeing up all that land around Almond Street and keeping the entire local street grid intact.

However, there were serious problems with the Access Syracuse Plan. It didn’t meet NYSDOT’s standards because it eliminated the I81/I690 interchange and because it maintained the current viaduct’s tight curves. It is also unlikely, that University Hill interests would accept the plan because, in order to maintain the local street grid, it removed exits and decreased interstate access to the Hill. This will be a problem for any tunnel, according to Doug Mankiewicz of the University Hill Corporation: “Tunnels are generally good for getting through things… They’re not so good at getting to things, so if the goal is to get to downtown, to get to University Hill, to get to the lakefront–the basic problem with tunnels is, when you’re trying to get to something, they’re not so good.”

As it stands, everyone is waiting for the final report from WSP-Parsons Brinkerhoff, the independent firm that the State hired to revisit the tunnel option. All politicians involved seem to hope that the report will contain a detailed plan for a tunnel that will satisfy all local parties. However, since that would mean a tunnel that doesn’t interchange with I690, such a proposal would not meet NYSDOT’s standards for the project. It’s also unclear how a tunnel could both provide easy access to University Hill while also maintaining the local street grid, since the on/off ramps of any exit would cut into city streets.

Whenever the report does come out and it becomes clear that no option can meet NYSDOT regulations and satisfy all local interest groups, then we’ll see what everybody really thinks. Are Senator DeFrancisco and Assemblyman Magnarelli looking to discredit the street-level option in order to justify the cost of maintaining I81’s current path? Will Senators Schumer and Gillibrand get funding for a project even if it doesn’t make everybody happy? Does Syracuse University care more about access to the interstate or developing an ‘campus-city’ to attract new students? Can local interests outweigh NYSDOT’s regulations in the final design?

Regardless of any of this, public pressure can force politicians to do the right thing. Call them all up and tell them what about this project matters to you.

Governor Cuomo’s Progressive Credentials and Upstate’s Forgotten Cities

Power

As New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo positions himself for a 2020 presidential run, both mainstream and left-leaning news media have published a bevy of opinion pieces about his troubled relationship with New York State progressives. These pieces argue that the Governor’s headline progressive policies are just for show–that he only pushes things like marriage equality once they’re politically expedient, or that that he designs policies like the Excelsior Scholarship to get national attention without really helping the poor.

The common diagnosis is that the Governor is building a sort of radical-centrist resume. He balances policies important to voters in urban liberal New York City against those important in rural conservative Upstate New York. The idea is that his progressive policies will appeal to voters on the urbanized coasts while his work in Upstate New York will appeal to those in the post-industrial Midwest.

The obvious tension is that Upstate New York is not purely conservative nor is it purely rural. New York City makes it easy to forget the size of Upstate’s cities, but Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo each have more people than the biggest city in ten other states. Rochester and Buffalo are each larger than the biggest city in seventeen other states. These are urban places that reliably elect democrats. They have more in common with the coastal metropolises than they do with the rural parts of America’s interior. When Speaker of the Assembly Carl Heastie visited Upstate for the first time in 2015, he marveled at our cows, but he also said “particularly in the urban center, the problems that are facing Syracuse are the problems that I face back home in the Bronx when we talk about education, when we talk about poverty.”

The Governor has a lousy record on these issues in these urban centers. In 2014, he mused about expanding the Buffalo Billion program to other upstate cities, but when Mayor Stephanie Miner proposed to spend the money on water infrastructure instead of tourist attractions the Governor responded by saying “fix your own pipes.”

In the Governor’s 2015 State of the State address, he tried to say that urban schools don’t have a money problem by pointing out that the Buffalo School District receives a lot of state aid, choosing to ignore the fact that Buffalo is so poor that state aid doesn’t close the gap in total spending per student between BSD and richer suburban districts.

In 2015 when Centro was going to cut its Sunday and late-night service to fill a budget gap, the Governor’s initial reaction was to say “I didn’t know anything about it. The state is funding it at the same amount we funded it last year. Somebody must have cut it. Not me,” as if flat funding isn’t the same as a cut when expenses are rising, and as if public transportation hasn’t been underfunded for decades.

In 2016, Preet Bharara revealed that the Governor’s tourism-based economic development plans for upstate cities have less to do with replacing the jobs that left with Carrier, Bethlehem Steel and Kodak, and more to do with enriching campaign donors like Cor.

Through 2017, the Governor has pushed city and county governments to consolidate. He’s pitched the initiative as a way to reduce property taxes, but it would also dilute city residents’ representation in local government and transfer power away from communities of color.

Governor Cuomo treats upstate cities with a mixture of condescension and contempt. The region is important to his political narrative so he showers it with money, but all those subsidies go towards banner projects that do not address the underlying issues that erode long-term city residents’ quality of life. Ask for an aerial gondola or performing arts venue, and he’s all in. Point out failing bus service or inadequate water infrastructure, and he’s either ignorant or uninterested. That’s the real hole in the Governor’s progressive resume.

Bike Lanes on Euclid Avenue

Planning

On July 11, the Post-Standard reported that Syracuse’s DPW had requested almost $935,000 to repave Euclid Avenue between Comstock and Westcott Streets. The City of Syracuse has been mulling the idea of painting bike lanes on this stretch of Euclid Avenue for a few years now, and the DPW’s request is just the latest step in what has been an extremely slow process.

This request makes it look like city government prefers to provide basic services in some neighborhoods rather than others. As the Post-Standard notes, the city government can only afford to pave about 2 miles of streets a year, and, according to the DPW’s own scale for measuring street quality:

Euclid was rated a seven out of 10 in 2015, according to the city’s public data. That’s better than most streets in the city.

Chris Baker, the reporter who wrote this article later tweeted that Euclid Avenue is in better shape than the streets “anywhere south of downtown”–a reference to the City’s most visible public housing projects and its most concentrated black neighborhood.

It’s impossible to look at this plan for Euclid Avenue and ignore Syracuse University’s influence. In its recently published Campus Framework, the University emphasized the importance of creating ‘gateways’ to campus, and it specifically called for this kind of work on Euclid Avenue:

Along Comstock Avenue and Euclid Avenue, new cycle lanes and streetscape improvements signal arrival to a campus district.

In the past, when the University wanted to make some change to University Avenue and Walnut Park, city government just turned those public resources over to this private entity in exchange for money. If city government is repaving Euclid Avenue in response to pressure from the University, then we should be thankful that at least this time the street is staying in public hands. It’s also possible that city government agreed to do this work in the negotiations that led to the 2016 Service Agreement, or in return for the money that the University spends to subsidize Centro.

Apart from any questions about who’s paying for this paving, the street’s new design also shows how the proposed zoning ordinance can influence seemingly unrelated issues in city neighborhoods. All of this talk about bike lanes got real momentum when the DPW published its 2014 Euclid Avenue Parking Study. That report surveyed demand for on-street parking along Euclid Avenue and proposed different bike lane designs that would maintain the necessary number of on-street parking spaces. That kind of evidence-based demand study is a good way to make decisions about parking, but runs up against a zoning ordinance that regulates parking without considering evidence at all.

On the most recent draft of the City’s zoning map, all of this stretch of Euclid Avenue is zoned as MX-1. As the Post-Standard notes, the vast majority of properties along this stretch of Euclid Avenue are multi-family apartment buildings. According to the most recent draft of the new zoning ordinance, multi-family residential properties that are zoned MX-1 are required to provide 1 off-street parking space per apartment. The draft allows that “On-street parking spaces along the property line may be counted to satisfy the minimum off-street parking requirements, if approved by the Zoning Administrator.”

All of that is to say that it doesn’t matter whether or not people use the on-street parking along Euclid Avenue–if DPW paints new bike lanes in such a way that they remove on-street parking in front of residential properties, the property owners will have to build new off-street spaces in order to meet the new zoning code. By effectively requiring property owners to pave their backyards, this bikelanes project will influence landlords’ willingness to renovate their properties, it will influence the uses to which those properties can be put, and it will even frustrate the County’s efforts to keep rainwater out of the city sewer system.

City issues are interrelated. The DPW wants money to repave a road, but the causes and effects of that request are difficult to trace. In this case, that request has to do with city government’s money problems, Syracuse University’s long range plans to attract students, and the proposed zoning ordinance–it’s about a lot more than potholes and bike riders.

ReZone Syracuse and Neighborhood Centers

Planning

The main objective of ReZone Syracuse, a project to rewrite the City’s zoning ordinance, is to “facilitate the implementation of the Syracuse Land Use & Development Plan 2040 (LUP), a component of the City’s adopted Comprehensive Plan 2040.” As of the most recent draft of the new zoning ordinance and map, ReZone fails to do this evenly across all of the City’s neighborhoods. In order to fully implement the Land Use Plan, ReZone needs to allow more residential density in select neighborhoods.

The City’s Land Use Plan focuses on Syracuse’s existing ‘neighborhood centers’–clusters of businesses and institutions served by major bus lines and surrounded by residential development. These are places, like Westcott Street and North Salina Street, that grew up in the 19th and early 20th centuries when people relied on streetcars to get around town.

Along with limiting off street parking and encouraging mixed-use development, the Land Use Plan suggests revising the zoning ordinance to allow high density residential development within a quarter mile (or 5 minute walk) of the neighborhood centers:

“Enable and encourage higher-density housing within the pedestrian-shed of mixed-use corridors and neighborhood nodes, placing people within walking distance of neighborhood centers.” Land Use Plan, pg 32

“Support and encourage high-density residential projects on upper floors of corridor buildings, and on properties adjacent to the commercial corridors to promote more foot traffic, interaction and vitality, as recommended by the Land Use Plan. (This may call for Zoning changes as well as selectively incentivizing residential projects when market conditions do not.)” Comprehensive Plan, pg 23

Dense residential development is necessary to sustain the businesses, institutions, and bus lines that make these neighborhood centers what they are. Without a lot of people living within walking distance, businesses in Syracuse’s neighborhood centers will rely on customers who travel by car from other neighborhoods or municipalities. That means more land used for parking lots, which makes the entire neighborhood center less walkable and discourages bus use, and the whole thing falls apart.

ReZone does not fully implement this recommendation. Comparing the map of proposed land uses from the Land Use plan and ReZone’s first draft map, it’s clear that the City intends to allow increased residential density (indicated on the Land Use map by yellow and pink, and indicated on ReZone’s map by yellow and blue) in some neighborhoods but not others.

 

Particularly, the blocks around the James Street neighborhood center in Eastwood are zoned almost entirely as R-1–single family detached houses on lots at least 40 feet wide and setbacks at least 30 feet deep. This is the opposite of “higher-density housing,” and it is totally inconsistent with the City’s Land Use and Comprehensive Plans.

It doesn’t take much effort to find two maps in the Land Use Plan that explain ReZone’s decision to keep Eastwood low-density.

 

ReZone’s draft map allows for higher residential densities in neighborhoods with high concentrations of vacant buildings and land, which is to say that ReZone proposes to increase residential density in poor neighborhoods.

If it makes sense to allow developers to build multi-family housing around the City’s neighborhood centers (it does), then ReZone should reclassify the blocks within a quarter mile of James Street as R-2 or denser. Revising the zoning ordinance in this way isn’t going to change anything overnight. Allowing apartment buildings on the blocks adjacent to James Street isn’t going to bring a huge wave of construction to Eastwood. But there’s no reason to leave existing density limits in place around neighborhood centers when the City’s own Land Use Plan recommends doing just the opposite.

Syracuse University’s Campus Framework and the City

Community, Planning, Power

On May 15, Syracuse University published its Campus Framework. This document “is meant to guide future potential development and decision-making” on both the University’s “physical campus and the surrounding area” until 2037. The plans for the campus’ “surrounding area” will have a direct impact on the City’s Near Eastside.

The last forty years show how Syracuse University’s building programs can either help or hurt the neighborhoods that abut the campus. During the 1970s and 80s–a period that the Framework calls “Strategic Investment”–Syracuse University closed public streets on University Hill and built new dorms on South Campus in order to remove students as much as possible from the City. The most visible project from this period is Bird Library, a concrete bunker built on top of what had been a public park and which cut off the intersection of Walnut Avenue and University Place.

Euphemistically, the Framework describes all of this building as “introspective”–it was really just an attempt to wall the campus off from the City. As the University separated its campus from the surrounding neighborhoods, it also discouraged students from living in city communities and contributing to their well-being. This ‘introspection’ added to the City’s myriad problems during these decades.

From the 1990s until 2014–a period that the Framework calls “Campus + City”–Syracuse University outgrew the wall that it had built along Waverly Avenue, and it had to locate new facilities further and further from the insular campus quad. Eventually, the University complemented this physical expansion with new services and initiatives that benefited both students and city residents. The most visible project from this period is the Connective Corridor, a free public bus route running from a university building in Armory Square to the main campus on University Hill.

Practical and economic factors forced the University to expand and expose itself to the City, but programs like the Connective Corridor, the Near Westside Initiative, and Say Yes to Education had a genuine positive impact on the community. Nancy Cantor, the University Chancellor who drove much of this new development, saw the University as an ‘Anchor Institution’ that could provide employment, capital, philanthropy, and a community vision for the City of Syracuse. She understood that city problems, if left unsolved, could eventually become university problems, so it was in the University’s interest to work for the benefit of the entire community. The two would succeed or fail together.

The Framework proposes to meld the ideas that guided campus development during these two periods. Like the “Campus + City” period, it looks for space to grow beyond the campus’ traditional boundaries, but like the “Strategic Investment” period, it seeks to draw a line between that new growth and the surrounding neighborhoods. The next period of campus development–which the Framework calls “Campus-City”–is ambivalent about about the University’s relationship to the City, but it should ultimately benefit the neighborhoods that surround the redeveloped campus.

According to the Framework, the chief challenge of the Campus-City period will be to consolidate the physical expansion of the Campus + City period while regaining the insular feeling achieved during the Strategic Investment period:

Syracuse University’s close physical connection to the city is an asset for partnerships and campus vibrancy; yet, it also creates challenges for an identifiable, clear sense of campus arrival. While the historic Campus on the Hill occupies a clearly defined area south of the Einhorn Family Walk, the University’s many other buildings within the Campus-City Community are not clearly defined.

It’s not enough that university buildings stretch down the northern slope of University Hill–those individual buildings must create a “clearly defined area” that campus visitors can enter or exit through “gateways.” That area’s definition should consist of “strong architectural design” communicating “University presence” and achieved through renovation of existing buildings and redevelopment of underused land.

The northern slope of University Hill lacks definition because it’s covered with surface parking. The University owns many of these lots, and the Framework proposes that it construct new dormitories on most of them. By designing these buildings all at once, the University can unify their facades and extend the campus’ clearly defined area all the way north to Harrison Street.

There is an economic incentive here as well. The University is in some financial trouble, and it can’t afford to keep buying up more land every time it needs to construct a new building. By more fully developing the land that it already owns, the University can add thousands of square feet of classroom and residential space without purchasing any more real estate.

Despite the insularity inherent in any plan to create “gateways” (entrances that imply barriers), this plan should benefit the neighborhood north of Harrison Street. First, by moving all of the dorm space from South Campus to University Hill, the University will bring an enormous buying population within walking distance of a struggling retail market. That will support the businesses along Genesee and Fayette Streets, and it will draw new businesses to the neighborhood, putting more daily errands and jobs within walking distance for the people who already live there.

Second, the decision not to buy any more land means that the University will not actively displace nearby residents. The majority of people living in the neighborhood rent their homes, so they’d be particularly vulnerable if the University continued to buy up land. This also means that there will be less total demand for land in the surrounding neighborhoods, and that will keep rents down.

Third, the Framework’s proposed upgrades to the Centro system will benefit everybody who rides the bus. After the University helps Centro implement the technology necessary to support “Real-Time Bus Arrival Information” and a “Bus Locator App,” Centro can turn around and offer those services to all of its riders. The Framework also proposes “Free Centro” for students–a subsidy that would boost ridership figures and automatically increase Centro’s state aid under the State Transit Operating Assistance funding formula.

Local government has work to do to capitalize on this opportunity. Just like the Strategic Investment period, the University still wants to control the public spaces within its campus. These include streets like University Place–long closed to through traffic and recently turned into a footpath–and parks like Walnut Park–a quarter of which is covered up by Bird Library, and which the Framework discusses as if it belongs to the University. City Hall needs to hold the line and keep public spaces public. That makes the difference between an insular campus and a Forbidden City on University Hill.

The State or SUNY Upstate or whoever it is that’s responsible also needs to let go of the land where Kennedy Square used to stand. The original plan for the site–displacing poor families in order to build a state-run luxury “neighborhood”–was bad, and it probably won’t ever get built. The land has sat vacant for four years, but developers are building new apartments along its edges. To more equitably distribute the benefits of land ownership, the State should allow City Hall to subdivide that land into normal-sized lots, and then it should sell those lots off to private developers who can build apartment buildings, stacked flats, single family homes, office buildings, and retail space on this prime real estate between the University and Downtown Syracuse.

 

The Westcott Neighborhood enjoys all kinds of advantages because of its proximity to Syracuse University. Students and professors live alongside families without any formal relationship to the University. Between subsidized apartments, cheap apartments, luxury apartments, affordable houses, and expensive houses, rich people and poor people all can find a place to live. The neighborhood has good transit, two grocery stores, and an active business district, allowing people to meet their daily needs without owning a car. It’s a place where all kinds of different people can make a good life.

The plans described in the Framework can bring the same benefits to the neighborhood north of Harrison Street. For all of its abstract discussion of architectural definition and efficient land use, the plan amounts to this: the University will move a lot of student housing from South Campus to the parking lots along the main campus’ northern fringe. That will instantly increase the area’s population without driving up its rents, and that means more money circulating through the neighborhood. If City and State government handle this change well, the result will be a larger, denser, healthier neighborhood between University Hill and Downtown Syracuse.

The University is asking for comments from the on the Framework. You can submit them at this link.