All posts by inthesaltcity

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.

Form-Based Zoning

Planning

Syracuse’s Proposed Zoning Ordinance contains a section that regulates certain aspects of building form. Form-based ordinances are meant to “promote high quality building design,” but legislating design is tricky, and this draft fails to focus on the kind of design that matters most. The City should adopt rules that support community interaction rather than rules that dictate taste.

One of the draft ordinance’s many regulations governs building rooflines:

Buildings shall be designed to avoid any continuous roofline longer than 50 feet. Rooflines longer than 50 feet shall include at least one vertical elevation change of at least two feet in height.

It’s not clear exactly how this supports the zoning ordinance’s mission, but you have to imagine that the people who wrote it had buildings like One Park Place in mind–big boring rectangles that feel out of place among Syracuse’s beautiful old buildings. However, some of those beautiful old buildings in Downtown Syracuse also have long unbroken rooflines.

The length of a roofline is a measurable indication of the architectural style of a building, but that single measurement can’t tell you whether a building is ugly, or–more to the point–whether people will think it’s ugly in thirty years. The dilemma here is that an ordinance cannot be both strict enough to guarantee taste and loose enough that a small staff of zoning employees can easily enforce it:

This draft tries to strike an important balance between raising the bar for design while recognizing that staff capacity limits the City‘s ability to effectively administer and enforce too many new standards.

This particular regulation errs on the side of enforceability, so while its authors might have intended that it give us more buildings with interesting roofs and outlines like City Hall or NiMo, it’s not specific enough to guarantee that. Instead we’re getting buildings, like the Amos Extension, that satisfy the ordinance in the cheapest possible way.

The Syracuse Zoning Board should focus, instead, on building forms that make it easy for people to interact as a community. This means buildings that let people communicate across the property line. It means forms that allow people to experience the interior space of a building from the exterior space of a sidewalk, and vice versa. It means stitching the public and private realms together. That’s a lofty way to talk, but all it really means are windows and doors that face the street, minimum setbacks, first-floor retail, and parking lots placed behind buildings. It’s very simple, easily enforceable, and more likely to succeed than legislated taste.

Luckily, Syracuse’s proposed form-based zoning ordinance contains regulations like these that will encourage community interaction. The sections on “Building Placement and Orientation,” “Primary Entrance Orientation,” “Building Entrances,” and “Transparency” are all reasonable and only need minor tweaking to focus their purpose. Other sections concerning things like “Building Materials,” “Mechanical Equipment Screening,” “Facade Colors,” and “Vertical Articulation” are unnecessary and should be cut out. These revisions will put the focus squarely on form-based zoning’s true goal: community.

Onondaga Lake and the Onondaga Nation

Power

In April, the State published the Onondaga Lake Natural Resource Damage Assessment Restoration Plan and Environmental Assessment. This document signals the State’s intent to force Honeywell to build habitat and recreational facilities in and around Onondaga Lake as compensation for all of the damage done to the Lake by industrial activity. The habitat and recreation proposals contain little detail, but the State will flesh them out more fully when it publishes an Environmental Impact Statement for public review and comment. There will be more to dissect when that happens.

Right now, though, the plan’s most obvious flaw is that it only mentions the Onondaga Nation in its listing of Cultural and Historic Resources. The Onondaga Nation should play a central role in any plan to restore the Lake’s ecology, and it should receive reparations for the specific harm that it’s suffered at the hands of industry and government.

The Onondaga Nation should have a say in plans for habitat rehabilitation and other environmental projects because it is the only party that has demonstrated actual concern for the health of the lake. Honeywell wants to do as little as possible as cheaply as possible, and the State and County are primarily concerned that the Lake get clean enough to attract tourists. Every time Honeywell has cut a corner, or failed to deliver on a promise, it’s been the Onondagas who’ve called them out on it. It’s doubtful that a plan written without their input will truly repair the damage done by Honeywell and its predecessors.

More outrageously, the plan doesn’t even mention reparations for the Onondaga Nation. It lists anglers, joggers, and birdwatchers all as people who have suffered harm as a result of the lake’s contamination, but it fails to name the people who hold the lake sacred. It takes an act of willing blindness to pretend that recreational fishers have suffered more than the Onondagas or that they’re more deserving of reparations than the Onondagas. The State needs to put its commitment to making full reparations in a legal actionable document in order to prevent more broken promises.

It’s too early to have much of an opinion about a lot that’s contained in this report. Will the State try to privatize land along the lake? Are the environmental restorations adequate? Will Onondaga County finally give the City of Syracuse access to its Loop-the-Lake Trail? Will the State try to build an aerial gondola between Liverpool and Solvay? These are all questions that will be answered in the future as the State drafts an Environmental Impact Statement.

It’s never too early, though, to point out that this Lake has a history and a meaning that predates the creation of the City of Syracuse, Onondaga County, and the State of New York. The Onondagas have a right to Onondaga Lake, and they have an overriding interest in its health. It’s unacceptable that reparations to them and input from them are not included in this Restoration Plan. The State, the County, and Honeywell do not want to work with a partner that will demand real restoration, but they must, and we must hold them to it.

Contact them by phone at 315 552 9784, online at this link, or, better yet, in person at one of the three public meetings:

10 am – 12 pm, Thursday, May 11

Room 203 of the Center of Excellence Building

727 E. Washington Street

Syracuse, NY 13244

 

4:30 pm – 6 pm, Thursday, May 18

Honeywell’s Onondaga Lake Visitors Center

280 Restoration Way

Syracuse, NY 13209

 

7:30 am – 8:45 am, Friday, May 19

City Hall Commons Atrium

201 E. Washington Street

Syracuse, NY 13202

ReZone Syracuse and Housing Supply in Older Neighborhoods

Planning

When a house in Syracuse is in such bad shape that no one would invest the money to repair it, then it makes sense to demolish that building. In a neighborhood that’s losing population and doesn’t need the housing, that newly vacant land can be put to good use as a side yard or community garden. In growing neighborhoods like the Northside, it makes more sense to let people build new houses on those vacant lots.

The City is currently rewriting its zoning ordinance as part of a project called ReZone Syracuse. The most current proposed draft ordinance restricts all new residential construction to lots at least 40 feet wide.

The Northside is jam packed with lots that are 33 feet wide. Narrow lots like these are common in Syracuse’s older neighborhoods. If the City adopts its current draft zoning ordinance as law, it will be illegal to build any new houses on these lots, and any demolition will permanently reduce the available housing stock in those neighborhoods. That will cram more people into the remaining apartments and houses, drive up rents and mortgages, and make it harder for people to make a life in the City.

This is a real problem. As of January 19, 2017, the Greater Syracuse Land Bank owns 218 vacant lots within the City. 86 of those lots are between 25 and 39 feet wide–large enough to build a normal-looking house, but technically non-buildable under the proposed draft ordinance.

It doesn’t have to be that way. The current zoning ordinance mandates that all residential lots be at least 40 feet wide as well, but it allows for construction on existing narrow lots through a special exemption for parcels created before 1962. A similar exemption in the new ordinance would eliminate this problem.

While Syracuse loses population, it makes sense to also reduce its overall supply of housing, freeing up city land for other more beneficial uses like community gardens and private yards. It doesn’t make sense to reduce the housing supply in every neighborhood, and it doesn’t make sense to reduce it permanently in any neighborhood. Some neighborhoods are still growing, and others will eventually grow again. The City’s proposed zoning ordinance threatens that growth by placing an unnecessary limit on the housing supply in Syracuse’s older neighborhoods. The proposed draft zoning ordinance must be amended to allow for construction on existing lots.

Ridesharing, Accessibility, and Public Pressure

Transportation

On April 9, the New York State Assembly, the New York State Senate, and the New York State Governor passed an enormous bill that “enacts into law major components of legislation necessary to implement the state fiscal plan for the 2017-2018 state fiscal year.” One of those components was a legal framework for ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft to operate in Upstate New York. Early drafts of this legislation included dedicated funding for transit, but failed to provide adequate access for the disabled. As enacted, this legislation provides no funding for transit but does provide the potential for equitable access for the disabled.

The Assembly, Senate, and Governor all proposed drafts of this legislation that provided funding for Upstate’s regional transit authorities through the fees assessed on ridesharing companies. That’s critical funding because the regional transit authorities provide transportation for the poor and the disabled–two populations that cannot use traditional ridesharing services. In the final budget, the money from those fees goes right into the State’s treasury, bypassing the DOT and upstate regional transit authorities. It’s not clear what horse got traded for that funding, but it’s a raw deal for the poor and the disabled in Upstate New York.

While the State’s decision to underfund upstate transit agencies has and will continue to harm disabled people living in Upstate, this legislation contains a provision that could mitigate the damage. It creates an 11 person Transportation Network Company Accessibility Task Force which will study the need for, and recommend policies to ensure, handicap accessibility in ridesharing.

Previous bills were weak on this subject. Most required ridesharing companies to write policies concerning accessibility, but went no further. Others went too far.  An Assembly bill contained vague language that could have required all cars engaged in ridesharing to accommodate wheelchairs. It was obvious that the people writing the budget don’t understand this issue well enough to come up with reasonable policy, so it was prudent to form a task force that can advise them.

However, if this task force is going to benefit the disabled, everybody concerned about equitable access to transportation (we should all be concerned) needs to keep up the pressure. Now that the budget has been passed and Upstate’s able-bodied population has guaranteed access to ridesharing, popular attention will shift away from the issue and the task force will be able to work without much scrutiny. As the task force does its work, disability advocates must watch it like a hawk in order to ensure that it recommends policies that will actually provide equitable access.

Once the task force has made its report, advocates will still have to maintain that scrutiny in order to ensure that those recommendations turn into real policies. The task force can compel neither ridesharing companies nor the State government to actually provide equitable access to these services. The task force is simply empowered to “complete a report” and then “present such report to the governor, the speaker of the assembly and the temporary president of the senate, and make such report publicly available for review.” For their part, ridesharing companies need only adopt the task force’s findings “to the extent practicable.” It will take public pressure to make those companies and the state legislature do something substantive.

New York State missed a huge opportunity with this ridesharing legislation. Public transit is an essential service for the poor and the disabled, and fees assessed on ridesharing companies could have provided it with the kind of robust funding that it so badly needs. All parties involved in the budget process proposed to do just that–then, they all dropped the ball. The onus is now on upstate’s populace to advocate for equitable access to ridesharing services for the disabled people who live here. It’s not going to happen unless people push for it.

SHA’s Plans for the Area South of Downtown

Community, Planning

On September 22, 2016, the Syracuse Housing Authority published the East Adams Street Neighborhood Transformation Plan. This document promises improvements to both the housing and services in Pioneer Homes, Central Village, Toomey Abbott Towers, Almus Olver Towers, and McKinney Manor–a set of highly visible and tightly grouped public housing complexes located at the southern edge of Downtown Syracuse.

SHA is right to treat this area as a neighborhood with needs beyond housing. The people living immediately south of Downtown do need quality housing, but they also need equitable access to transportation, good food, and community services. These are features of any healthy neighborhood, and without them no collection of housing units can adequately support its residents.

SHA is also right to encourage economic integration. Currently, this area is made up of “islands of affordable housing.” By clustering so much of the County’s public housing in such a tight area, local government has created all sorts of problems for the people who live there. These include, but are not limited to, inadequate political representation, social stigma, economic inactivity, and alienation. All of these problems could be helped by integrating people with a mix of incomes in the neighborhood.

There’s a lot that’s right about SHA’s vision of a healthy, economically integrated neighborhood, but its plan to make that vision a reality is dead wrong.

With all of the problems plague the area south of downtown SHA seems to think that the existing neighborhood is beyond hope. SHA can’t imagine how something so undesirable could turn into a neighborhood of choice, and so it has determined that the situation calls for “the complete demolition of existing out-of-date, poorly designed public housing and replacement with all new housing in a mixed-income community.”

In this city at this time, that’s a thoughtless thing to say. When the I81 project has reminded the City of urban renewal’s worst excesses, how can anyone hear SHA’s call for “complete demolition” without thinking of the racist, classist, muddled motives that lurked behind the demolition of homes and communities during the middle of the last century?

“It is stipulated that construction of new housing be accompanied or followed by the equivalent elimination of substandard housing. “Elimination” in this case means demolition or rehabilitation”
Sergei Grimm, Secretary of the Syracuse Housing Authority, 1949

In both 1949 and 2016, SHA made the same mistake. It assumed that government intervention could create a neighborhood out of whole cloth. It thought of a neighborhood as a collection of parts–housing units, a grocery store, a library, a rec center–all of which it had the power to build.

A neighborhood is more than that. It is the intertwined histories of its residents. It is the systems of trust and mutual support that bind its people together. The rec center has no meaning unless people have played inside of it. The library has no purpose unless people have used it to broaden their horizons. The grocery store has no value unless people trust it to provide healthy food. Housing units are nothing unless people call them homes.

Neighborhoods are not built, they grow. People have been giving meanings, purposes, and values to the neighborhood just south of Downtown for decades. They’ve made homes out of the housing units that SHA built. The people who live there may not have a grocery store, but they do have more of a community than SHA could ever build on its own.

If SHA demolishes those homes and dislocates those families, it will sever the ties that bind the neighborhood together. That rupture will alienate current and future residents from each other, hindering SHA’s attempts to create a true neighborhood. It’s both wrong and counterproductive.

The area south of downtown can and should be a healthy neighborhood. Its residents should enjoy quality housing, good food, and community services. SHA has the power to move the neighborhood in this direction, but not through wanton demolition. SHA needs to act humbly and incrementally, respecting the neighborhood’s decades of growth while making targeted interventions to support its future. That’s the right way to help the neighborhood grow.

The Land Under and Around the I81 Viaduct

Planning

By the end of 2017, the State will decide how to replace the current Interstate 81 viaduct. If NYSDOT chooses not to build a new viaduct, the project will uncover a lot of land around Almond Street. The future of that land will have a significant impact on the future of the City, but NYSDOT is not addressing the issue.

The advocacy group ReThink81 has repeatedly pointed out that the Interstate 81 viaduct depresses the value of adjacent land:

the viaduct… is not a desirable element in our city. Development patterns reflect this, with the dominant land uses adjacent to the viaduct being surface parking lots, parking garages, and the utilitarian backsides of buildings.

The land near any highway isn’t worth much, but ReThink81 argues that this is a particularly galling case because, if not for Interstate 81, the land along Almond Street would be some of the most valuable in the entire county. According to this analysis, both the City and County governments will benefit from increased property tax revenues if the viaduct is permanently removed and Almond Street allowed to develop to its full commercial potential.

Ken Jackson, editor and publisher at Urban CNY, has warned instead that Syracuse University and SUNY Upstate might seize any land that becomes available as a result of NYSDOT’s work on the viaduct. Both universities have already grown towards Downtown Syracuse, and their campuses now abut the viaduct. Further expansion would push into the neighborhoods surrounding Downtown, and it would displace black residents.

ReThink81 and Ken Jackson can’t both be right. The land around the current Interstate 81 viaduct can’t yield increased property tax revenues if two tax-exempt Universities buy it all up. Either prediction would bring big change, but it’s impossible to know which is more likely, because NYSDOT isn’t talking about what it’s going to do with that land.

NYSDOT’s has specific plans for the streets and sidewalks around the viaduct, but their most detailed renderings only show grass on the surrounding land. NYSDOT could turn that land into a park, it could continue to operate surface parking lots on that land, it could give that land to a single private developer, it could parcel that land up and sell it to a variety of small developers, it could transfer ownership of that land to the City, it could give that land to the Syracuse Housing Authority. There are good reasons to support or oppose any of these options, but it’s impossible to know which, if any, are even on the table. NYSDOT hasn’t said what it plans to do, and no one has asked. It’s time to start asking the question. 

Ownership and Power in the Housing Market

Power

When Boston’s Planning & Development Agency proposed a zoning change that would encourage high-end residential development in the Jamaica Plains neighborhood, community activists turned out to oppose it. When a property developer built luxury apartments in an abandoned factory on Syracuse’s impoverished Westside, the Post-Standard endorsed the project as a sign of the neighborhood’s revival.

It’s not hard to account for the difference between these two responses. In Boston, two things are true: (1) large numbers of affluent people are moving into the city center and driving up demand for city housing, and (2) many people who already live in the city rent their housing. New demand for city housing creates wealth by increasing the value of existing real estate. In a rent-heavy market, this new wealth flows to landlords and not to renters. New demand for city housing also increases the price of any given housing unit. In a rent-heavy market, rising rents push out long-term tenants and bring in affluent newcomers. New demand for city housing enriches landlords and empowers newcomers at the expense of the existing community. The Jamaica Plains zoning change is both an expression and a catalyst of this transfer of political and economic power.

Syracuse, on the other hand, is so starved for visible signs of economic activity, that almost any building project for any purpose anywhere seems like a good thing. Rental units make up more than 60% of the housing in Syracuse, but the City is so poor and its real estate market so weak that it’s hard to imagine that any new building could pose a real threat to the existing community.

It’s only a matter of time, though, until demand for luxury housing inflates Syracuse’s real estate values. Every metropolitan area in the United States contains a large and growing number of people who want to live in ‘the city.’ So long as a city has space where property developers can build apartments reminiscent in some way of Manhattan (exposed brick, city views, open floor plans, etc), that city will support a luxury housing market. Syracuse has this space, and property developers are already building these kinds of apartments.

When real estate prices do, inevitably, rise, the people who own Syracuse’s real estate will control that new wealth, and they will determine who can live where. Before a flood of affluent people move into Syracuse and drive up demand, the existing community must protect its political and economic power by taking ownership of its housing.

 

Real estate is expensive, and it’s taken a whole complex of government programs and private interests to make home ownership a reality for so many Americans. For a variety of reasons, these traditional means of buying a home are often unavailable to people in Syracuse. In response, local organizations and residents have developed three proven alternatives to the traditional home-buying complex: non-profit lending, the Land Bank, and cooperative ownership.

Traditional banks won’t lend in Syracuse because they can’t guarantee that the land will increase in value, and because so many potential borrowers are poor. Non-profit lenders like Home HeadQuarters can fill this gap because their primary goal is to get people into homes–not to profit from the transaction. Non-profit lenders are doubly effective when they partner with neighborhood organizations like the Near Westside Initiative to actively transfer land ownership from outside landlords to community members.

Syracuse is full of empty houses. These should be the most affordable options available to people trying to buy a home, but too often these houses belong to people who prefer to keep the buildings vacant. When these property owners fail to pay their taxes, the Greater Syracuse Land Bank can seize their buildings. As an institution committed the the community’s future, the Land Bank can then sell these houses to people who want to live in them.

Large apartment buildings will always be too expensive for a single family to purchase, but groups of families can pool their money to purchase these buildings cooperatively. The people living at 377 West Onondaga Street have done this, meaning that each resident owns a share of the entire building and will benefit when it appreciates in value. This is currently Syracuse’s only cooperatively owned apartment building, but neighborhood groups have adopted a similar strategy to rehabilitate vacant apartment buildings in other areas of the City.

Too many cities, hungry for tax revenue and good news, have actively promoted the luxury housing market, only to realize after the fact how much damage it had done to long-term residents. Syracuse has a chance to get out ahead of this now–to put its homes in the hands of the community before real estate becomes prohibitively expensive. Non-profit lending, the Land Bank, and cooperative ownership are all pieces of the puzzle. The community must take advantage.

Transit and Ridesharing in Upstate

Transportation

On February 6, the New York State Senate passed a bill that would legalize ridesharing services like Lyft and Uber in Upstate New York. (Ridesharing has been legal in New York City since 2011.) That bill was based, in part, on a bill that Governor Andrew Cuomo proposed in his FY 2018 budget. Governor Cuomo’s proposal guarantees that a portion of the fees collected from ridesharing will fund upstate transit agencies. The Senate’s bill makes no such guarantee.

Ridesharing provides transportation to people who cannot or will not drive a car. This puts the service in direct competition with upstate transit agencies like Centro. The Post-Standard said as much in an editorial published in the Spring of 2015. The Editorial Board cited “rising costs and stagnant funding” as the cause of Centro’s poor service, and suggested that ridesharing could provide better transportation service for commuters and “the elderly and disabled… at times when the buses aren’t running.”

Centro’s rising costs and stagnant funding are not facts of nature. They are the results of choices made at every level of government from the Common Council to Congress. If rising costs and stagnant funding have created a problem worth solving, then the City and County should assess the mortgage recording tax on all new development, the State should index the State Operating Assistance Fund to inflation, and the Federal Government should expand its funding to cover Centro’s operating costs.

More to the point, ridesharing will not provide better service for the people who rely on public transit the most. These people fall into two categories: those who cannot afford to purchase and maintain their own personal vehicle, and those who cannot operate their own personal vehicle because of a disability.

Centro rides cost $2, and they include option of a free transfer. Ridesharing charges significantly higher fares, and the people who ride the bus for economic reasons cannot afford them. Nevermind that almost half of Syracuse’s low-income households can’t afford an internet subscription, and won’t be able to access any ridesharing apps at all.

Every Centro bus is ADA compliant and accessible to wheelchairs, and its Call-A-Bus service provides more specialized transportation for anybody whose disability keeps them off the bus. Ridesharing is, at-best, only intermittently accessible to the disabled. Philadelphia’s disabled community is lobbying against ridesharing because its members have such a hard time finding handicap-accessible Ubers.

Ridesharing will compete directly with upstate transit authorities, but its cost and the nature of its vehicles mean that it will not be a viable option for the poor or the disabled. Legalizing it without making provision to also support upstate transit will improve transportation options for the better off at the expense of those who need public transportation the most.

All that said, if the state government does legalize ridesharing in Upstate, Centro could work with ridesharing companies to dramatically improve its service. Currently, Centro must provide bus service for the entire County, including its more sparsely populated rural and suburban regions. Many bus routes in these areas are little used, and they draw money away from high-demand routes. If Centro contracts ridesharing companies to provide handicap-accessible service in rural and suburban areas at no extra cost to riders, it could then redirect funds to provide better service along routes through the more densely populated areas where transit can be its most effective.