Category Archives: Community

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.

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.

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.

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.