Category Archives: Planning

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.

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.

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.