Forums aim to ease neighborhood tensions

Damian Vallelonga has fond memories of growing up in Syracuse’s University Neighborhood. That’s a large part of why he bought a house here last December. But to Vallelonga, there’s one big difference between the neighborhood he knew back then, referred to by locals as Westcott, and what he sees now from his home on the 700 block of Euclid Avenue – there seem to be more students, a lot more.

Unfortunately for Vallelonga, his house on Euclid sits at the epicenter of the SU undergraduate party scene. Trash blows down the street on a constant basis and although Vallelonga tries to keep up with it, he’s been cited by the city for the garbage that coats his lawn.

"As a kid, even a late teen, I didn’t really notice all of the students and I’m surprised to see so many now that I’m a homeowner,” says Vallelonga. “I’m not happy about it.”

The good news for Vallelonga is that there are people who want to hear his concerns and actually do something about them.

"The plan is meant to come up with a shared vision, to the extent possible that all stakeholders can agree, looking over the next 10 years, of how residents want to be able to describe the neighborhood,” said Maren King, director of the Center for Community Design Research at ESF.

The University Neighborhood Housing Plan brings in research team members from ESF directly communicate with neighborhood residents in order to understand what they value about the neighborhood.

The success of the program, King says, is directly related to community involvement because the goals of the housing plan are based on what the community values. In order to get the needed community input, two open forums were held on December 3rd and 7th. “Once you can define what people care about in the community, you can start to figure out how to get there,” said King.Any individuals, including permanent residents, renters, landlords and SU students were encouraged to attend the forums. SU students got an email reminder about the forums from the Office of Off-Campus Housing and Commuter Services.

Ongoing struggles

Perhaps the biggest question facing the University Neighborhood is how to balance rentals in the neighborhood with owner occupied residencies. Vallelonga and many other permanent residents say the number of rentals threatens some of the things they value about their community and causes problems, most notably with regard to noise, physical housing maintenance and parking.

"I’m lucky enough to live on a street with a limited number of students,” said Adam Felleman, a homeowner on Westminster Avenue for the last eight years. “For people who live next to a noisy house and have to get up and go to work the next day, it can be really tough.”

Still, Felleman can see both sides of the issue. He was born and raised in the University Neighborhood, going to school at Edward Smith Elementary School on Lancaster Avenue. He also went to college at SU, and graduated in 1990.

"I was in a band when I was a student here. We played parties around the neighborhood,” said Felleman. “I was a noisemaker myself, so I’m empathetic to parties.”

But Felleman also cites other problems. Because these places are only temporary for students, they care about them less, said Felleman. If there’s a loose railing they are less likely to fix it and so houses and the neighborhood has started to deteriorate over time.

“It’s not that this is something they should have learned before in school,” he says, “it’s just something they’re not ready for.”

Another problem among home-owners is over-parking. Landlords often offer off-street parking to their tenants in order to alleviate the bother of having to move cars on the street every day. “We’re losing our yards – front and back – to parking lots,” laments Felleman, “it’s an eyesore.”

Many neighbors agree say time is what has changed the neighborhood dynamic. 

Vallelonga says that the University Neighborhood was originally a pretty standard family one, but sometime in the 70s or 80s, as enrollment at Syracuse University went up students began moving into the neighborhood and never really stopped.

Grace Flusche, who runs the Westcott Street Fair each September, and whose husband is an SU professor, says the neighborhood has tipped considerably in the direction of students. “They [the houses] went one at a time,” she says, “I don’t know if they can come back one at a time.”

A geographic breakdown

Flusche is right – sort of.

The University neighborhood is split up into three separate census tracts numbered 44, 45 and 56.01. From 1960 to 1990 the percentage of owner occupied residencies in tracts 44 and 45 were steadily declining – tract 44 still was in 2000. Tract 56.01, though much more heavily populated with owner occupants, reached its peak in 1980 and has been declining since.

See an interactive map outlining census tracts 44, 45 and 56.01 that make up Syracuse’s University Neighborhood here.

Another factor in the decline of owner occupied housing is a tendency to sell to landlords rather than owner occupiers who often pay less money.

"From a potential landlord’s perspective, the houses aren’t homes, they’re business properties, so they are much more valuable to them,” explains Andrew Bessemer, a realtor and 30 year resident who does 90% of his business in the University Neighborhood. “A house that would go for $125,000 to an owner occupant could easily go for $175,000 to a landlord.”

Still, 55% of residencies in the three tracts that combine to make up the University Neighborhood are currently owner occupied. That is a neighborhood-wide rise in owner occupancy of 7% since 2000.

That rise is due in part to programs from the University Neighborhood Preservation Association, or UNPA, like the Homebuyers Assistance Program, which offers 10-year zero-interest loans for owner-occupier buyers, or the Rescue a Rental Program, which offers similar assistance for buyers looking to convert a rental into an owner-occupied residence.

"Our mission is simple,” says Eric Greenfield, president of UNPA, “to promote owner occupancy in the neighborhood.”

 A landlord's take

Landlords, however, have a different opinion about the effect that their rentals have on the neighborhood.

"Over the years, the rentals have made a monumental change in the neighborhood for the better,” says John Williams, a landlord who has been renting since 1978. “The housing stock is better than when I grew up in the neighborhood in the 50s and 60s.”

“The owner occupied places were decrepit to mediocre when we bought them,” says John’s wife, Judy. “The landlords have actually made the neighborhood better. They [the students] may not realize they are investing in the neighborhood, but they are, and God bless them for it. If it weren’t for students there’s no way we could keep all the properties up.”

Whether it is directly attributable to the rentals or not, the University Neighborhood is doing well. Home values in the neighborhood have increased over the last several years - a claim no other Syracuse neighborhood can make, says Bessemer.

Landlords say what is hurting the neighborhood is the subsidized housing units being built by the University – places like University Village Apartments at Colvin on East Colvin Street and Park Point Apartments on Comstock Avenue.

"The University doesn’t pay hardly any property taxes on those places,” said Bill Osokowski, a landlord in the University Neighborhood. Meanwhile Osokowski says the landlords are paying higher property taxes than even their neighbors that are owner occupants. The property tax system is two tiered, one rate for rental properties, another for owner occupants.

These new subsidized housing units aren’t giving back to the community because they aren’t paying taxes, says Osokowski, and their taking students out of our rentals and charging astronomical prices.

Looking forward

But according to the actual numbers, says Darya Rotblat, director of off-campus housing for SU, the new subsidized housing units aren’t affecting student renting in the University Neighborhood.

The reason is that student enrollment at the university is going up. The number of students living off-campus went up by 650 this year, a 9% increase, Rotblat said. That increase roughly coincides with the housing available in the subsidized units so that the same number of students are still renting in the neighborhood, she said.

The rise in students living off-campus coincides with a rise in enrollment, going from 16,405 students in 2009 to 17,104 in 2010. Numbers of undergraduate, graduate and English Language Institute, or ELI students are all rising, Rotblat said.

However, at the same time, the city has stopped further conversions of owner occupied houses into rentals in the neighborhood. They have also put a hold on converting any more yard space into parking space.

Meanwhile, the University Neighborhood Housing Plan continues. The next steps for King and her team of ESF graduate students majoring in architectural design are to organize the data collected from the community forums and analyze it individually. From there, they will come up with a draft of a vision statement and begin outlining goals for the neighborhood.

“Based on what we learned in the two community forums so far,” says King, “there seem to be many areas of agreement.”

Some of those areas include maintaining the integrity and physical attractiveness of the neighborhood housing stock, making sure there is plenty of on-street parking for residents, permanent and renters alike, and maintaining the diversity of residents that the neighborhood prides itself on, including students.

Currently, King isn’t sure what form the final report of the housing plan will take when it is completed in May, but says it’s something she hopes that neighborhood residents and groups use to help make decisions in the future.

King also acknowledges that more community forums may be needed. Residents are encouraged to sign up for further small group discussions where they will use their local expertise to help the research team answer a series of more specific questions about the neighborhood’s qualities.

And it’s that local expertise that housing plan researchers value.

“Understanding place and people’s relationship to it is important,” says King, “because it’s hard to understand a living environment without first understanding a neighborhood environment.”