Get the latest Syracuse news delivered right to your inbox.
Subscribe to our newsletter here.

As a former Rust Belt city, Syracuse has about 1,800 vacant properties. But the imbalance in their distribution traces back to a highway built during the 1960s down the middle of the city: Interstate 81.

“It creates a physical and mental barrier to crossing the highway that reinforces segregation,” said Austin Zwick, assistant director for the policy studies program in Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

According to property data from Open Data Syracuse, both sides of the highway have properties the city has deemed unfit for human living. Issues with plumbing, a lack of heat and backed up sewers can all fall under this category, according to the website’s entries. Currently, there are 96 properties west of I-81 out of 14,408 parcels of land that the city lists as “unfit”. The east side of the viaduct has 13 “unfit” properties out of 6,801 parcels of land.

While there are 6.7 unfit properties per 1,000 parcels on the west side of the highway, there are just 1.9 unfit properties per 1,000 parcels east of the viaduct.

In the mid-twentieth century, people emigrated to the increasingly-industrial western area to settle for work, Zwick said. Zwick referred to these concentrations of vacant properties as representative of a “legacy” of deindustrialization in the region. After Syracuse’s population peaked between the 1950s and 60s, the city experienced significant deindustrialization.

“There will be a lot of homes built relatively quickly of relatively poor quality during those decades,” Zwick said. “You had this heavily concentrated area of relatively shabbily built homes in order to be able to work in those factories.”

As the city’s housing stock has developed, disparities between the areas directly east and west of I-81 have increased.

Between the two areas, there are currently 41,365 code violations, around 35,000 of which are on the western side of I-81, according to the city’s open data website. Code violations can include issues with the upkeep of land as well as land that’s been left vacant, according to the data.

Megan Thompson | Digital Design Director

The rate of code violations per parcel of land is proportionally over 2.6 times higher on the west side of I-81 compared to the rate on the eastern side of the highway, which includes Syracuse University. Residents can still live in properties marked with code violations.

Latoya Allen, common councilor for Syracuse’s 4th district and the chairperson of the Neighborhood Preservation Committee, said many Syracuse residents can’t afford to maintain their houses after they retire and end up leaving their properties because they’re on fixed, reduced incomes.

“It’s not because they don’t want to live there — they just can’t afford it any longer,” Allen said.

The Greater Syracuse Land Bank works to buy the abandoned properties in some of these locations. Katelyn Wright, the Land Bank’s executive director, said the majority of properties the organization owns are concentrated in the west and south sides of the city. She said the Land Bank demolishes about 30% of its seized properties and salvages the majority to resell with real estate agents.

A staff specialist within the organization attends neighborhood meetings to gather information about which vacant properties residents are most concerned about and the actions they feel are needed, Wright said.

“We are always open to feedback from neighbors,” she said.

A proposed I-81 community grid would remove the viaduct and disperse traffic to local north-south and east-west street levels. The current community grid plan would also demolish the entirety of Pioneer Homes. According to syracuse.com, 4,000 people live in the development’s 1,000 units.

The Syracuse Party for Socialism and Liberation, a local activist group, wrote on Instagram that the highway’s demolition may “jeopardize the health and safety of workers and nearby residents,” such as those living in Pioneer Homes.

Syracuse PSL is also concerned that lead paint on the bridge will cause neurological damage to those in the area during its deconstruction.

“The potential for this project to cause lead poisoning in children is heightened by the highway’s closeness to a Syracuse City School — Dr. King Elementary — a mere stone’s throw from the viaduct,” the group wrote.

The project’s demolition is currently paused. On Thursday, a state supreme court judge ordered the state’s department of transportation to stop work at the request of the group Renew 81 For All, which cited the project’s impact on the area’s air quality.

Professor Sevgi Erdoğan, an associate professor at SU’s School of Information Studies who specializes in transportation systems analysis, said that though cities other than Syracuse are working to remove highways and remedy their negative impacts, those impacts are “irreversible” to begin with.

“You cannot think (of) transportation separate and land use separate or urban development separate, because they are interconnected,” she said. “Transportation is a driving demand. It’s not happening for its own sake.”

But Zwick said the plan may allow residents to move more freely between areas the highway previously cut off from one another and open up new land for use.

Removing the viaduct altogether wouldn’t necessarily solve the disconnect between living conditions, Zwick said. Instead, he said, new issues such as gentrification may arise.

“It’s a complicated issue,” Zwick said. “Will that help get rid of the vacant houses? Yeah, probably. Will everyone be better off for it? That’s much more difficult to answer.”

Asst. Digital Editor Alice Liu and News Editor Kyle Chouinard contributed reporting to this article.

Published on November 15, 2022 at 12:47 am