With the deadline for a new city zoning update fast approaching, local residents expressed concerns about the project, called ReZone Syracuse, during a forum at Nottingham High School on Monday evening.

ReZone aims to update zoning districts that reflect current market demands, modernize land usage throughout the city and regulate some building designs. Preliminary ReZone plans are set to be presented to the city’s Common Council in June.

Owen Kerney, a representative of ReZone Syracuse, presented information about the project Monday at the forum. Kerney said residential areas of the city that prohibit many for-profit stores will largely stay the same under proposed zoning changes. But Kerney stressed how wide-ranging the project is.

“These procedures affect everybody,” he said. “Whether you’re doing a new fence on your property, you’re renovating your house (or) something in your driveway.”

Most of the changes included in one draft of ReZone Syracuse were design standards that would have only applied to the city’s lakefront area and James Street, Kerney said. Now, though, regulations on designs of buildings, which would require a certain level of transparency in windows and ground floors, will apply to the entire city, Kerney said.

ReZone Syracuse also includes a provision that would regulate corner stores in “mix-use districts,” which allow for the construction of both residential and commercial space. The regulations require a notification for communities when a new corner store is being built. ReZone would require a public hearing to be held for residents to discuss those projects, and create additional design standards for corner stores with owners who want to build in mix-use areas, Kerney said.

As soon as Kerney finished his presentation, Gloria Sage, a resident who has lived in Syracuse for more than 50 years, stood up and held out a petition of 197 signatures from her neighbors near the corner of Thurber Street and Brighton Avenue. That intersection is south of Syracuse University’s Main Campus.

According to a draft of the latest ReZone map, a parking lot at the corner of Thurber Street and Brighton Avenue would be converted from a residential area to a commercial area, allowing for “God-knows-what,” Sage said. The residents who signed Sage’s petition oppose that residential to commercial switch.

Lindsay Speer, a resident of the Westcott neighborhood area east of Main Campus, said she had concerns about the lack of support for collective housing in ReZone Syracuse. Current laws prohibit more than five unrelated people from living together in a single-housekeeping unit, she said. The definition of “related” in this context is being married by blood, marriage, adoption or a housing situation in which someone is responsible for the well-being in the house, Speer said.

“You have low-income communities, refugee communities (and) people who are used to living closer together,” Speer said. “Our concept of what a family looks like, what a household looks like, it’s very isolating in many ways. I strongly think that the five unrelated persons law is being used against people in ways that we don’t really realize.”

Published on April 2, 2018 at 11:18 pm

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