Zoning and Segregation in Syracuse

Syracuse's municipal zoning ordinance—a law that governs the size, type, and location of all new development—has shaped the city's growth over the last century. In that time, it has helped to make Syracuse one of the most racially and economically segregated cities in the United States. As City Hall rewrites this law for the first time in decades, it must reckon with this history so that everyone in Syracuse can find a good place to call home.

In 1963, residents of Syracuse's 15th Ward—a segregated neighborhood home to 8 out of every 9 Black residents of the city at the time—marched in protest of housing segregation. They were part of a national movement which drew attention to racist practices and policies that denied housing opportunity to most Black Americans, and their activism led to the creation of state and national fair housing laws later that decade.

But 58 years later, despite the passage of state and federal fair housing laws that outlawed housing discrimination, Syracuse is still segregated by both race and class. A  2015 report by the Century Foundation  found that poor Black and Hispanic Syracusans are more likely to live in a high poverty neighborhood than in any other city in the country. The same report found that poor white Syracusans are more likely to live in a high poverty neighborhood than are poor white people living in all but four other cities in America.

Syracuse's entrenched segregation is the result of many factors outside of local control, including global economic trends, national demographic shifts, and state and federal housing and transportation policies. But one contributing factor that Syracuse does control and can change is its municipal zoning code. Zoning governs the types of housing and businesses that can be built or operated in different parts of the city, and it has helped create an urban environment where poor people cannot access housing in many neighborhoods. In a city where poverty and race are strongly correlated, this economic segregation leads to racial residential segregation.

Syracuse is currently rewriting its entire zoning code for the first time since 1967. This is a critical opportunity to dismantle one part of the legal structure that perpetuates housing segregation in our community. In order to successfully eliminate zoning barriers to economically and racially integrated neighborhoods, we first need to understand how zoning came to occupy a place in that structure.

Syracuse passed its first zoning code in the early 1920's. This was a time of great upheaval for American cities when the end of World War I, the Great Migration, and rapid urbanization and industrialization created new challenges for major metropolitan areas. Cities across the nation turned to professional planners to try and solve the urban problems created by these enormous social, demographic, and economic changes.

One such problem was racial violence. Overtly anti-Black urban riots became much more common in northern cities during and directly after World War I. This period of racial violence reached its climax during the Red Summer of 1919, when white residents of dozens of cities and several rural communities rioted and killed hundreds of Black men, women, and children.

This wave of violence crashed into Syracuse when white striking iron workers attacked Black strikebreakers at the Globe Malleable Iron Works multiple times over the course of that summer.

Although the immediate cause of these riots was a labor dispute, local reporting always presented them in racial terms. News articles identified the participants' race, transcribed their quotes in racialized dialect, and included illustrations that depicted strikebreakers with racist stereotypes. The news media melded industrial labor disputes and racial violence.

Just months after those riots, Syracuse City Engineer Henry C. Allen created a map that divided and labeled the city's residential neighborhoods according to the presumed class, heritage, and race of their residents. Newer neighborhoods built on the city's hills were labeled as being home to "citizens of more than ordinary wealth" and "professional men," while "skilled and unskilled labor[ers]" were sorted by their ethnicity and shown occupying older, low-lying neighborhoods near the city's center.

This map identified a small area east of Downtown as Syracuse's only Black neighborhood, but Allen labeled it a manufacturing district rather than a residential area. To be sure, there were factories as well as homes in that area, but the same was true of other neighborhoods—such as the Northside—that Allen labeled as residential. In fact, Syracuse's lone Black neighborhood is the only spot on the entire map where a racial, ethnic, religious, or class group is shown living in a manufacturing district despite the fact that factories were common in many segregated white neighborhoods at that time. From City Hall's perspective, segregated white neighborhoods were 'residential' even if they included factories, but a neighborhood occupied by Black families was not truly residential. Ideas about what makes a place 'residential' or 'industrial' were tied up with ideas about race.

The next year, City Hall began to put these ideas into law. In 1920, Syracuse Common Council asked the city planning commission to create the city's first zoning law. When the planning commission completed the ordinance in early 1922, the Syracuse Herald Journal explained its logic:

"The idea of zoning is to restrict certain areas to residential use… Downtown commercial areas and industrial reservations are set up in the zoning system. Residences may be constructed in the commercial or industrial districts if anyone wants to put them there. In the main, property on the heights will be protected against the objectionable intrusion of business or industry, with attending unsightliness and nuisances. With city growth the lower sites have been taken over by business and industry and zoning recognizes this fact."

The same article quoted Newell B. Woodworth, chairman of the city's planning commission, describing the benefits of the new zoning ordinance:

"Zoning will guarantee a definite and safe place for industrial investment; protect home neighborhoods from unwarranted commercial and industrial invasion; promote ownership of homes and contented labor relations."

Zoning was a direct response to fears about industrialization, and industrialization was associated with racial diversification. Factories created nuisances like smog and smells, but they also implied the presence of Black families and the potential for labor unrest and racial violence.

By banning industrial development in residential neighborhoods while at the same time allowing the continued presence of residences in industrial areas "if anyone wants to put them there," the zoning code entrenched existing segregation that confined Black families to housing on "lower sites" next to factories and preserved the city's largely undeveloped "heights" for new residential neighborhoods to be occupied by "professional men" and "citizens of more than ordinary wealth."

City Hall is currently drafting a comprehensive revision of the municipal zoning code. This project—called ReZone—presents a critical opportunity to reduce residential segregation and promote integration throughout the City.

ReZone makes many important changes to the current zoning code, such as the simplification and consolidation of zoning districts, streamlining the zoning review process, and creating a reasonable accommodation procedure for people with disabilities.

However, if enacted as written, ReZone's most recent draft would do very little to remove the barriers to housing choice that currently contribute to residential segregation in Syracuse.

There is a clear relationship between zoning and the spatial distribution of classes of people protected by the Fair Housing Act. As a recipient of cash grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the City of Syracuse has a legal obligation to Affirmatively Further Fair Housing through its administration of any program or activity that relates to housing or urban development. Therefore, the City of Syracuse must use ReZone to proactively address residential segregation in city neighborhoods.

However, neither ReZone nor the  Land Use & Development Plan  currently include this goal in their lists of "Guiding Principles" or "General Purposes."

The City of Syracuse should incorporate "Affirmatively Further Fair Housing" as an objective of ReZone and revise the proposed zoning code in a manner that reduces barriers to more racially, ethnically, and economically integrated neighborhoods that are accessible to people regardless of disability. This report provides some suggestions to achieve that outcome, but City Hall should also produce an official Housing Plan (it currently has none) that can detail how to combat residential segregation and improve housing choice through zoning reform and other housing policies. The most recent draft of the federal budget reconciliation act includes funding for municipalities to produce housing plans and zoning ordinances that achieve these goals.

There are multi-family homes across large swaths of the city, but the current zoning code is written as if this should not be the case. In fact, it bans multi-family housing in neighborhoods where apartment buildings have always been a fact of life and an essential component of neighborhood character.

ReZone should remove these apartment bans from neighborhoods such as the Northside, Westcott, Eastwood, Southside, and Valley. This will make it easier both to maintain the city's existing housing and to replace it when necessary, especially as most multi-family buildings in Syracuse are over 100 years old and in need of renovation or redevelopment.

In order to combat residential segregation, ReZone must do more than just legalize Syracuse's existing housing stock. The zoning rules and regulations that govern development in residential neighborhoods on the city's edge are part of a legal structure that was designed to enforce racial and economic segregation, and they must be changed.

ReZone should allow multi-family housing to be built in any residential zoning district, subject to uniformly applied restrictions on density and design that allow small-scale multi-family housing on typical city lots. This would promote integration and resilience in the face of demographic change by allowing a greater variety of housing types.

Housing choice is determined, in part, by access to transportation, service, and opportunities for employment. Zoning contributes to racial and economic segregation in Syracuse by restricting that access in certain neighborhoods through bans on transit-supportive and commercial development.

ReZone should allow more mixed-use development in areas where it is currently banned in order to make walking, biking, and busing practical transportation options for people living in neighborhoods across the city.

Group homes should be allowed to operate as of right in every residential neighborhood in the city, subject to uniformly applied restrictions on density and design. It is unreasonable and  likely unlawful  to require housing for people with disabilities to receive a special permit simply to live in a residential neighborhood, particularly when similar housing types are not subject to the same restrictions.

Zoning is a very specific tool that cannot end residential segregation or neutralize its negative effects by itself. Legalizing existing housing types in Syracuse's older neighborhoods may encourage better property maintenance, but it cannot force a landlord to adequately maintain a tenant's home. Allowing more housing in more neighborhoods will help mitigate development pressure in the area around Pioneer Homes, but it will not prevent gentrification and displacement. Streamlined permitting processes will make construction easier, but they will not ensure that everyone who needs a home can get one. Encouraging more construction of quality multi-family units can provide Syracuse residents more housing options, but it does not guarantee these homes will be affordable for the people who need them most.

Syracuse needs to pursue additional housing strategies that will complement reforms to the zoning code. These should include tenant protections like good cause eviction requirements, anti-displacement measures like a community opportunity to purchase act, and new approaches to homeownership such as limited equity cooperatives and community land trusts.

And, in order to affirmatively further fair housing, Syracuse absolutely must produce more meaningfully affordable housing in neighborhoods across the city where the current zoning code has contributed to racial and economic residential segregation.

Affordable housing mandates for large residential developments and incentives for affordable infill development can help meet some of this need. However, direct funding for social housing development remains the most effective way to ensure that new affordable housing will be developed in a way that intentionally combats segregation. Syracuse should create a housing trust fund to support the activities of non-profit and public agencies who build affordable housing. The fund should have a dedicated source of revenue such as payments from SIDA's PILOT agreements, and it should only be used to fund new housing construction that is designed to affirmatively further fair housing in Syracuse.

For 100 years, Syracuse's municipal zoning code has contributed to racial and economic segregation in the city. The ordinance was passed in response to the massive demographic, economic, and social changes sweeping over the entire country in the period just after World War I, and it was intentionally designed to exclude Black Americans from living in the new suburban developments being built on the city's edge at that time. Today, a century later, those same developments remain some of the most racially and economically segregated in Syracuse in no small part because of the zoning ordinance.

In order to combat that segregation and affirmatively further fair housing, Syracuse must rewrite its zoning ordinance to allow different types of housing across the city so that people of different means, of different backgrounds, with different kinds of families, and in different stages of life can find a home in Syracuse.