Gov. Kathy Hochul visited Syracuse Tuesday for a ceremony to celebrate a housing project that she says is the beginning of a push to create thousands of new homes and apartments in Central New York.
As she and other dignitaries signed a steel beam at the site of the former Syracuse Developmental Center, Hochul called the apartment complex “one of the most transformational housing projects here in Central New York.”
Syracuse Developmental Center was home to developmentally disabled people for nearly 150 years before it was closed by the state in 1998. The 600,000 square foot facility lay empty for the next two decades, becoming a magnet for crime and a symbol, Hochul said, of neglect that “mocked the neighborhood.”
Two years ago, a private developer leveled the facility and began building the first phase of what is intended to be more than 500 apartments and townhomes in a scenic, hilltop neighborhood next door to the Rosamond Gifford Zoo. The first phase will see 260 apartments built and rented to low and middle income people.
Hochul said her administration has helped to make it easier for developers to build housing by removing some environmental review regulations. The state estimates Central New York needs at least 30,000 more homes and apartments to address the current shortage that drives home sale prices up and also to meet the expected need as Micron builds its massive semiconductor plant in Clay that first will employ thousands of construction workers and eventually a permanent workforce of 9,000.
“There's a lot of anti-development developer type of sentiment, but governments should use us to build more because that's what we do and that's what's needed,” said Chris Albanese, President of Albanese Development Company, developers of the housing project and other projects in East Coast states. “The programs in New York as far as the East Coast for affordable housing are the best. No other state does what the state of New York does.”
Albanese expects to begin renting apartments in the new complex at the end of 2027.
