The city of Syracuse is celebrating the start of construction on six new affordable single-family homes on some vacant land on the city’s southside.
Mayor Ben Walsh’s administration has promised to build 200 new homes in a city feeling the pinch of a housing crisis. While Walsh expects that to happen before the end of his term next year, he wants to see more action.
"We've got a lot of projects in the pipeline,” Walsh said. “We have funding in place and what we've been talking about, especially since the announcement of Micron, is that we're doing all the right things. We just need to do them faster."
It took two years to get these six homes on South State Street from the planning stage to the construction stage, according to Kerry Quaglia, CEO of Home HeadQuarters, the non-profit agency coordinating the project. Part of that is because this is the first time the city has used a new state program called A-HOP.
“So I don't think there was really a template on how to get the money out in the street,” said Quaglia. “We like to think that we help develop the template and that as we receive funds in the future, they'll go a lot faster."
Quaglia expects the next round of construction to begin soon.
“You'll start to see the others immediately following,” he said. “We have the contractors lined up, so we'll go one right after the other. We've got the capacity to get these built within a year, and we'll do that.
That is something Walsh wants to hear.
"That requires all of us to raise the bar, to get our respective bureaucracies working faster,” Walsh said. “It also means we have to staff up, and so you need to make sure that you have the people that can do the work. And so all of it, these are, I guess, what you would consider growing pains, but we are growing."
