The Near Westside
One of the first residential neighborhoods in the city, the Near Westside is comprised of 550 acres of industrial, residential, and commercial properties adjacent to Syracuse’s city center. Dating from the turn of the century, many buildings are now demolished, vacant, condemned, or in disrepair. A pattern of empty building lots remains after years of demolition in the hopes of spurring urban renewal. Traditionally dense, small lots have been fused to create suburban sized parcels, which have further eroded the community fabric. As with other inner city neighborhoods across the country since the post-war period, it has experienced a decline in population and investment. Today, the 8,400 racially and demographically diverse residents have begun to build on the area’s assets, the talents of the inhabitants, and the neighborhood’s proximity to Syracuse's downtown core.
This competition, through the advanced design approaches it yields and the resulting built work, will demonstrate the feasibility of bringing a high quality of design to a typically underserved group of clients. Its ambition is to wed high design standards and advanced technology in the development of small domestic projects that will act as catalysts for improving our neighborhoods, creating innovative green homes, from the ground up.
The natural and man-made physical boundaries of the neighborhood are; to the north, a 157-year old rail line, a major east-west artery across the city of Syracuse; to the west, S. Geddes Street, a major north-south artery running along the base of a hillside, to the south; W. Onondaga Street, a wide boulevard originating in downtown Syracuse; and to the east, Onondaga Creek and West Street, an eight lane state highway built in 1964, that separates the neighborhood from the vibrant, downtown Armory district. For more than a century this was a vital community with both commercial and residential buildings, interior blocks with housing for the workforce and tree-lined streets with mansions for the executive populations, as well as local churches, schools, and corner stores.
Today, the community suffers from the effects of Syracuse's "sprawl without growth", a dynamic created by the city's population remaining relatively the same for the last 40 years while upwardly mobile families have been moving out towards the suburbs, resulting in a shift in demographics, property vacancies, reduced property values, and lack of maintenance to existing buildings. Further, statisticians believe 50% of the community lives below poverty level, which is the second highest poverty rate in the United States.