News & INSIGHTS

Onondaga County needs to dramatically ramp up building to create about 1,700 new housing units every year from now until 2040, according to a long-awaited county housing study.

But forget about picket fences. Most of that new housing should be something other than the detached single-family homes that have typified local development for decades, the study says.

For several reasons – an aging population and shrinking household sizes, among others – the greatest need is for apartments and densely packed owner-occupied options like townhouses, row houses and condos.

County officials said the study will help them sell town and village governments on the need for something new: high-quality clustered housing.

“I’m going to specifically give a briefing to village mayors, specifically to town supervisors, so they understand this,’’ County Executive Ryan McMahon said. “And the goal is that this housing document becomes their housing document.’’

A year in the making, the county housing study by consulting firm CZB LLC lays out the housing challenges facing Onondaga County as it prepares for population growth spurred by Micron Technology chip fabs planned in suburban Clay. But it leaves the solutions to those housing challenges to public officials.

“Achieving desired housing market outcomes will not be easy,’’ the study concludes.

Households in Onondaga County are getting older and have fewer people in them. Those trends call for a new mix of housing, according to the county's new housing study. CZB LLC

For decades, the local housing market has been dominated by single-family home construction and suburban sprawl, despite a stagnant population. Now the population is aging and the average household size is shrinking, fueling demand for smaller homes and apartments. Two out of three households consist of just one or two people.

Micron-related population growth – as much as 20,000 to 24,000 new households – will strengthen the housing market only “if the county’s housing development system moves away from business as usual and along a new path of smarter growth,’’ the study says.

Charles Buki, president of CZB, said development should be guided by the land use plan adopted last year by the county, called Plan Onondaga, which emphasizes housing growth in existing population centers such as the city of Syracuse, suburban villages, hamlets and high-density areas of towns.

As for what to build in those areas, the new housing study says this:

“Higher-density housing units will necessarily be smaller, mostly attached, often in a stacked-flat format, and a mixture of rental and ownership. In their combination, these are the types the county needs.”

How to make that happen? County officials have no direct control over what gets built, or when. Plan Onondaga is, after all, “a non-binding document,’’ Buki said.

But McMahon said county planners will work cooperatively with suburban governments. Several towns and villages – especially in the northern suburbs where the Micron effect will be strongest – are developing comprehensive land-use plans, in many cases for the first time. County officials are helping, in part by paying for some of the studies.

McMahon said he expects most town and village governments to support the concept of center-driven development. And once they see examples of high-quality projects, they will support apartment developments and other unfamiliar projects.

As an example, he pointed to Camillus Mills, a mixed-use apartment project developed in a former Camillus Cutlery building after fire destroyed the company’s knife factory in the village of Camillus. After successfully creating 29 apartments in the old building, developers are constructing a new apartment building where the knife factory stood.

That development whetted the appetite of village officials for more, McMahon said.

“Now they want to do it. They’re looking at every older building in their village,’’ he said.

The study makes clear that affordability will continue to be a problem. Roughly 30,000 households – 18,000 in Syracuse and 12,000 in the suburbs – pay more than 30% of their income for rent, making them “cost-burdened.” That’s nearly one household in six.

Typically, the only way to make new housing affordable to low- and moderate-income people is to subsidize the construction, which is costly, Buki said. It’s not clear where the money would come from.

“Somebody has to stroke those checks,’’ Buki said.

The housing study estimates that today’s cost of building an 850-square-foot apartment requires $2,480 in monthly rent to break even. That’s affordable only to a household making $90,000 a year or more, higher than the area median.

The estimated need for new housing – nearly 1,700 units a year – is based on the projection that Micron could bring as many as 24,000 new households to the county. Buki said it’s important to ramp up production soon, because “you know you’re not averaging that, necessarily, right now.”

But Buki and McMahon also agreed that it’s important to hold out for high-quality developments rather than to hurry to approve less-desirable projects.

“You need wins,’’ McMahon said. “If the first project of a different type of use in these communities is a good project, if it’s high quality — even if it’s a mixed-income project, or an affordable project — you have success there.’’

The county planning department is tracking proposals that would create more than 7,000 new units of housing, mostly apartments and mostly within the city of Syracuse, said Megan Costa, assistant planning director. But many of those projects are likely two years or so from construction, if they move forward.

Although it can’t dictate what gets built, the county has financial resources that can help boost the projects it likes. McMahon said he will continue to support worthy projects with the county’s O-CHIP fund, which can make grants of up to $750,000 per project. He said the county also can offset infrastructure costs, such as sewer work.

McMahon said he is particularly interested in supporting innovative owner-occupied housing in clustered developments.

“Homeownership is a way out of poverty,’’ he said. “So we don’t want to not have homeownership options anymore. You want to have the blend you need. And so we’re willing to incentivize there. But we’re not going to incentivize your traditional cookie-cutter developments.’’