The United States faces a housing crisis; the solution has always been some form of incarceration — shelters or detention — or being put out on the street. The causes are many — including lack of accessible and affordable health care, wage and labor inequities, and a market that does not award the creation of sustainable and thoughtfully designed housing. Geneva’s crisis mirrors the nation’s. In the coming local and national elections, housing must be a central issue — if our local candidates do not discuss it, the voters must raise the issue. Secure housing is essential for a thriving community.
Geneva’s current housing crisis is rooted in a failure of oversight and planning, and a lack of an ethics of care. Here are five examples, all of which have been reported in the Finger Lakes Times:
• First, the implosion of the condo/hotel complex where the American Legion stood. What had been claimed a unique property remains a failed construction site. A generous PILOT offering could not support an under-capitalized developer seeking to build lackluster condos. This project was rushed for approval, perhaps skimping on a thorough financial vetting, and seized by many as a quick means of solving the city’s financial woes. And there it sits, a gravel pile as a testament to the city’s business planners.
• The failure to consult with neighbors for the 50-60 unit Jackson Street project before soliciting any developers was an egregious error by the city. The confusion about the condition of the soil — the extent of remediation — and the ramifications for what can be safely built in the immediate environs of the foundry continues the long history of suppressing information about the toxicity of the foundry site. This is property the city controls; after decades of denial, litigation, and finally remediation, City Council seemed unable to define what can or cannot be built on that site. This is an abdication of their elected roles. More significantly, it represents an attitude that some residents of the city remain disposable.
• Similarly, the proposal to build a multi-story complex on Genesee Street reveals the lack of consultation with neighbors and a profound lack of understanding of the needs of those who might live in the proposed complex. This is an example of human warehousing. With no nearby grocery or pharmacy, many of the residents would be unable to secure their immediate needs. City Council’s failure to provide an urban development plan invites more of these spectacles of failure — if the “old” comprehensive plan is or was not suitable, then provide a new one, building on the DRI’s forward thinking improvements, or hire someone who would.
• The short-term rental effects continue to ripple through every neighborhood. Some of us have new neighbors every two or three days; every weekend a new party. What are the effects of speculative real-estate and absentee landlords? The economic impacts are probably negligible in the very short term. If there is little housing available and what does come to market is quickly purchased for speculative purposes (to convert into Airbnbs), the longer term result will be no sustainable growth. Sustainable growth means people who vote, who volunteer at the library or hospital or school, kids who go to school, people who go to a restaurant during the offseason, or reliable customers at the farmer’s market, or shop at a store that’s not a franchise or have coffee at a local, one-of-a-kind coffee shop.
• And then there is the purchase of the Garden Apartments by Hobart and William Smith Colleges, which ironically justify the purchase by claiming they are addressing the housing crunch its students and staff may face as the Colleges grow. While the Colleges plan to keep the property on the tax rolls, the loss of 60-some affordable housing units strains the market and represents an ethical failure. The Colleges missed a chance to integrate “town and gown” in a truly mixed housing complex. Instead, ashamed to be next door to poor and working-class folk many of whom are people of color, the Colleges evicted them, to consolidate the neighborhood. This is gentrification. But as the property stays on the tax rolls, the City saw no need to intervene.
This not an essay of complete despair. City residents continue to propose remarkable possibilities for re-imagining the city. Ken Camera must be lauded for putting forward re-purposing of the Hamilton Square plaza — the vastly under-utilized property could be a site of redevelopment into integrated apartment complexes. With its adjacency to Wegmans, Walgreens, the Colleges and the new health campus not too distant, it could potentially give life to a nondescript and moribund area. Camera’s earlier proposal to move the railyards and develop the properties on the north side of 5&20, thus preserving the public expanse of the lakefront park, is a plan other cities would have seized upon ages ago.
J.J. Nicholson’s consideration of daylighting Castle Creek where it runs under the burnt shell of Madia’s — indeed reimagining the urban riverine ecology of Castle Creek from the lake to the Experimental Station — would, like the nascent urban rail-trail, transform the city. Preserving or developing urban green space, whether urban such as the lakefront or the daylighting of Castle Creek, or urban-adjacent green space such as the corridor from Jay Street paralleling Slosson Lane behind the cemetery or the stretch of Kashong Creek that includes four falls, would signal Geneva’s commitment to addressing the climate crisis. Geneva might actually start to live up to its claim of being “uniquely urban” as it is interlaced with green and blue corridors.
But all this depends on a shared civic goal. Affordable and accessible housing cannot be a form of human warehousing. Gentrification, capitalism’s soft version of ethnic cleansing, has to be rejected. Development, in the Anthropocene, must integrate people as much as it integrates green space into human space. None of this is pie-in-the-sky dreaming; people are actively seeking to develop Geneva. Geneva, however, provides no discernible comprehensive long-range plan. That plan must include public green spaces running throughout the city that connect the urban to its rural roots as well as accessible and affordable housing that understands that residents are not disposable but integral to the well-being of all.