The Onondaga County Legislature on Tuesday convened its first housing summit with local elected officials from Onondaga County towns and villages as well as the city of Syracuse.  Democratic county legislature Chair Nicole Watts called the summit with the goal of wrangling elected officials to identify housing issues and solutions to the county’s housing crisis.   “We all have different pain points that we came to this table with,” Watts said to the assembled politicians. “And hopefully, if we have a successful evening, we will walk out of here with some ideas.” Watts, alongside newly elected Legislator Elaine Denton and the legislative staff, planned the housing summit. The idea for the summit grew out of the Democrats’ creation of the legislature’s Housing and Transportation Citizens Advisory Board.  Representatives from nearly every municipality in the county sat around round tables to discuss their visions for what the county government could do to support the building of more housing.  Attendees came up with a range of ideas: from developers combining their orders of construction materials to take advantage of bulk discounts to issuing grants that incentivize municipalities rezoning land for workforce housing. Watts’ plan is to use the feedback from the summit to create task forces for the legislature’s housing and transportation advisory board. She will co-chair the board with Darrell Buckingham, a senior program officer at the Central New York Community Foundation who has worked on the foundation’s lead and literacy efforts. Buckingham plans to bring his background in lead mitigation to the county’s housing conversations.  Homelessness in Syracuse increased by 150 percent between 2019 and 2025, and Syracuse saw the largest rent hike in the nation in 2024. As Micron prepares to come to Clay, the county will need an estimated additional 30,000 homes by 2038, according to a state study.  “This is not something that can be dilly dallied on,” said Watts, speaking about the county’s housing crisis in an interview with Central Current. “It needs action as quickly as possible, done responsibly though.”  Watts said she is trying to “make haste slowly” this year, hoping to make thoughtful decisions while quickly expanding access to quality, affordable housing.  The board, once appointed, will officially work under the legislature’s planning and economic development committee, chaired by Denton. Board members will be divided into task forces. Watts will invite people from around the community — developers, tenant advocates , landlords and more — to join both the board. There are likely to be several task forces. Each member will likely get to choose between two to which they are invited..   Those task forces will be determined in part by the conversations from Tuesday’s summit. Before the summit, Watts said the one predetermined task force will focus on displacement. After the summit, Watts said senior housing could be the focus of another task force. Other potential task forces include infrastructure and the use of collaborative county resources.  Once the task forces are in place, each will be expected to present one idea to the planning and economic development committee by August, said Watts. That would give legislators time to talk with County Executive Ryan McMahon about funding some of those ideas before he presents his budget to the legislature in September.  “Ideally, all of these ideas are embedded in the county executive’s budget he gives to us,” Watts said. “That would be an ideal world.”  By December, Watts hopes that all required funding will be included in the budget and action plans will be fully sketched out.  She also plans to hold a second summit with municipal representatives near the end of the year to determine whether the process helped solve some of the problems they identified at Tuesday’s meeting. At Tuesday’s summit, the municipal representatives split up into groups. Each group talked about its issues with housing and picked one issue to focus on. Individuals had three minutes to write on sticky notes ten ideas to solve the problem — imagining money and reality as no barrier — and then the groups came up with more solid plans based on those ideas. At the end, they presented their ideas to the full group, noting what would be needed from the county and any points at which the idea could fail.  In addition to bulk orders of building materials and rezoning incentives, the participants suggested waiving county and state sales tax for developers building non-single family homes, streamlining permitting processes to reduce upfront costs, building tiny home communities that seniors could move into without giving up home ownership, offering tax incentives for civil servants living in the city and expanding county sewer district limits.  Courtney Gauthier, a town councillor from Clay, said she didn’t know what to expect from the summit, but she was impressed.  Gauthier is a big proponent of non-traditional housing, she said. She was impressed by another politician’s suggestion of offering developers building that kind of housing a fast-track through the planning board process. When non-traditional housing would not have the same profit margin as a large single family home, it made sense to incentivize developers up front, she said.  “At the town level, there’s a lot of things that can be done,” said Gauthier. “And I would like to see some of the things we talked about tonight acted upon, especially the zoning changes for non-traditional housing.” The post With power in the Onondaga County Legislature, Watts begins planning path forward on county’s housing crisis appeared first on Central Current. ...read more read less