Civic Innovations

It’s February in Syracuse, and people in Central New York are coming to the realization that things are different. The snow isn’t coming.

At least not this year. Or for the last several years where we have seen snowfall totals way off of normal. The endless winters and mountainous snowdrifts of my youth are now just stories I tell my kids. I’m not entirely sure they believe me when I do.

Snow is part of the identity of Syracuse and Central New York. Historically the snowiest city in the United States, our location along the path of winter winds that blow off of Lake Ontario has embedded snow in our consciousness. It’s a part of who we think we are.

Warm weather isn’t the only thing happening in Syracuse. The legal obstacles to the State of New York’s plan to remove the highway running through Downtown Syracuse appear to be resolved. Crucial funding to support the development of expansive new microchip manufacturing plants north of the city are starting to flow. Plans for the wholesale remaking of the central part of the city are starting to come into focus. Taken together, the scale of the change that is coming to our city seems hard to believe. 

And lots of people don’t. There is a palpable sentiment of doubt in the community. People quietly (and sometimes loudly) grumbling that things will eventually fall apart – they always do. “Don’t get your hopes up,” is a common refrain. As much as snow is a part of our identity, so too is our pessimism about our city and our region. Pessimism born and nurtured on years of deindustrialization, population loss, and dodgy schemes to develop our local economy. 

The doubt is in my DNA as well. My Great Grandfather came to Syracuse from Detroit to work for the Franklin Automobile Company, which manufactured cars here in the early part of the 20th Century. Other cars were made here too, and air conditions, and lots of other things. But not anymore. The jobs left, and the people left, and things were never the same. I left too. After graduate school at Syracuse University, I did what a lot of people my age did then – I left Syracuse to find a job.

When I came back, things were starting to change. The winters were getting milder, and there was talk about removing the highway that, under the banner “urban renewal” in the 1960’s, had flattened city neighborhoods and driven people to the suburbs. Now we’re at the precipice of massive change. But it’s still hard for people that live here to believe it.

If you’d have asked people as recently as 10 years ago about a snowless February in Syracuse, most people wouldn’t have believed it. But now – I think – people are starting to believe. Without all that snow, we’ll have to rethink our identity. We’ll have to come to grips with a new version of who we think we are.

It’s the same with all of the other changes that will happen over the next 5-10 years, changes that will remake our city into a version of itself that no one would have dared believe just a few years ago. We’ll have to reevaluate our idea of ourselves. We’ll have to change our identity to accommodate a new reality.

We’ll have to believe.