Syracuse Comprehensive Plan

A decade has passed since the adoption of Syracuse’s most recent comprehensive plan in 2014. As we embark on developing a new comprehensive vision for a brighter future, Phase I provides the framework for how the city will chart its course for the next decade.

Phase I focus areas include: 

1. Audit of the Comprehensive Plan 2040: Identifies the status of past planning goals, providing a list of goals that have progressed significantly or are in-progress, as well as emerging goals and ideas.
2.  Assessing Current Demographics: Shares a community profile of Syracuse as it relates to population growth, concentrated poverty, housing, climate change and more.
3.  Stakeholder Engagement: Identifies preliminary understanding of community values to help shape future planning considerations. Engagement included targeted conversations with city staff, civic partners from organizations who work on a variety of issues and projects in Syracuse and City department leadership.

Learn More About Phase I

Phase II will be comprised of three distinct segments – each with clear and definitive outputs that would serve as the building blocks for subsequent work.

1. Trends, Issues and Priorities: Analysis and public engagement to determine existing conditions and trends and well-defined outcomes that describe what progress on Syracuse's priorities would look like.
2. Values, Principles and the Path Forward: Building the Syracuse Comprehensive Plan's decision-making framework and solidifying the overall direction that the new plan should take.
3. Plan Development: Drafting of the new comprehensive plan, including the compilation of plan components developed during Phase II and the development of an implementation guide and action plan.  

In early 2025, the Division of Planning and Sustainability began the process of preparing a new Comprehensive Plan 2050. The City of Syracuse adopted its first comprehensive plan in 2005, the Comprehensive Plan 2025. Prior to its adoption, the City largely relied on area-specific master plans to guide change but lacked a city-wide comprehensive plan that dealt with interrelated policy and budget issues.

Syracuse's Comprehensive Plan 2025 brought our community together to identify broad goals and a shared vision for the future - pertaining to physical assets, government services, local business and institutions, and cultural resources—and identified policies, actions, regulations and investments for the City to pursue to achieve this vision.

The City's current Comprehensive Plan 2040 is an update to the original plan and was adopted by the Syracuse Common Council in 2014. The Comprehensive Plan 2040 and its components outline policy and detailed objectives and actions related to Bicycle Infrastructure, Historic Preservation, Land Use and Development, Public Art, and Sustainability. In addition, revisions to the Comprehensive Plan included action items to provide clear guidance for implementation by City departments, both in their content and in the organization of the Plan.