City development director Crystal Surdyk gave an update on the status of demolitions and the plans for the lots when the houses being demolished come down during Monday’s City Council Housing Committee meeting. P-J photo by Sara Holthouse

Demolition work is constantly ongoing in the city, and condemned houses in the city’s neighborhoods that are in need of help are in the process of coming down, with some marked for demolition soon.

At Monday’s City Council Housing Committee meeting, city development director Crystal Surdyk updated the committee on where demolitions currently stand, though she is still waiting on the updated list for the month.

“I know there are a number on Fulton Street that are supposed to be down by the end of this month,” Surdyk said. “I know there are bids that were out for the demolitions themselves. I think everything on Fulton has been abated.”

Two demolitions on Cross Street have started, and Surdyk added she expected Fulton Street to be done before Cross Street, but they are being done by different contractors with different schedules. Council president Tony Dolce asked about how it has been said that some were meant to come down by the end of September, and Surdyk said without the updated list she did not know for sure, but that she knew many were scheduled to come down by the end of the year.

The demolition spreadsheet that has been shared to council members is the same, she added, saying that she was scheduled to meet with someone from the Chautauqua County Landbank on Oct. 7 and could ask if any dates had changed.

Housing committee members had the previous spreadsheet, where it showed three demolitions scheduled for Oct. 17, with at least two of those scheduled on Fulton Street.

A member of the public asked what happens to the lots when the houses come down.

“So these particular properties that we’re talking about we have already strategically identified for neighborhood revitalization projects,” Surdyk said. “The ones that are being demolished, the County Landbank or the Renewal Agency or the city already own them, and so they’ll come down and we will start working on — we need to do a lot of infrastructure upgrades and before you can build new you have to upgrade the Board of Public Utilities infrastructure, particularly the water and sewer.”

Surdyk said they will start working on that and then doing site preparation and getting ready for potentially some new builds. A few different projects are in the works but there are no contracts with builders yet.

“We’ve got some ideas and some potential infill that will be coming along for those neighborhoods,” Surdyk said.

The projects will be built back as residential and fit with the context of the neighborhoods that they are in. Surdyk said some legislation was recently passed for the allowance of the creation of Pilot Residential Districts and that gives them a little bit more flexibility in the type of housing they will be able to build there.

“We’re looking at some modular built housing,” Surdyk said. “Not mobile homes, just to make sure that that’s clear, but it’s modular manufactured and so they can bring whole components, so entire walls that have been already put together and then they can take it out and build it right on site.”

While no specific contracts are in place, Surdyk said they are continuing to work on that with different developers and hopefully there will be some more information on that in the next few months. Some setback restrictions have also been loosened and work on the complete overhaul of the zoning code for the city is still ongoing, but that is something that Surdyk said is still probably at least two years out.

“The need is now and we have the opportunity to start making some changes and revitalize some neighborhoods now so we didn’t want to let this opportunity and some funding potentially go by, so we passed the zoning but everything will still have to go through Planning Commission review and approval,” Surdyk said.

There will still be public input for the zoning code changes but the Pilot Residential Districts are already done, though Surdyk added that if with the zoning code it is discovered that those districts need to change the city still has the ability to do that.