Wellsville needs housing badly, and quickly
A COLUMN By Kathryn Ross
When I was growing up on Rauber Street the area was much more open with fewer houses with some areas only one step away from the farms they had once been.
As a youngster, my sister Pat used to walk me to the top of the street where there was a small barn that housed a horse.
I was predestined to love horses. They are something that has been a constant in my life.
When we visited the horse, we always had an apple or a carrot to offer. Pat taught me how to feed the horse an apple – put it in the palm of your hand and bend your fingers back out of the way of those big white teeth.
Back then, Williams Avenue was not like it is today. Then it wasn’t much more than a dirt path that ran downhill towards the fairgrounds and Dyke Street.
When Pat was growing up, our entrepreneurial father used to send her up on the hill to sell sodas to the people who were parked up there watching the races on the fairground track below. Who could resist a little curly-haired blond girl selling cokes and Ne-Hi?
There’s a photograph of that track and the grandstand hanging on a wall in the entrance of the elementary school. I bet most of the students and probably even a lot of the adults who see it, if they see it at all, think that it is just a really old photo. I’m here to tell you it’s not that old. It is not like a photo of Lincoln at Gettysburg.
The area Williams Avenue, School Street and the school complex are all relatively recent when one looks at the history of the village. It is not only Main Street that has changed over the years.
Many of the homes on Williams Avenue all look the same. I remember when they started popping up in the 50’s. The look alike houses quickly climbed toward the top of the hill. Over the years homeowners have tried to make those original homes unique and more distinctive. And the houses at the top of the hill are different architecturally from those older homes near the bottom of the hill.
A lot of Wellsville is like that. I don’t know how old I was when I realized the house I grew up in had the same silhouette and design plan as the houses on either side of it and those farther down the street.
I was discussing housing in Wellsville with an old friend recently. She said that while growing up on Cameron Street, she noted the houses adjacent to her’s were all the same too. As you look around Wellsville you see that a lot – Sunnydale, Morningside the streets and houses off the Bolivar Road and above the VFW, even in the older neighborhoods within the Village.
Today there is a housing shortage in Wellsville. The aging housing stock is a matter of constant concern for local officials. One annual visitor even remarked that while the village is looking better, there are still areas that need work.
Officials from the Building Trades Department at Alfred State College recently informed the village board that their future plans call for constructing smaller housing units in the village. It is a departure from the high-end, upscale, mcmansions they’ve constructed for the last couple of decades on Niles Hill. Before that, they constructed less lavish houses in Stannards. They have the right idea, building smaller and more affordable homes to help solve the housing problem.
But those plans are a ways off. Something needs to be done today to solve the housing problem. Where are all the entrepreneurs, the kind of forward-thinking people who built the homes throughout the Village when the Village was growing and expanding?
Today there is a plethora of small house plans, the kind of one and two-bedroom homes that are perfect for small families and senior citizens and for those who don’t have heavy pockets or coins stored in a terrarium or dollars stuffed into their mattresses. Such plans can easily incorporate and utilize new forms of energy, bringing down the cost of construction and maintenance.
I would think it is time for someone or a group of someone’s to take the reins and build a district like Morningside or Sunnydale that features tiny houses for seniors, small families and for those with limited incomes.
Kathryn Ross is a career writer, journalist, columnist, and community activist from Wellsville. You can reach her anytime, kathr_2002@yahoo.com
