SYRACUSE -- Good news for coffee lovers Cafe Kubal has opened up a new store on South Salina street. Manager Chris Deferio says downtown is the perfect place to open a new business. "It feels like a neighborhood community like you would find in a borough of New York city or something like that. It's nice," he says.
In the last two years close to fifty million dollars has been invested here on the three hundred block of South Salina street alone.
Ben Walsh the city's deputy commissioners for development says in the last two years close developers have invested close to 50 million dollars on South Salina Street projects including the recent 16 million dollar expansion of the Landmark Theatre.
"We have an almost 100% occupancy rate downtown for residential units we literally can't build them fast enough," he says.
Even old buildings are attracting developers, an equity company has agreed to buy and renovate the Hotel Syracuse and the city just got 1.6 million dollars from the state to rebuild the long abandoned Sibley Parking Garage. Walsh says this is the most construction downtown Syracuse has seen in more than forty years.
"You see windows opening up where they were previously blocked off, you see cranes in the air. There is real development happening down here," he says.
