Southside fire was at vacant house, fire dept says

CORRECTION on Oct. 26, 2025 : While a news release from the Syracuse Fire Department noted the house as being at 213 Lincoln Ave, our video shows the fire at 207 Lincoln Ave. We have corrected the article accordingly.

SYRACUSE, N.Y. (WSYR-TV) — Syracuse fire crews battled an early morning house fire today, on the southwest side of the city. Yet again, it was at a vacant house.

The Syracuse Fire Department was sent to 207 Lincoln Ave, at 2:24 a.m., Oct. 25, for the report of a house fire. The crew arrive to find heavy smoke rising from the back of the house, which was consumed by flames. The fire department said, in a news release, that two people had already escaped the building.

They were likely not the owners, however, since the house was vacant and boarded up. The fire department has not confirmed whether they were squatters.

The fire is one of many across a pattern of fires at vacant houses across Syracuse. City auditor Alex Marion, and his team, compiled a lengthy report of 2024 fires, which found that last year, 25 out of 87 structure fires were in buildings nobody legally lived in.

“Anytime we can prevent a situation where our firefighters have to run into a burning building, we should be taking steps to prevent that from happening,” Marion said in a news conference. “God forbid something worse happens in a vacant structure fire that could have been prevented.”

You can read that report online here.

NewsChannel 9 investigated the city’s rise of vacant house fires last year. Fire Chief Michael Monds said one of the biggest challenge behind combatting these fires was that, since they were vacant buildings, the fire crew has less info about their safety.

Many homeless people squat in vacant buildings to escape the frigid Central New York winters. More vacant house fires happen during the winter months, which Monds said could be due to homeless people lighting fires in unsafe houses.

“We don’t know who’s inside, we don’t know if there’s holes in the floor, so it’s a little different than our regular house fires,” Monds told us last year.

It took about an hour, the department said, to control this recent fire, and five more hours to completely snuff it out. At the end of it all, part of the house collapsed and the chimney was unstable.

In July, Marion urged the city to label unsafe vacant houses with large signs with a red X on them, the FEMA standard.

It’s October now, and the colder weather is coming in. If the patterns from before continue, we can expect more fires in vacant homes as the year comes to a close.

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