I really enjoyed the discussion we all had with John Schroeder last week.  I thought it was really cool to see how the city of Ithaca has changed over time and see how different everything now looks from how it looked 100 years ago.  One thing that greatly annoyed me, however, was what I learned about housing prices and how Cornell plans to provide housing for its students forthcoming.  I always thought that collegetown housing prices were exorbitant because of landlords hiking up the rent to make as much of a profit as possible, but I never considered the ways in which Cornell significantly contributes to the problem.  A lot of houses on Cornell’s campus do not pay property taxes, and Cornell as a whole could charge way less than it does for housing to relieve some of the financial burden students face.  In addition, Cornell has a lack of housing, which allows landlords to drive up prices because of supply and demand.  The new housing coming to north campus is not going to help in the short term because it is going to be swing housing, used to house students who would usually be living in another dorm but aren’t because those dorms will be under renovation.  Cornell needs to fix this problem soon, and fast.