On Wednesday, I had the pleasure of listening to Senior Planner of the city of Ithaca, Lisa Nicholas, talk about the development of Ithaca as a major hub of growth in the region.  I was very naïve about the development occurring in Ithaca and mainly thought most of its business came from the college students during the school semesters.  In fact, the population of Ithaca is linearly increasing compared to the population growth in Tompkins City. Unfortunately, the unexpected growth in Ithaca brought rising housing demand and associated problems with low property turnovers and low vacancy rates.  This can be seen in the high rents found across Ithaca housing.

Our speaker, being an urban planner, described how her department is trying to resolve the near term housing problems while trying to balance the longer term needs of the Ithacan community.  Ms. Nicholas plans to create more compact and dense housing to meet this demand in addition to designing more sustainable projects.  However, she also wants to maintain Ithaca’s culture and architecture and not work against housing and commercial projects currently under development.

Overall, Ms. Nicholas’ job is to optimize the town’s space in order to create the most value for everyone by bringing the community closer and providing a variety of uses to businesses.  It was impressive to learn how she designed certain parts of Ithaca such as the Commons to fulfill her ideals of the city while keeping her perspective on the future needs of the community.  One of the biggest projects I look forward to is the completion of the Marriott and Hilton hotels!