This week at the Rose cafe, our guest was Lisa Nichols, a planner who works with the City of Ithaca.  She started her talk off by telling us about what urban planners are and what they do.  I had had a vague idea of what the job was before, so getting a better grasp on it was good.  Planning has to do with how places have a tendency to grow and change, and planning helps shape the growing and changing to a vision put forth by the people.

The City of Ithaca recently put forth a comprehensive plan — a plan for the city that includes everything, but nothing in a lot of depth.  From this comprehensive plan, smaller, more detailed plans can be formed and worked on.  The overall vision can be detailed in the comprehensive plan, after speaking with the people in the city and getting an idea of where they see the city going.  And then after getting the vision of the people, the plan can be made for more specific parts of the comprehensive plan.

An important thing to look at for Ithaca planning is the Ithaca population trends.  We saw that the population of Tompkins county has increased drastically in the last several years, while the population of the city of Ithaca has not increased as much.  The population of the city isn’t growing at a similar rate to the county because of housing: an extremely low vacancy rate, joined with very high rental costs and people wanting to live in smaller households, causes the population size to stay relatively stable.  Additionally, Ithaca is an employment hub, with approximately 16,000 jobs, but with approximately 13,000 of the people working those jobs commuting into Ithaca for them.  The city wants to attract more people into the city, which means that some planning needs to be done.

To attract a larger population, Ithaca needs to build more dense, compact development.  This helps a lot because it follows national trends, it is more sustainable, many residents already use public transportation rather than driving, and it encourages a competitive housing market.  Not to mention helping get some of those 13,000 commuters into the city.

One interesting thing we spoke about at this talk was the recent renovation of the commons.  The idea was to make it more open and flexible, which could be seen by the numbers of people able to attend a concert series soon after the commons reopened.  But there is a conflict within the city of Ithaca, regarding the commons.  People want to live down there, because it is a place with so much character, but locals also don’t want to have the commons ruined because of its local flavor.  This meant that the talk of the hotels that will soon be built in the commons was careful.

I thought it was very interesting that two new chain hotels will be opening in downtown, despite the fact that both are trying to be more local-friendly.  It has been notoriously difficult to find hotel rooms when coming up to Ithaca for drop-off weekend or during pick-up weekend, and don’t even get me started on graduation.  I hope these hotels fill the need for IC and Cornell parents, as well as making the locals happy about the tourist influx, without ruining the local flavor of downtown.

The end of the talk mentioned how most of the projects planned for Collegetown were with regards to student housing, responding to the need from students.  I thought this was great, but I’m still a bit skeptical, because the prices of housing in Collegetown is still less than ideal, especially considering that there is sometimes no where else to go.  But I’m hopeful, even though the houses won’t be completed until I have graduated.

Overall this was a very interesting talk.  I learned a lot about the planning that went into Ithaca, and I appreciate it.  Ithaca is a lovely place, and it wouldn’t be the same without the amount of thought that went into creating it in this way.