The housing situation in Ithaca and at Cornell amazes me. I took a class on housing and urban development last semester, and since I’ve been pretty sheltered from the housing scene in Ithaca, thanks to living at Rose, it was my first introduction to the insanity that is Ithaca’s rental market. In a New York Times article from 2014, it was rated as the 11th most expensive city to live in in the country, right behind NYC. It was interesting to hear from an architect’s point of view, what building here is like, even though he didn’t touch very much on affordability.

The new projects that our guest speaker discussed in Collegetown give me mixed feelings. On one hand, there is no doubt that they meet a great need for decent housing for students close to the university. The fact of how difficult and expensive it has been until recently to develop in Ithaca is amazing to me because every college area I’ve been to has seen an influx of developers buying up land and building large apartment buildings designed specifically to be student housing. One the other hand, these new buildings on College Ave. will definitely change the look and character of the surrounding neighborhood. The speaker mentioned zoning attempts to prevent impacting the surrounding neighborhoods that have low student populations by creating a tiered system limiting building as it goes out from College Avenue. I know this has worked in other places like Portland, OR, where they attempted to avoid subdivision development and lost of farmland by requiring that developers build in the inner zone around the city and wait until that zone had reached a certain population density before expanding into the outer zones. This may work well to protect the character of surrounding neighborhoods off of College Avenue.