Please join us this Saturday from 12:00-3:00 pm at The Space @GreenStar for Earth Day Ithaca.
We will be hosting a community conversation on how we might address the housing shortage in the Ithaca area in ways that reduce displacement of lower-income residents while honoring neighborhood quality of life.
It is clear that Ithaca’s popularity is causing a housing affordability crisis for those already here. And the Ithaca area is slated for continued growth with additional infill projects, significant waterfront development, and housing complexes in several municipalities.
Most of the people being added to our population are students, retirees, and entrepreneurs attracted to Ithaca’s culture and knowledge economy. But what does this mean for working class residents? What will happen to Baby Boomer city residents as they retire and transition to smaller fixed incomes?
Schedule:
12:00-12:30 Welcome and Opening Remarks
(Joey Gates, Earth Day Ithaca and Gerald Torres, Chair of Earth Day Network)
12:30-2:30 Teach-in on Housing Shortage in the Ithaca area
(Gay Nicholson of Sustainable Tompkins with Martha Robertson of Tompkins County Legislature, Paul Mazzarella of INHS, Kirby Edmonds of Building Bridges, Seph Murtagh of Ithaca City Council) After short presentations to provide background on our housing situation, attendees will work in groups together to explore how we might apply various tools or policies or investments to help us reach our goals of equality in housing opportunity, climate resilience, and healthy neighborhoods.
2:30-3:00 2016 People’s Choice ‘Signs of Sustainability’ Awards
(Kitty Gifford and Dick Franke of Sustainable Tompkins Board presiding)
Thanks to our Earth Day sponsors, Renovus Solar, Beck Equipment, Park Foundation and GreenStar, we are able to host this community conversation and celebration of all the ways we are making the Ithaca area thrive for all of us.
Sustainable Tomkins hosts the annual Earth Day Ithaca event where we feature our People’s Choice ‘Signs of Sustainability’ Awards along with exhibitors and featured speakers. This year we will be at The Space @GreenStar on Saturday, April 23 from 12-3 pm. Instead of an all-day affair, we are going to keep it focused on conversation and celebration.
We are revisiting the teach-in format of the original Earth Day and participating in the International Earth Day Network’s Global Day of Conversation. In Ithaca, we will host a discussion about densification, gentrification, carrying capacity, and how to distribute costs and benefits as we add people to our community.
Our objective is to create a space for critical thinking about how our current housing system works and how it might be redesigned. As a prelude to that conversation, we have organized a weekly series of opinion articles in the Ithaca Times. Starting on March 16, elected officials, developers, and community leaders have been exploring what’s driving our current development patterns, and what options we have for accommodating new residents without decreasing quality of life or increasing gentrification.
Just the other day, Ithaca made it onto another list of the best places to live. This time it’s not just the natural beauty and wineries being celebrated, but our new role as a “job epicenter” due to the recent surge in start-ups. Meanwhile, Cornell continues to expand and add upwards of 200 additional students per year, and all those folks coming for school or to work have to sleep somewhere.
Data and statistics are scarce, but we’ve been hearing for a while about the extremely high cost of housing in the Ithaca area, along with many anecdotes about lower-income people, even long-term residents, being forced out of the city because they can’t afford the property taxes or the ever-increasing rents. Others who are anxious to buy a home and start a family can’t find anything on the market.
We think it is time for a community conversation on housing.
In 2015, we saw many contested debates on proposed development projects and arguments over the best policy framework to assure adequate affordable housing. Typically, these debates focused on the merits of individual projects, which may have obscured our collective ability to examine underlying economic theories and governance philosophies.
We need to have a deeper discussion about rates, distribution, property taxes, and what endpoint we have in mind for ourselves. It is clear that Ithaca’s popularity is causing a housing affordability crisis for those already here. And the Ithaca area is slated for continued growth with additional infill projects, significant waterfront development, and housing complexes in several municipalities.
Most of the people being added to our population are students, retirees, and entrepreneurs attracted to Ithaca’s culture and knowledge economy. But what does this mean for working class residents? What will happen to Baby Boomer city residents as they retire and transition to smaller fixed incomes?
We hope you will join us for a community conversation as we try to develop more of a shared understanding of the systems in place and how they might be redesigned to push outcomes in the direction of fair access to housing, a thriving local economy, and healthy neighborhoods.
