THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH GOOD CREDENTIALS
The rural Town of Lansing is racing ahead to be the “the growth part of the Tompkins County area,” but when you look around, there’s no competition in sight — so why are we doing this?
Ithaca was recently listed as both “the best destination for students” in the American Institute of Economic Research’s list of the best college towns in the country, and as #11 in the Top 20 cities with the “least affordable rents” by the New York Times.
The Problem: With 80% of your workers already forced to live outside the City, how can Ithaca attract new businesses and provide affordable housing for workers while keeping College revenues up and protecting those low-density, high rent urban neighborhoods with that “small town feeling” students and professors love?
The Solution: Convince another municipality to shoulder the costs of schools and services for the affordable housing your workers need; while you keep the businesses and spending in Ithaca.
• Create a “vision,” for Tompkins County and use a lot of credentials and influence to sell it to a town government; and by the time its residents realize what’s happening, it’s too late.
The new Tompkins County Comprehensive Plan heavily promotes the creation of an “Urban Center”
“The Urban Center includes portions of the City of Ithaca, the Towns of Ithaca and Lansing, and the Villages of Cayuga Heights and Lansing and is the largest of the Development Focus Areas.”
“It is envisioned in the future at least two-thirds of all new residential development would occur in the Development Focus Areas.”
Excerpts from recent local comp plans give a clearer picture of how this residential development will actually be shared among the municipalities:
Village of Lansing Comp Plan: “All HDR [High Density Residential/Multi-Family] parcels in the Village have been developed.”
Village of Cayuga Heights Comp Plan: “For the purpose of land use analysis, the County plan . . . anticipates no major changes for the Village in the coming decades.”
City of Ithaca Comp Plan: “No significant changes to the character of low-density residential areas are proposed.” “No significant changes to the character of medium-density residential areas are proposed”
Town of Ithaca Comp Plan: “The HDR–High Density Residential zone accommodates detached and semi-detached (duplex) residences in a medium density setting. . . Only 136 acres, or 0.7% of the Town, is zoned HDR.”
Town of Lansing Comp Plan:
• “From these residential housing maps, we can see that the area of South Lansing, which runs along Triphammer and Warren Roads, is currently unaffordable for the majority of people within the region. However, due to close proximity to jobs, shopping and the university it would make for an ideal location for housing, which would provide the opportunity for people to earn a living and spend less than the 30% threshold for affordability.”
• “By creating compact neighborhoods of high population density, TCAT would be more likely to expand into this area and thereby making housing more affordable by eliminating the costs of additional vehicles and associated transportation.”
• “Housing expansion in the form of new developments and PUD’s [Planned Unit Developments – a term used to describe a housing development not subject to standard zoning requirements for the area.] will result in increased traffic and the need to expand roads and/or mass transit to accommodate the resulting increase in population. As with municipal water and sewer, the logical choice would be to gradually expand out from the village into the area of South Lansing and eventually further north.”
Since the Town of Lansing will need to “create neighborhoods,” “expand roads,” and add “municipal water and sewer” to their infrastructure, as well as being miles further away from Ithaca’s job and business center than any other municipality in the County’s “Urban Center” plan — how can this be the best planning solution?
Scurvy Survey
The Town of Lansing survey never asked residents if they actually wanted a town center, only what should be included “In the town center” when they get one. Regardless of the soundness of the survey’s sampling methodology, the selection and wording of the questions clearly indicates the intent to gather responses that would validate predetermined policies.
Many of the survey questions are so general that the results could be used to support almost anything.
And if that isn’t enough evidence of manipulation, the Lansing Comp Plan uses statements like “the survey indicated strong community support for a ‘Complete Streets’ study and approach for this area to include safe travel, pedestrian and bicycle access,” when the survey responses only indicated that residents support “bike lanes” and “improving sidewalks,” and the survey never even mentions the ‘Complete Streets’ study.
Once a response was elicited that could be made to fit a preselected Comp Plan agenda, the public “participation” was over.
If it couldn’t be made to fit: it was ignored:
90% of those surveyed supported “laws or policies to protect scenic views and natural areas,” yet the Comp Plan recommended “infilling” the fields and woods for miles along Triphammer Road [the highway with the best Lake views in Lansing] with High-Density residential developments.
Ironically, the survey results showed that most town residents thought town officials did not respond to resident concerns or communicate information well.
The Town of Lansing Comprehensive Plan is only a “stooge” for the County Plan’s agenda: It backs exactly the same policies, and was jockeyed through its entire formulation and pre-approval process without any meaningful participation or oversight by the town’s residents.
There is very little of Lansing in the “Lansing” Comp Plan.
“Lansing’s” Plan includes no fact based models or projections on the impact that thousands of acres of new high-density development would have on the rural town’s schools, taxes, and recreational facilities. Instead, the Town of Lansing Comp Plan blandly claims; both that agriculture reduces taxes because of the low cost of services compared to new residential development, and that new residential development will also reduce taxes.
Elitist Policy Making
Planning in Tompkins County today is a textbook example of elitist policy making:
“Public officials and administrators merely carry out policies decided on by the elite, which flows ‘down’ to the mass.” – California State University Long Beach, Graduate Center for Public Policy and Administration.
In other words:
“Tompkins County should be a place where all levels of government work cooperatively to address regional issues.” – Tompkins County Comprehensive Plan
This policy is perfectly represented by the County Plan’s flow ‘down’ to the Town of Lansing Comp Plan.
Examining the wording of the Tompkins County Comprehensive Plan reveals its underlying elitist ideology: “All in all, the colleges define the community” proclaims the Plan, and in many ways and on many occasions reiterates this idea. Another common thread is the insistence on “restrictions needed to protect or otherwise benefit the larger community.”
The use of the word “protect” is revealing: The “haves” are always interested in “protecting” what is theirs.
• Although the County’s Plan “protects” agriculture 25 times, it does not mention “protecting” any other rural landowner or resident even once.
The Real County Development Plan
If you take the County Plan’s stated development goals:
• “Tompkins County should be a place where new development is focused in compact, walkable, mixed-use communities.”
• “Compact development lowers costs of government services by utilizing and reinvesting in existing infrastructure and broadening the base that bears the cost of maintaining that infrastructure into the future.”
And add the City of Ithaca’s existing assets:
• High walkability ratio.
• Existing infrastructure.
• Low-density residential downtown neighborhoods of old wood frame houses that are perfect for redevelopment.
Then obviously the City of Ithaca is the best location for building the affordable housing needed for its own workers — but that is not the County’s plan.
The Town of Ithaca, which surrounds the City, and admits: “The bulk of residential zoned land is undeveloped, underdeveloped, or occupied by non-residential uses” should be the second choice — but using that is not the County’s plan either.
The nearby Village of Cayuga Heights and the Village of Lansing, by their proximity and infrastructure, are the next logical choices — but neither is of them is County’s choice.
The Town of Lansing is the County’s default, but unannounced, choice as the development site for the thousands of housing units needed for their “vision.” It’s a rural town that has no existing infrastructure to support this development, the town that is the farthest from the county’s business center, and by a strange coincidence, the town that has a different school and tax district from the all other municipalities in the “development focus area.”
By adding the rural Town of Lansing to their Urban Center’s “development focus area,” County planners can bypass policies that: “encourage municipalities to protect rural character and scenic resources by limiting [urban] sprawl” and use its rolling landscape as a dumping ground for all the high-density and affordable housing that the other municipalities refuse to build.
The “Urban Center” housing agenda is an example of everything that’s wrong with planners and planning in Tompkins County today:
• Academic credentials at the service of vested interests.
• Adopting a lesser plan to appease a greater master.
And maybe even worse in a county with such smug pretentions of being a seat of learning and illumination — it’s intellectually dishonest.
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An important part of elitist policy is making all decisions final. Policies made by Cornithaca’s elite; flow down invisibly until they are revealed to the masses by the County Legislature. There is no way of knowing exactly where they come from — just that our lives are being shaped “up there.” As in the “Non-disclosure Statement” article: County Legislators may go away saying one thing, and come back saying something very different. They’ve talked to someone(s).
Our County Legislators see a “need”; and implement a fully formed policy to fill that need. Government is that simple in Cornithaca County.
The Form Based Codes that the “County” is using for planning are not only an incredibly powerful tool for government control; they are unanswerable. This a Plan for everybody. Their Plan for everybody. A Plan made by and for the Elite to enforce “restrictions needed to protect or otherwise benefit the larger community.”
Form Based Codes slide in under the cover of “zoning” and rise to the position of “dictatorship.” Form Based Codes are not a new way of living: they’re as old as oppression.
See if the officials in your community are planning to use Form Based Codes — do you think they will use all that power with compassion and respect for human dignity and worth?
Haw, haw, haw, haw.