Planning students help neighbors develop a vision for the Northside

By Linda Myers

Thirty-four students in Ken Reardon's Neighborhood Planning Workshop course, most of them undergraduates, helped residents of Ithaca's Northside neighborhood develop a shared vision for their community's future last fall. Some of the students will stay on to help the plans move forward this spring, joined by a fresh crop of undergraduates.

The participatory planning project, which the city of Ithaca set in motion, may lead to improved housing, more stores and access to transportation, safer streets and even a place for Northsiders to meet.

From left, Nancy Potter, community educator with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County, joins AAP undergraduates in the Neighborhood Planning Workshop course, Joanna Canter '02, Jennifer Hoos '04, Annie Siegel '02, Ian Hegarty '03 and Terrance McKinley '03, along with Tim Logue (Cornell MRP '00), an Ithaca neighborhood planner, and Ken Reardon, associate professor of city and regional planning, in the P&C supermarket on Third Street, Dec. 18. The students hope to win national funding for a proposal to expand the property, where the supermarket rents space, to include apartments and shops. Charles Harrington/University Photography

Last fall the students gave residents disposable cameras and asked them to survey their neighborhood and take pictures of resources as well as problems. The photographs documented a strong neighborhood confronting serious challenges -- fewer businesses, more neglected properties and lots filled with weeds and debris. Still, Northside had some real assets, such as a P&C supermarket that residents walked to and a once-scenic stream -- Cascadilla Creek -- along the neighborhood's eastern edge. "People were worried that the supermarket would follow national trends and relocate to a more suburban location," said Reardon. "But trend doesn't have to be destiny."

Some background on Northside: It's a triangle of land of about 26 blocks and 900 residents on the city's north end. In addition to the creek on the east, it is bordered by Cascadilla Street on the south and Route 13 on the west. It includes the Sciencenter, a hands-on museum, a county Department of Motor Vehicles office and a subsidized housing complex.

Last spring city officials invited Reardon, associate professor of city and regional planning, to help the neighborhood develop a plan for its future, the first of many neighborhood-based plans that will update the city's 25-year-old comprehensive plan. Also helping the neighborhood is Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County.

Reardon said that involving Cornell students through a workshop-style course appealed to him. "Cornell's Department of City and Regional Planning has a long history of doing community workshops with the local government as partners." The idea is "not to turn students into professional planners but to get them interested in becoming involved in community planning, wherever they are," he said, citing the Jeffersonian model of the "citizen planner" as the American ideal he hopes they'll aspire to after they graduate.

Caitlin Chipperfield, a senior majoring in urban and regional studies, signed up for the course because, she said, she saw it as "a good opportunity to put into practice some of the stuff we've been learning in theory in class."

Joe Braitsch, a first-year student in the department's master's program in regional planning, enrolled because the course offered him "an opportunity to give back to the local community," he said, something he believes all Cornell students should do.

And Terrance McKinley, a junior in urban and regional studies, who hopes to go on to do faith-based urban development in distressed communities after he graduates, wanted to learn more about community planning. Through the course, he learned that the key to successful community planning is to get as many people involved as possible. "It can be tough work," he observed, "but what of value isn't?"

Last fall Reardon's students studied census records and Northside's history to get a better picture of its demographics and character. They also distributed fliers, conducted face-to-face and telephone interviews with hundreds of residents, helped organize a neighborhood cleanup and even drove through Northside in a pick-up truck with a bullhorn announcing community meetings. To include the ideas of residents overlooked in past planning efforts, they arranged for a press conference at a Baptist church on First Street whose members are mostly African American and held a dinner meeting at the housing complex, catered by a local cook famous for her down-home meals.

"Ithaca is diverse, economically, socially and ethnically. I found it encouraging that we've been able to be a bridge between different communities," said McKinley.

In addition, the students researched public and private funding to enhance block grants the city hoped to get and worked with community groups on an energy conservation grant proposal. Their work culminated in an all-day summit meeting in November during which residents shaped their ideas into a five-year plan. The students presented it with slides at a jam-packed meeting at the Women's Community Building in downtown Ithaca, Dec. 4. Residents reviewed and voted on details by waving strips of paper, green for go ahead, yellow for proceed with caution and red for halt.

Among the ideas to emerge was a proposal to turn the current building that houses the P&C into a mixed-use, two-story structure with more retail space and apartments with lake or gorge views. Reardon's students are submitting the proposal to a national competition that could win a substantial first-prize purse for the project.

Reardon's students have since fine-tuned the components of the plan to reflect neighborhood priorities and will join residents in presenting it to city and urban-renewal officials this semester. This summer, Cornell's Public Service Center will hire several Cornell student interns to shepherd the Northside neighborhood planning initiative to the next level. And Reardon's course will be offered again next year, ensuring continuing student involvement.

Harnessing students' energies to "this kind of work enhances the strength of grass-roots-level planning," said Reardon. It also may have a profound, positive and lasting impact on the local community.