Now to start digging into the odds and ends:
1. For those interested in learning more about the Carpenter Business Park proposal, Northside United, the neighborhood group that represents the Northside Neighborhood, will be hosting the development team for a presentation and Q&A on Monday, February 4th 6pm at the Quaker Meeting House on 120 Third Street. Here’s the project breakdown as provided in email by Northside United:
Affordable Housing. A 4-story building with 42 one and two-bedroom units of working family housing will be sited near Farmer’s Market and 3rd Street and targeted at those in the 50-60% of area median income ($30,000-$35,000 household income range). The affordable units are in a separate 4-story building from the market rate units, they say due to federal/state requirements for low-income housing tax credits. Park Grove Realty (with staff formerly associated with Conifer) will manage the affordable units.
Market Rate Housing. In addition to the building affordable housing, two other 4-6 story buildings in the development will be targeted at market rate rents (and also include commercial/retail). Maybe 150 or so units of market rate housing.
CMC Medical Office Building. This 4-story building, at the east end of site near Cascadilla Street, is slated to be mostly medical/specialist offices and a still to be defined “healthcare location,” but not a “convenient-care” type facility.
Commercial Space. Tentatively there will also be approximately 20,000 feet of commercial space in the development.
Neighborhood Design and Features. They talk about this being a small “new neighborhood” of its own, but knitted together with our existing Northside neighborhood.
Community Gardens. Ithaca Community Garden retains its current size (following a land swap) and becomes permanent (pending agreement with Gardens and City). As this is being negotiated with the Gardens and City, NU probably does not need to spend time on it.
Opening Fifth Street to Rt. 13 is being considered.
Northside United participants have asked the development team consider an urgent care or dental clinic on-site, screening the parking from the rode, better pedestrian and bike access (with reference to Form Ithaca’s boulevard concept), consider townhomes vs. multistory buildings, making the Fifth Street access pedestrian/bike only, well-designed green space, include a local committee of officials, residents and developers to guide the design process, and satisfaction with the affordable component, though they’d like it mixed with other buildings. That last one is always tough, because state-administered affordable housing grants don’t allow this out of concern the market-rate section goes bankrupt; so if they were in the same building, they would still have to be one contiguous entity within the building, as with Visum’s Green Street proposal.
Kind word of advice – if you want to attend but are not a Northside resident, be as respectful like you’re a guest invited to someone else’s house. In the 210 Hancock debate, Fall Creek was strongly negative to the affordable housing proposal, which was in neighboring Northside and better received in Northside. But Fall Creekers had a habit of steering the conversation, which created tensions with Northside United.
2. Dryden’s Tiny Timber Homes has been keeping busy. The firm is rolling out a new line of smaller homes in an effort to better meet the needs of the middle-income housing market. The first home shown above is their first truly tiny timber – a 330 SF home that sells for about $75,000 fully finished. The second example is a U-shaped ranch home being built on Landon Road in the town of Caroline; that 2-bedroom, 856 SF home on 1.2 acres is selling for $199,000, which is practically the maximum buying power of the median family income in Tompkins County (3.4 * $59,000 = $200.6k). The new line of homes will include designs ranging from the 330 SF example, to 1,100 SF, which can be built for $150-$200/SF depending on the home model, location and features.
Tiny Timbers has also rolled out its next cluster development, a 20-home development on 6 acres on a vacant West Hill at the dead end of Campbell Avenue. Plans call for screened parking, a community garden and a multi-use trail. As reported by my Voice colleague Devon Magliozzi, the Planning Board was enthusiastic but cautioned that West Hill was generally averse to any new development. I dunno if that is totally true in this case; I had a conversation with George McGonigal a few years ago when Tiny Timbers bought the property, and he was cautiously optimistic for owner-occupied housing as long as they weren’t “packed like sardines”; dunno if ~3 units/acre passes the test. This would be their second such development, following the Tiny Timbers Varna plan, “The Cottages at Fall Creek Crossing”, which has sold at least four of its fifteen lots (the website shows three sold, but it’s not clear when the webpage was last updated) and is undergoing site prep for the new homes. The homes here would likely be similarly priced, in the $200k-$275k range, and 850 SF – 2,000 SF.
3. Here’s a look at the New York State Department of Transportation’s plan for a new regional facility on Warren Road in the town of Lansing. Here’s a description of the plan as reported by the Lansing Star, per DOT representatives at the meetings to the county and town last week:
“Buildings on the site will include a 30,000 square foot ‘sub-residency’ maintenance building, a 5,000 square foot Cold Storage, a 8,200 square foot Salt Barn, and a 2,500 square foot Hopper Building (covered lean-to). The proposed maintenance building will have vehicle storage for 10 trucks, a loader and tow plow, with one additional double depth mechanical bay and single depth, drive-thru truck washing bay. It also includes an office area (three rooms), lunch/break room (30 people), toilet/shower/locker rooms, storage rooms and mechanical/electrical rooms. The site will also contain stockpile areas for pipe, stone and millings, and ancillary site features including a fueling station, parking for 40 vehicles, and stormwater management facilities. The project will require construction of an access drive from Warren Road and the extension of utilities.”
As is often the case with high-priority state projects, the construction time frame is fast – the governor’s office wants the site built and fully operational by the end of the year. Also, much to the chagrin of some very unhappy neighbors who don’t want a DOT facility nearby, the town of Lansing is not Lead Agency in environmental review – the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) is, given proximity to the airport (the county sold the 15.5 acres of land to the airport last September). Public resource projects by the state, like state-owned office buildings, state maintenance facilities and labs, are generally excluded from local zoning codes and do not have nearly as lengthy of an approval process. The nearly 1,000 page Environmental Site Assessment report can be found on the DOT website here. CHA Companies (formerly Clough Harbor and Associates) of Albany, a prominent state contractor, did the assessment on behalf of the state.
There’s always going to be a bit of limitation in where the state can go with a project like this. The state wants out of the waterfront, not just because the county wants the land to be redeveloped, but because the salt and vehicle fluids could pose risks to the water quality of the inlet and lake (and DOT doesn’t want to be on the hook for that), access to 13 is more difficult due to urban traffic, the location isn’t efficient to where the state plows state roads previously handled by the town, and lastly, the state has simply outgrown the waterfront site -it needs more land, and taking the railroad’s or the Farmers Market’s is not a viable option. The state did originally plan using a site in Dryden on Ellis Drive, but the state determined that response time to urban areas was too long, and since some of the land was federally designated as wetland, the site was too small.
4. In the county’s deed filings, one of the more common recordings is the easements filed by NYSEG, often for new line connections to the power grid. Once in a blue moon, they turn up something interesting. The above site sketch comes courtesy of one of those filings. Scott Morgan owns 543 Asbury Road, and in 2015 he had proposed eight duplexes on the property, but the town had issues with that much density on a rural lot, so Morgan shelved the plan and the town amended the code to prevent such density on rural parcels. In turn, it appears that Morgan subdivided the 5-acre lot into four parcels, and is building a duplex on each. If they’re like his Lansing rentals, expect them to be ranch-style units with two bedrooms each.
Ithacating in Cornell Heights 