Ithaca won $10 million in state funding for downtown developments, Walter Mosley, the New York Secretary of State, announced at the Ithaca Downtown Convention Center on Thursday afternoon.
The funding was disseminated by Mosley as part of the New York State’s Downtown Revitalization and New York Forward initiatives created by Gov. Kathy Hochul (D). The villages of Margaretville and Stamford also won $4.5 million each in state funding.
“You’re here today to watch the beginning of Ithaca’s downtown renaissance,” Ithaca Mayor Robert Cantelmo M.A. ’20 told the crowd of local elected officials. “This money is going to have a transformational impact on our city.”
Ithaca’s planned developments include hundreds of new housing units along West Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, which runs from the Ithaca Commons to NY Route 13, supplementing separate state investments in the SouthWorks facility, Mosley announced at the event.
“This is a force multiplier type of initiative,” Mosley told The Sun. “We get this public-private partnership that we believe will pay immediate dividends.”
While early construction will begin in “late 2027,” Judy McKinney Cherry, regional co-chair of the Southern Tier Regional Economic Development Council, said that people will not notice changes for 18 to 24 months.
Ithaca has applied for this grant for the last 10 years and though they have never received it, the city has taken feedback to improve their application each time, according to State Assemblymember Anna Kelles (D-125th District), who represents Tompkins County.
Mosley told The Sun, “you get a winning bid eventually” because of “the practice of debating and having meetings and conversations amongst Ithaca residents who understand this community better than anyone.”
Kelles said the funding is necessary as "Ithaca is one of the most expensive cities in the country,” and the price of housing has pushed “over 15,000 people to commute from outside of the county every single day.”
A report by the Ithaca-Tompkins County Transportation Council states 15,735 people commute to the county; Ithaca household bills are around 14% higher than the national average, according to Doxo.
Receiving the grant – after nine attempts – “feels really good. It’s been a long time coming,” Acting City Manager Dominick Reckkio told The Sun.
The Ithaca downtown initiative will include “revitalization” of streetscapes, facades downtown, new housing and the incubation of new businesses, Cantelmo told The Sun. The Ithaca Neighborhood Housing Services is one of the partners the city is moving forward with for housing development, which Cantelmo said has a “stellar reputation.”
Specifically, the West Martin Luther King Jr. Drive development is meant to be the “connective tissue,” between NY-13 and the Commons, especially since the planned area has been “underinvested” in, Reckkio and Cantelmo told The Sun.
Which projects specifically will be selected for inclusion in the award are yet to be determined, with a “multi-step” process between the city and state required, according to the Ithaca Downtown Revitalization website.
In order to be eligible for the grant, Ithaca was required to be a “pro-housing” community, Mosley said, a program that certifies local governments as committed to supporting housing growth in order to address housing shortages. Ithaca is one of 414 certified municipalities across the state.
In order to be designated as a pro-housing community, a local government must either show that their housing permits have increased over three years or pass a resolution committing to being a pro-housing community.
That designation is “a signal to the marketplace that the community is interested in that issue, and will try to be a helpful and engaged catalyst,” Kurt Foreman, the president of Ithaca Area Economic Development, said in an interview with The Sun, “rather than just sit back and say, ‘there's nothing we can do, or we don't care.’”
“People who have kids, and the kids can't live here anymore, they'll actually be able to stay,” Kelles told The Sun. “How cool. How cool is that."
Lila Davis is a news contributor and can be reached at lrd73@cornell.edu.
Atticus Johnson is a member of the Class of 2028 in the College of Arts and Sciences. He is a senior writer for the News department and can be reached at ajohnson@cornellsun.com.
