CRP 558:
Planning a Plan for Affordable Housing in Tompkins
County
Class: TTh 11:40 AM-1:10 PM, 208 W. Sibley
Background
This semester’s City Planning
Workshop takes on the question of how Tompkins
County can meet its current and future
affordable housing needs. In the past year, affordable and multi-family housing
proposals have experienced substantial resident hostility in three of the
county’s villages: Trumansburg, Groton,
and Dryden. All three of these communities have the infrastructure to support
dense development; they have regular transit service to Ithaca;
and they have community services needed by people of moderate means. The
housing proposals may have had other problems, but their affordability made
them headline news and heightened conflict.
Local governments in New York
State, unlike those in many other
neighboring states, have few reasons not to yield to their residents’
opposition to affordable housing. Builders who propose housing cannot, as in Massachusetts
and Connecticut, appeal to a
state authority when a jurisdiction with very little affordable housing denies
a project. Nor are local governments required to plan, zone sites, and adopt
programs to accommodate their “fair share” of their region’s housing need, as
in New Jersey and California.
This workshop arises out of the instructor’s concern that a
limited number of jurisdictions have taken responsibility for accommodating
low-income residents of Tompkins County.
The City of Ithaca is the region’s
center for affordable housing; many Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher users live
in the Village of Groton;
and the Town of Ithaca has recently
approved, in three phases, a mixed-income project with several hundred units
built by a for-profit developer who obtained low-income housing tax credits.
Many of the county’s low-income residents live in rural areas, often in mobile
homes or deteriorating older housing, especially in the less-regulated
jurisdictions of Caroline, Enfield,
and Newfield. Furthermore, rental housing is concentrated in a limited number
of locations. Some low-income residents simply leave the county to find housing
they can afford, commuting back to low-wage jobs with the county’s major
employers.
Tompkins County
also has issues of aging, both of its housing stock and of its population.
These two problems sometimes coincide, but not always; clearly, they merit
different responses. But thinking at the same time about the obsolescence of
some of the county’s housing stock and the changing housing needs of its
elderly population may allow more creativity in responding to both problems.
Workshop objectives,
deliverables, and audience
This workshop, then, has two
objectives that correspond to two deliverables:
- Assess
key current and future (year 2010) housing needs in Tompkins
County. The needs assessment
will identify both the current resources and the gaps in those resources,
developing clear programmatic steps (including funding sources and cost
projections where possible) to close those gaps. Deliverable date: October
30.
- Develop
a set of planning options, with a recommended process, for the County
Legislature, based on research
about how other states and regions have addressed regional housing needs
within a fragmented home-rule municipal environment. Deliverable date:
December 4.
There are two audiences (who are not formal clients) for
these deliverables. First, the Tompkins County Planning Department is currently
working on its comprehensive plan; the workshop is intended to complement their
work on the housing element of the comprehensive plan. Second, the County
Legislature’s Health and Human
Services Committee, chaired by Martha Robertson, has taken on affordable
housing as one of its main agenda issues. We will have ongoing conversations
with both County Planning
and the HHS Committee throughout the semester.
Main activities
This workshop does not have a
budget, but it is being undertaken here in Tompkins
County and will therefore not be
very costly to undertake. Some key activities of the needs assessment will
include (but not necessarily be limited to) the following:
- Analysis
of 1990 and 2000 Census data to identify key housing needs.
- Forecast
of population by age, income, and special-needs status to 2010.
- Targeted
windshield surveys in areas with low housing values, low rents, and other
indicators to gauge the extent (external) of deterioration/dilapidation.
- Interviews
with affordable housing and homeless services providers around the county,
including Ithaca Neighborhood Housing Services, Better Housing for Tompkins
County, Tompkins Community
Action (the largest HCV agency in the county), the Ithaca Housing
Authority, and American Red
Cross Tompkins
County’s Charter House
(homeless shelter).
- Interviews
with providers of student housing (Cornell
University, Ithaca
College, private-sector
providers) to explore plans and possibilities for future construction.
- Interviews
with local staff and elected officials in several county jurisdictions, to
identify their concerns, goals, and perceptions about affordable housing
and housing need.
- Interviews
with successful and unsuccessful affordable housing project sponsors, to
learn how they selected their sites and why they succeeded or failed.
- Interviews
with Tompkins County
builders.
- Review
of local zoning ordinances to identify where multi-family housing may be
built in the County’s zoned jurisdictions and use of aerial photos and
site visits to ascertain whether these sits are built, vacant but
constrained, or vacant and unconstrained.
- Review
of local housing plans, documents produced by area housing providers, and
past studies on housing by academic researchers.
Key activities for the regional
planning process include the following:
- Review of successful and unsuccessful regional
planning processes for affordable housing elsewhere in New
York State
and outside the state
- Exploration of how these processes would work in Tompkins
County
- Exploration of the incentives that could be brought
to bear on municipalities to encourage participation in (a) the regional
planning process itself and (b) the delivery of affordable housing
- Exploration of the municipal implications of a
completed planning process, i.e., where the county’s housing needs might
be met.
The main purpose of the workshop
is not necessarily to recommend how much housing each jurisdiction ought to
accommodate, although that may emerge naturally from the students’ selected
method for the planning process (and students thus should carry their analysis
further to explore those municipal implications). At the very least, the
workshop will produce one or two recommended process suggestions that the
County and its institutions could use to plan to meet its affordable housing
needs.
Reading materials
There are a few readings on the
Internet in the first few weeks. Other readings may be placed on reserve. Also,
students will be responsible for finding and reviewing housing needs
assessments available on the Internet.
Course evaluation
Products: Two main products will be
evaluated: the final needs assessment and the regional planning process
recommendations. Each of these two reports will be evaluated as final products
worth 35 percent of your grade. Your own contribution to each report should be
clearly identified. You will be given a grade that reflects the quality of the
overall product as well as the quality of your own contribution.
The final 30 percent of your
grade will be based on my assessment of your contribution to the class.
Contribution will be evaluated based on (a) number of hours worked, (b)
initiative, (c) creativity, (d) teamwork, and (e) leadership. I will make this
assessment based on monthly reports by each of you as well as an end-of-term
self- and peer evaluation that everyone is required to complete.
Monthly reports: The monthly
reports must include the following: (a) a statement of the main tasks you
worked on in the previous month; (b) a summary of the hours worked on the
project.
Logging your hours: Everyone is required
to log the hours they worked with notes on what they were doing and submit the
hours weekly to the course’s TA, Anna Revington, on a form that she will make
available to you. Timely completion of your log will be taken into account when
assigning the final 30 percent of your grade.
Academic Integrity: Each
student in this course is expected to abide by the Cornell University Code of
Academic Integrity. As a workshop course, most of the products are
collaborative, but students should take care to identify for the instructor
which work should be attributed to them.
Preliminary schedule of class sessions
8/28 Introduction to the problem and audience
9/2 Housing affordability: Background, measurement, and the local
context
R Bogdon, Amy S. and
Ayse Can. 1997.
“Indicators of Local Housing Affordability: Comparative and Spatial
Approaches.” Real Estate Economics 25(1): 43-80. On-line, ABI/INFORM database.
For access instructions, see http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/rjp17/onlinereadings.doc.
9/4 Housing needs assessments
R Association of Bay
Area Governments. 2002. Blueprint 2001 for Bay Area Housing: Housing Element
Ideas and Solutions for a Sustainable and Affordable Future. Section 1.
On-line: http://www.abag.ca.gov/planning/housingneeds/pdf/Blueprint_2001/Blueprint_2001-Section_1.pdf;
pay special attention to pages 1-13 to 1-35.
9/9 Student report on needs assessment review
Report on contents of needs assessments in review
R Students to select
housing needs assessments based on on-line research
9/11 Structuring the Tompkins County
Needs Assessment
What should be in the needs assessment? What should be our
“deliverables” goal?
9/16 Fundamentals of housing analysis using decennial Census data
Note: If possible, please attend CRP 525 at 10:10AM for housing presentation (on foot)
R Lab Assignment 1,
CRP 525 on-line at http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/rjp17/less1_03.pdf
and http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/rjp17/asst1_03.pdf.
9/18 Forecasting housing need by income category
9/23 Field research: Identifying sites and doing windshield surveys
R TBA
9/25 Getting the most out of an interview
R TBA
9/30 Work and check-in session
Rolf out of town
10/2 Reading a zoning ordinance
R Kelly, Eric
Damian. 1988. “Zoning,” Chapter 9, pp 251-284 in So, Frank and Judith Getzels,
The Practice of Local Government Planning, second edition. Washington:
International City
Management Association. To be placed on reserve at Fine Arts
Library.
10/7 Work and check-in session
10/9 Check-in
CRP field trip to Boston
10/14 Work and check-in session
10/16 Work and check-in session
10/21 In-class presentation informal presentation (draft needs
assessment)
Draft needs assessment
due
10/23 Work session
Rolf out of town
10/28 Work and check-in session
10/30 In-class presentation (or downtown)
Revised needs assessment
due; presentation
11/4 Regional housing plans: Models
11/6 Regional housing plans: Models for Tompkins
11/11 Work and check-in session
11/13 Work and check-in session
11/18 Work and check-in session
11/20 Work and check-in session
11/25 In-class presentation
Draft regional planning
process recommendations due
11/27 No class: Thanksgiving
12/2 Work and check-in session
12/4 In-class presentation (or downtown)
Final regional planning
process recommendations due