This semester, there has been continuous construction on the corner of Catherine Street and College Avenue. The Catherine Commons project takes its name from its location and replaces eleven two-story houses. The new construction includes six apartment buildings, three north of Catherine Street (called Catherine North) and three south of Catherine Street (called Catherine South).
The buildings will host approximately 360 residential units; a net gain of 339 bedrooms vs. the previous buildings. Additionally, there will be 2,600 square feet of commercial retail space along College Avenue, a private fitness center on the corner of Catherine and Cook Streets, and a small parking lot for ADA compliance and service vehicles. The project includes streetscape improvements, several ADA-compliant plaza spaces, pedestrian amenities, and a public bus stop. The estimated costs by completion will total approximately $39,136,000.
The project received its greenlight for construction permits on March 23rd, 2022, from the city of Ithaca Planning and Development Board and is scheduled for completion in August 2024. However, it has been in the works since October 2020, when the Circular Construction Lab organized a group of community organizations (including the SC Johnson College of Business, Finger Lakes ReUse, Ithaca NHS, Cornell Cooperative Extension, TAITEM Engineering, Trade Design Build).
The group’s goal was “investigate the circular potentials of the local built environment by researching and proposing methods for material reuse and recycling, reversible construction, reactivating embodied values, creating green jobs, and reinventing the underlying business models of construction.” It is supported by the Cornell Einhorn Center through the Engaged Cornell Public Purpose Grant CI:RCLE.
Novarr Mackesey, the project’s developer, worked in close collaboration with Circular Construction Lab and students from Cornell’s Department of Architecture. Together, they documented and cataloged the reuse and deconstruction potential of the buildings that the Catherine Common would replace. With the assistance of the Seattle-based Building Deconstruction Institute, the group convinced building owners to deconstruct, rather than demolish, one of the structures (206 College Avenue). The material from 206 College Avenue was then turned into an art exhibit advocating for more use of circular construction processes. The Circular Construction Lab elaborated:
“Over the course of five days in January 2022, a crew of up to eight workers methodically carved the 420-square meter, 13-bedroom structure into sections from top to bottom. Panels of roof, walls and floor as large as 2.5 by 5.5 meters were lifted on a flatbed and hauled to a local warehouse for the materials to be processed, salvaged and eventually resold. The chosen process—panelized deconstruction— incorporates the use of heavy machinery in an effort to minimize time on-site by relocating specific steps to off-site locations.”
The Catherine Common’s project is being used as a case study for documenting deconstruction’s local potential. It is particularly useful as it permits a side-by-side comparison of demolition and deconstruction processes on nearly identical buildings within the same economic system. The Circular Construction Lab expects the generated data to provide a “much-needed insight” into the effects of implementing deconstruction and developing a business analysis that could address the scalability of the process.
While the Circular Development’s experiment can assist the development of research on sustainable construction techniques through “deconstruction,” the bigger issue is Cornell’s housing crisis. The Catherine Commons project serves as a pertinent reminder of a housing shortage that will become increasingly pressing in the upcoming years, with Cornell’s growing enrollment for undergraduate students. Already, there is the issue of a net gain of 1,000-1,100 undergraduate students that will contribute to the Collegetown housing pinch once these students leave North and West campuses as junior and seniors, as the NCRE only accommodated for housing freshmen and sophomores.
In fact, as many sophomores recount, they had to sign a housing contract in early fall to secure accommodations for their junior year. Even then, there is a consistent worry that they will be unable to afford the rates that they are expected to pay. The New York Times listed Ithaca as number 11 in a list of the 20 least affordable cities to rent in the United States relative to median gross income. The worry about being able to secure housing permeates even across the freshman class, who realize that these issues will affect them sooner rather than later.
Locals that live in Collegetown face further issues along with the excessive housing need. Highly affluent students are willing to spend whatever prices are needed to secure housing that they would want, inflating the overall market. On the other end of the scale, students with no income whatsoever, attending on loans, would have to pay even more because of the adjusted market rate. Combined with the university’s focus towards growth, it leaves locals and students in a problematic and worsening situation.
Cornell’s enrollment has expanded significantly from the end of World War II to the 1960s, to the point where Edmund Cranch, the dean of the Engineering School, created a task force and wrote a report titled “Cornell in the Seventies” documenting that it was impossible to balance Cornell’s budget with growth and that expansion simply spreads a limited endowment across more students. The housing shortage in Collegetown reiterates the concern brought up by Cranch and the university’s failure to heed the report’s findings.
It is unreasonable to assume that Collegetown would have been able to remain a village of the attractive Italianate and Victorian one-family houses forever, but the remaining houses make one yearn to experience what Ithaca was like in the past.
It makes one wonder about when Collegetown was filled with hospitable one-family houses that made Ithaca feel like home, rather than the modern and overwhelming apartment complexes that make up the area now. It is unreasonable to assume that Collegetown would have been able to remain a village of the attractive Italianate and Victorian one-family houses forever, but the remaining houses make one yearn to experience what Ithaca was like in the past. There was a time when students did not strain the limited resources available and when overcrowding did not stretch into worries about basic necessities like shelter. Yet it becomes hard to imagine that past, when we are so overwhelmed with present challenges. Catherine Commons is a temporary band-aid to Cornell’s insatiable desire for growth. Until Cornell prioritizes sustainability over expansion, the situation will only worsen.
This article was originally published in the Cornell Review’s semesterly print edition: Semester in Review.
