ITHACA, N.Y. — Cornell University is taking the first public step this week towards the second phase of its Maplewood graduate and professional housing development.
The Town of Ithaca’s Planning Committee will receive its first informational presentation about the proposal at its meeting Thursday afternoon.
The concept plan at this point is for six five-story buildings on nine acres, housing 615 apartments with about 800 beds, primarily studios and one-bedroom units. A second community center building is also proposed, with amenities like a cafe, wellness spaces, bike workshop, and pet spa. The project would also include about 150 parking spaces, as well as stormwater facilities, walkways and a central green space.
Notably, this is a different design approach than the first phase of Maplewood. The first phase was not only designed by a different architect, it incorporated a mixture of mid-rise apartment buildings and townhomes with parking areas away from the street, tucked behind the buildings.
The second phase is all mid-rise apartment buildings, and has wide drive aisles with the “fronts” of the buildings facing inward towards that central green space of meadows and lawns — “less gardenesque and more pastoral,” as the project narrative describes it.
At this early stage, there are no votes and the second phase of Maplewood is not formally up for review. Cornell and its development team intend to share the concept plans as they are now, and solicit initial feedback from town officials.
Unlike the Planning Board, the Planning Committee comprises Town Board members and reviews items such as historic landmark designations, conservation easements, and zoning code changes. As the Maplewood proposal will involve a zoning code change request, it will need to be reviewed by the Planning Committee.
The first phase of Maplewood opened in 2018 with about 442 units hosting 872 bedrooms, replacing what was intended to be temporary housing built in the late 1980s. Since the first phase was planned, Cornell has anticipated building a second adjacent complex of graduate and professional housing at the former site of the Ithaca East Apartments (and previously called the Maple Hill Apartments), an 82-unit apartment complex from the 1970s that Cornell demolished in 2020. A pair of single-family homes on the 200 Block of Maple Avenue were also demolished.
At the time Ithaca East was torn down, Cornell representatives explained they had not planned to move forward with new housing for several more years, but when the previous management gave the buildings and land back to Cornell, they were in poor condition and the university decided it would be safer and easier to tear them down as soon as possible.
Fast forward to 2024 and the need for that second complex of graduate/professional housing has grown. When the first phase of Maplewood opened in the summer of 2018, Cornell had 7,276 graduate and professional students matriculating in Ithaca. The number last fall was 8,043.
Cornell has assembled a project team as it has fleshed out the concept plan for redevelopment of the Ithaca East site. Nationally prominent multifamily developer Greystar would develop and manage the project on Cornell’s behalf, with CBT Architects designing the buildings, GTS Consulting doing the traffic analysis, local firm T.G. Miller P.C. handling the civil engineering work, and Ithaca’s Whitham Planning and Design serving as landscape architect and shepherding the project through the approvals process.
Cornell’s goal is to have the project ready for its first residents in August 2027. To achieve that, they’ll need to go through extensive review, including a zoning change to a Planned Development Zone similar to the first phase of Maplewood. That first phase also required an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which is a fairly lengthy document usually invoked only for very large projects that identifies the full range of project impacts and proposed mitigations.
One aspect that would save time on the construction side is that Cornell intends to use panelized wood-frame construction. Panelized construction could be thought of as a midpoint between modular and custom build elements. Living units aren’t assembled in a factory as with modular spaces, but wall sections, floor and roof components are pre-built, and may be installed with sheathing, windows, or utilities rough-ins already in place within the panels. The trade-off is that the architectural design is overall less varied; the site plan schematic shows that the six apartment buildings have two basic footprint configurations.
It is, for now, uncertain if the second phase will require an EIS as well, or if Cornell can go through regular Site Plan Review provided that have executed supplemental studies in conjunction with the project submission — many aspects of the first phase’s 2016 EIS were designed with the second phase in mind.
The current expectation is a review process that would take a minimum of 10 months. There will be numerous opportunities for public comment in the coming months, and certainly a project of this size will garner its share of attention from the greater Ithaca community. But this week is simply the first toe dip into the water before Cornell dives into the Site Plan Review process later this year.
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