ITHACA, N.Y. — City Harbor, a proposed major redevelopment of Ithaca’s waterfront, is looking to move forward. Courtesy of the Site Plan Review filing with the city this week, here’s a look at the details, as well as a first glimpse at the buildings.
The project has been refined since its public debut back in January. Organic Waterfront LLC, a consortium of local and regional developers, is now proposing eight buildings on 7.817 acres – two five-story apartment buildings, one of which will have a waterfront restaurant/bar, walk-up rental apartments, for-sale rowhouses, a golf and boating center, and a three-story medical office building to be fully occupied by Guthrie Clinic. Along with that are improvements to Pier Road, Newman Golf Course, and a waterfront that will include a new seawall, rebuilt docks, and a public promenade along the water with lighting, native ornamental trees and plantings, seating and railings.
As designed, everything fits within the new waterfront zoning. The buildings are five floors or less, the taller ones have setbacks, there is no need for a use variance, and there is no parking requirement. However, as one can see pretty quickly from the site plan, there is plenty of parking, 425 spaces includes covered first-floor parking. 240 of those are Guthrie, using the industry standard for medical office space, 1 per 250 square feet of building; the golfing/boating center, restaurant and 128 residential units have 185 spaces. The restaurant will be busiest in the evening when Guthrie’s daytime employees have left for home, so there’s some flexibility in the parking.
While local firm STREAM Collaborative is the building and landscaping architect for most of the project, Guthrie supplied their own architect for their 60,000 square-foot building, HBT Architects of Rochester. In fact, the Guthrie portion will be subdivided and sold to Guthrie, who will lease the property they own across the creek to GreenStar Co-Op for their new flagship location (GreenStar has an option to buy the location after ten years). The GreenStar project is dependent on Guthrie moving into the City Harbor site.
The medical space will include doctor’s offices, exam rooms, waiting rooms, medical imaging facilities, administrative offices, and support space. It’s not stated if Guthrie will move staff from its current, much smaller 25,000 square-foot location in Dryden. With a much larger space, Guthrie is likely to expand staff, though no numbers are given in the project application.
Also to be subdivided are 18 for-sale townhouse units – ten in one string, eight in another. These will be three-bedroom units, about 1,700 square-feet of living space each, with covered ground-floor garages and waterfront balconies and terraces.
On the rental side, the smaller three-story apartment buildings will be ten units each along a “woonerf”, a type of multi-use path that mixes walkers, bikers, and cars at a maximum speed limit of 5 MPH (readers might recall woonerfs from INHS’s cancelled Greenways project a few years ago). Each building would contain two 3-bedroom, four 2-bedroom and two 1-bedroom units, with covered ground level parking, a lobby, recycling area and bike/general storage space.
The larger apartment buildings include “The Point” and “The Point Extension”. The extension is a five-story, 46-unit apartment building with ground-level parking and storage, with 39 2-bedrooms and seven 1-bedrooms. It connects to its sister building via a skybridge. Nearly all units have a balcony, and a terrace open to all residents will be built out on the top floor.
The centerpiece appears to be “The Point”, which is a 44-unit building with ground-floor restaurant/bar (think Boatyard Grill), outdoor veranda, and a combination of studios to three-bedroom units (three studios, eight 1-bedroom, 22 two-bedroom and 11 three-bedroom units). This is the only building with ground-level living space, on the east end of the building. Perhaps counter-intuitively for the location, most of the waterfront is actually a higher elevation the the Fall Creek and Northside neighborhoods, so it’s not as flood-prone.
Lastly, the golf and boating center will replace the existing golfing center at Newman, as well as serve boaters’ needs. This 8,266 square-foot public facility will include a golf pro shop, a public gas dock fueling facility, a sandwich shop, lounge, restroom, outdoor seating, and a convenience store – basically a rest stop for the small vessel captains.
This building will come along later because as a public facility, it will need licensing/concession agreements that have to be hammered out between the developer and the city, as well as extra time for public and stakeholder input. And yes, those are solar panels on the roof. The developers are exploring net-zero energy for the residential buildings, while Guthrie has yet to state whether their building will use renewable or fossil fuels. STREAM was a major player in the city’s new Green Building Policy, so it would make sense that they practice what they preach.
The site is a bit tricky since it’s one way in and out along Willow Avenue, so a traffic study is being done to determine the impacts, and the city planning board can suggest mitigation measures as part of the environmental review. While a topic of close examination, it doesn’t necessarily stop a project – the cancelled 150-unit Cascadilla Landing project did a traffic study on this same site several years ago, and that project did eventually receive preliminary approval even if it never moved forward.
Now, a big question that’s not stated but deserves some discussion – affordable housing. It’s not a secret that the developers plan to utilize CIITAP to pursue a tax abatement, if expanded to cover the waterfront. That would also likely place them under an affordable housing requirement, if Wednesday night’s meeting was any indication.
In a request regarding plans for affordable housing, Constantinos Lambrou, a member of the project team, said “I’m confident we will meet city requirements if CIITAP offsets the challenge of recovering costs.” It’s a bit vague, but then again, so are the CIITAP affordable housing requirements at the moment. Lambrou did confirm the affordable rental units would be mixed through all buildings, but cautioned that they are still working on the actual mix and size of units for the affordable and market-rate components.
A timeline has not been stated in the Site Plan Review document, though with this submission, it is possible that the city may begin environmental review at the planning board meeting later this month. The process typically takes a few months from that point, though it can take longer with large projects such as City Harbor.