Northside United

120 Third St • Ithaca • N.Y. northside14850@gmail.com

Statement on Carpenter Circle Project

Northside United is writing to affirm our support for moving forward with the Carpenter Park
development project from Cayuga Medical and Park Grove Realty. We well remember the alternative
proposed early on for a car dealership there. This is a great opportunity for the City and our Northside
neighborhood, and we want it to be successful.

From our neighborhood point of view the success of the project, however, is related to ensuring
that it best meet our needs and priorities, including affordable housing, affordable and needed
medical/dental clinical services, ensuring and maximizing utilization of local labor in construction, and
agreement with the Community Gardens.

Affordable Housing
We support maximizing the provision of quality and needed affordable housing on the site. Specifically:
 targeting the units to make them truly affordable to working families including those at the lower
income range
 ensuring that the units are equivalent in size and quality to those in the market rate units
 siting the affordable units close to the market rate units to minimize segregation by race and
class.

Medical Building
The Cayuga Medical Center building provides an important opportunity for city residents no less than
for CMC itself. But the real benefit to our neighborhood would come from having affordable and
accessible clinical services. We support and encourage:
 providing an urgent care-type facility with early and late hours (7am-10pm)
 ensuring that whatever clinical services are provided either directly by CMC or by another
provider accept Medicaid.
 providing basic dental services and care, and accepting Medicaid. This would be especially
valuable as it appears that no other dental provider in Ithaca takes Medicaid.

Local Labor
We support and encourage the provision of well-paid construction jobs with benefits and apprenticeship
opportunities in the construction process, and that mechanisms be developed for ensuring that these
jobs be available for local residents.

Community Gardens
We strongly support ensuring that any agreement is acceptable to Ithaca Community Gardens and allows
it to retain its current size (following a land swap) and become permanent (based on agreement with
Gardens and the City).

Strengthening connections between people who live, worship and work in the Northside Triangle neighborhood