It’s time for outside-the-box thinking when it comes to leveling the playing field and encouraging local investment.
We hear it from every corner of the political world. One camp clings to the promise that anyone can climb to the top if they grind hard enough. Another insists that everyone deserves a fair shot at a meaningful slice of the pie. But for all the talk, we rarely write policy that delivers on either vision. Instead, we default to choosing winners and losers so someone can score political points, rather than improving the rules so more people can actually build something that lasts.
Every once in a while, though, a policy comes along that actually moves the needle. Ithaca’s proposed changes to its site plan review law are one of those rare examples.
Here’s the basic idea. Right now, if you want to build or significantly change a building in the City of Ithaca, you get pulled into a full-blown site plan review process – meetings, public hearings, consultants, and time. That process might make sense for a big student housing complex or a major commercial project. But for the “missing middle” – the small apartment house, the 8–10 unit building over a corner store, the mixed-use project a local owner wants to build on a single lot – the process can be enough to kill the project before it starts.
The proposal in front of Common Council would raise the threshold for what staff can review and approve administratively. Instead of only single- and two-family homes qualifying as “projects of limited scope,” staff would be allowed to handle multiple dwellings and mixed-use projects with up to 14 residential units. The language in the ordinance is cleaned up, the process is clarified, but the core point is simple: If you want to build small-to-mid-sized housing, you shouldn’t have to run the same gauntlet as a 200-unit complex.
Importantly, this isn’t a free-for-all. Site plan review still applies. The same standards for stormwater, traffic, fire access, landscaping, and neighborhood character still exist. The environmental assessment filed with the proposal is clear: This is a change to how projects are reviewed, not a green light for anything-goes development. There’s no physical project attached to this law – just a faster, clearer path for people who want to build the kinds of housing we keep saying we need more of.
Staff also keep an escape hatch. If there’s significant public controversy or a project raises bigger issues, the Planning Director can bump it up to the full Planning and Development Board for a full review and hearing. And anyone unhappy with a staff decision can appeal to the Board. In other words, guardrails stay put. The difference is that the default for the middle – up to 14 units – becomes “we’ll help you get this done” instead of “prepare for months of process.”
Why does that matter for local investment?
Because process is one of the quietest, most powerful ways we rig an economy in favor of the biggest players.
A national or regional developer can shrug off months of legal fees, engineering bills, and carrying costs while a project grinds its way through hearings. They have in-house lawyers, full-time consultants, and an entire line item devoted to getting through it. Meanwhile, a local owner who wants to turn a three-unit into a six-unit, or add apartments over a small storefront doesn’t.
For them, every extra hoop is another reason to give up, sell to a bigger outfit, or let a property sit underused.
By raising the staff-review threshold to 14 units and explicitly encouraging “missing middle” housing types – everything between a detached single-family home and a mid-rise apartment building – Ithaca is acknowledging that small and mid-sized projects deserve their own lane.
That is exactly what it looks like when policy stops pretending to be neutral and actually starts to favor the local economy.
Instead of throwing giant tax breaks at one marquee project, the city is trimming friction for dozens of small ones. Instead of betting on a single “transformational” development, it’s making it easier for regular people – small landlords, family businesses, local builders – to add incremental housing in the places that already have infrastructure.
That’s the shift we almost never see. Our default model of “economic development” is still built around big checks, ribbon cuttings, and industrial-park photo ops. We shower incentives on the company with the best lobbyist, while an ordinary family trying to finance a 10-unit building gets ground down by time, cost, and uncertainty.
The proposal flips that script without costing taxpayers a dime. It doesn’t hand out subsidies. It doesn’t waive standards. It just says “Hey, if you’re building at the scale that actually fits into existing neighborhoods, we’ll get you an answer faster and with fewer layers of bureaucracy.”
Now imagine if we applied that same thinking outside of housing.
Take main street businesses. Instead of endlessly debating another big-box store or outlet center, what if we looked at our permitting and zoning through the eyes of the person who wants to open a small café, a daycare, or a neighborhood hardware store? How many separate approvals do they need? How many nights do they have to take off from their other job to sit through a meeting where nothing gets decided?
We could create “limited-scope” review paths for small commercial fit-outs and expansions, where staff are empowered to say ‘yes’ quickly as long as basic safety and building standards are met. A mega-corporation will open a store if it makes sense in their national model regardless. The person we’re losing is the one who gives up because the process feels impenetrable.
The same logic applies to energy and infrastructure.
We spend years fighting about massive utility projects and billion-dollar transmission lines, while small distributed solutions – rooftop solar on a warehouse, a neighborhood geothermal loop, a shared battery project – drown in red tape. You shouldn’t need to hire a consultant army to put solar on a local grocery store. Yet in many places, that’s basically the expectation.
If we built “middle-scale” paths into our codes – streamlined reviews for small renewables and energy-efficiency retrofits up to a certain size – we’d unlock projects that actually keep money circulating locally: Local installers, local property owners, lower energy bills that stay in the community.
Even on the corporate side, you can apply this thinking.
Right now, we tend to negotiate one-off deals with major employers: Special tax abatements, infrastructure promises, customized zoning, etc. Meanwhile, the structural stuff – how hard it is to hire, build, expand, or invest at a small scale – rarely gets the same intensity of attention.
If we really believed in either conservative rhetoric about opportunity or progressive rhetoric about shared prosperity, we would be obsessed with these structural rules. We would ask, over and over, “Does this process reward the people who already have armies of lawyers and lobbyists, or does it make it easier for ordinary residents to participate?”
That’s what Ithaca’s site plan proposal does in the housing space. It looks at a bottleneck – the gauntlet small housing projects must run – and says “We can protect the public interest and still stop wasting people’s time. We can trust trained staff to handle modest projects, pull only the tricky ones to the full board, and free up capacity for both.”
It’s not flashy. There’s no groundbreaking photo where everyone in hard hats smiles for the camera. Most residents will never read the ordinance or the environmental review. But if it passes and works as intended, you’ll see it in quieter ways. More 8–12 unit buildings scattered across neighborhoods, more mixed-use corners that feel like they belong in the neighborhood, and more local owners willing to take a risk.
That’s what real “local economy” investment looks like.
Not another press release about a big outside company “coming to town,” but a codebook rewritten so more of the upside goes to the people who already live and work there. Not another round of winner-take-all incentives, but a set of rules that stops treating the local builder as an afterthought.
If we’re serious about leveling the playing field, that’s where the work is. Go into the zoning code, the permitting rules, the review thresholds. Find the places where we’ve quietly designed the system for the benefit of the biggest players. Then make the kind of changes Ithaca is considering now. Raise the ceiling for staff-level approval, shorten the distance between an idea and a yes, and trust residents enough to let them build things at a human scale.
Do that across housing, small business, and local energy, and you won’t need to manufacture talking points about “supporting the middle class” or “growing the local economy.”
You’ll be able to point to something concrete. More stuff getting done and a rulebook that finally matches the stories we tell about opportunity.
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