All Roads Lead to Cornithaca

“Integration in Tompkins County”

“Put the poor urban blacks and the poor rural whites together – somewhere else.” The County Comp Plan calls it “balance the burdens” – but it’s another name for the County’s policy to move everything and everyone they don’t want in Ithaca – somewhere else. • When a drug rehab center marred their vibrant downtown – they found a better home for it in another municipality. Necessary public works in Ithaca’s “jungle” displaced the homeless; but they were found new housing – elsewhere. The County’s urban housing authority merged with rural providers and absentee landlords turned rural homes into subsidized housing apartments for the urban unwanted — and since agriculture is the only rural activity and land use that the County considers of any importance – those people [and their problems] effectively disappeared. Clever. And there are other words for it . . .