The Secret Cornell

If it’s true that history repeats itself: then so does the propaganda that is used to camouflage self-serving and repressive policy making. The term “rural sprawl” was coined by Cornell to cover up the deliberate creation of an urban sprawl bedroom community in rural Lansing: propagandizing a fatuous “domino effect” scenario of a rural community “destroying our land.”

There is an old joke about Cornell’s “centrally located in New York” recruitment blurb: “Cornell, centrally located: in the middle of nowhere.” This has been the albatross that Cornell’s student and staff recruitment has had to deal with — how do you compete with the urban energy and access to culture and the variety that other colleges can provide? By offering something they can’t — a small town feeling, surrounded by parks and outdoor recreation.

Visitors marvel at this small town; a place that they didn’t think could still exist — that’s because it doesn’t: it’s a Form Based fallacy that hides the downside of its greedy corporate agenda: by bulldozing fields, cutting down woods, and building thousands of new housing units in a once rural community, miles away — and seeks to double the benefit by bringing in new businesses and institutions: while putting the high cost of services for the worker’s families in a different taxing district. Lansing, NY is now ruled by a grab-and-go policy making that maximizes short-term benefits and property values for a 15-year “use and move” bedroom community that cares nothing for the town’s past — or its future.

Unsurprisingly, the Tompkins County Comprehensive Plan does not mention “urban sprawl” even once – replacing it with exhortations to “combat” rural sprawl by “concentrating growth in the Development Focus Areas” — building high-density “Urban Node” housing and infrastructure in Lansing.

Cornell is moving into the future by reinventing the privileges of the past. Best Planning Practices have become professionals in the service of profit — and public participation has been reduced to a public proclamation.