The Secret Cornell

Cornell is using Form Based Codes to remold the town of Lansing — and its rural residents are just excess material. 

The package Cornell’s Design Connect presented pictures Form Based Codes as a gooey community friendly confection with an enlightened functionality. But the contents of the box are quite different: an unyielding, unalterable centrality. With Form Based Codes; the only legally empowered participant is your government — and they have all the decision making power.

Only 25 residents attended the indifferently advertised meeting – but their attendance was of as little importance as their comments.

The presentation wasn’t given to inform a decision making public – it was a show-and-tell that was only intended to check the “public participation” box. A puppet show of “form-based” authority.

The examples and arguments they used were only superficially convincing: a number of the plans had not even been implemented – and all were about increasing development – not preserving a rural town, and a rural way of life.

While these Form Based Codes were slid into planning with minimal public awareness; they loom large in the Town’s Comprehensive Plan: “Form Based” appeared 85 times; and in conjunction with every new land use policy. And the Comp Plan’s chapter of “Future Land Use” is headed by “Form Based Tools” – rapturously describing how they would encourage “sense of community among neighbors,” insisting that “significant public input ensures that the impacted community is getting what it desires” — as big a lie as you could publicly commit to; considering their actions against Lansing’s unrepresented and unilaterally targeted rural community.   

It’s only fitting, after telling such a bald-faced lie – that their Form Based section ends with a disclaimer: “the best way to plan for the long-term future of the Town of Lansing is to decide regionally” – a Comp Plan corruption that takes from those who have the least; for the benefit of those who have the most — Cornell.