Grayson Rivers

The historically Black Southside neighborhood in Ithaca, New York has endured decades of gentrification and rising taxes, contributing to the pipeline into homelessness

The first few weeks of spring, much like the winter months that came before, had been frigid, interposed with brief bouts of sunshine and lazy spells of rain.

Sitting on a bench outside the Southside Community Center in Ithaca, New York, I watched parents begin picking up their children from the center’s free afterschool program, happy to chat on one of the first warm April days.

I was there to meet Ira McKinley, a dining hall employee at the nearby Ithaca College and a long-time independent filmmaker. He has also been homeless for over two decades.

As I waited, I struck up a conversation with Fern Morgan, the center’s Director of Operations going on nine years, as she greeted parents on the front steps. I mentioned that I had written a research paper on the SCC for a human rights class a semester earlier, and that I’d been wanting to come see it in person.

“Really?” she said, a smile breaking across her face. “Well, you’re family then.” She laughed. “Yeah, you’re family.” She invited me to visit the center again when her program was out of session.

My phone rang–McKinley, calling me back. He instructed me to walk a few hundred feet down Cleveland Ave to a house nestled across from the St. James African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. He waved to me as I got closer.

The home belonged to Barbara Murapa, and was being looked after by her brother and caretaker, Paul Dickerson. McKinley was living in a tent in the backyard. He told me I could take a picture of it on my way out.

McKinley sat in an office chair on the house’s porch, his laptop on a table in front of him. Over the course of our conversation he would use the computer to show me clips from his films, and to play music from his childhood. He switched back and forth between Soul II Soul, Denice Williams, and the Ohio Players as we talked.

As I sat down, McKinley wasted no time getting to the point.

“This used to all be Black,” McKinley said, his hand sweeping towards the houses around him. That’s why he’d brought me there, he told me. He felt it was important that I, one of the few Black journalists he’d ever spoken to, see the historically Black Southside neighborhood up close.

Over the past 35 years, the percentage of Black Southside residents has shrunk by 26%. The residents of Cleveland Ave and the immediately adjacent Green, Plain and Corn streets, were at one point majority Black.

“We were a community. We had drums and beautiful cars. We had basketball teams. We would go out of town and play other basketball teams. They used to have apple trees, peach trees. There used to be trees here, female trees, bro. They bore fruit. Everything you see here now is males.”

Dickerson sat down in his usual matching chair next to McKinley, nodding along.

“This was all a Black community,” Dickerson said. “We were raised on this street. This used to be called Wheat Street, because all of us were Black. We came here, you know, as a safe haven.

After World War II, Dickerson’s grandfather, father and uncle moved to Ithaca against the backdrop of the Jim Crow era. While his grandfather and father didn’t receive the funds entitled to them through the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, his uncle did.

“They all went to a trade college back then,” Dickerson said. “My father became a master mason here. So he worked at Cornell, a lot of buildings there he helped build, a lot of little schools around here he helped build. He raised a family here.”

For a short time, McKinley went on to say, the city and national governments had made a real effort to advance Wheat Street. In 1938, Eleanor Roosevelt came to Ithaca to dedicate its Southside Community Center during her time as First Lady, touting it is a major success despite having been created with a budget of only $229.

I asked McKinley where he felt that momentum went, and why he felt Ithaca’s Common Council had failed to uphold this legacy as homelessness continues to grow decades later and the historically Black Southside Community becomes more and more White.

“I think the people that are really in the Common Council are not home born–there may be some–but they don’t represent this area,” he said, leaning in.

“Their goals and their perspective and insights is different from somebody that was raised here and went there [he points to an art piece down the road] and knew when we painted that rock almost 55 years ago.”

The state of housing within Ithaca as a whole, McKinley said, were the exact reasons for the gentrification of the Southside neighborhood. Over the past nine years, the average property value of a home in Ithaca rose $130,000.

In November of 2025, the Common Council voted in favor of an amended city budget that raised property taxes by 4.11%, which works out to $12.24 per $1,000 on taxable valuation.

Patrick Kuehl, 4th Ward Alderperson on the Ithaca Common Council, holds high taxes responsible for the displacement of families from their childhood homes, though he voted in favor of the budget proposal last November.

“The story that I hear all the time,” Kuehl told me, “is you’ve got someone who’s on Social Security, an older person who maybe bought their house and raised their kids in their house. They bought it, let’s just say, for $100,000 in 1960, right? And now, their house is worth $400,000 they’re on a fixed income of far less than what they made when they were able to afford their house for $100,000, right?

“Their taxes have, you know, tripled, quadrupled, quintupled since then, right? And we’re not talking between $200 and $600. Someone’s taxes could be 10,000 plus dollars a year or more, right? And so you have all of these people who are moving out of the community because they just can’t afford to live here anymore.”

Kuehl believes affordable rental housing will have major impact on the average property value in Ithaca. Cities like Ithaca, he explained, simply don’t have the room to develop additional single-family housing.

Kuehl is a major advocate for the zoning reform plans proposed by Mayor Robert Cantelmo in January of 2025, which would allow new housing to be integrated into metropolitan areas, and in turn lower high taxes and the high cost of single-family housing in neighborhoods like Southside.

Still, the effect of gentrification shouldn’t be overstated. A combination of United States Census data and US Department of Housing and Urban Development data shows a correlation between the shrinking percentage of Black residents in Ithaca’s Southside neighborhood and the rising rate of Black homeless individuals in Tompkins County, where the majority of Black residents live in Ithaca.

McKinley didn’t need data to tell him this.

“It’s always been a push out, bro, it’s always been a push out. They’re building stuff over here, over there, by that’s $2,000, so push [Black people] over here.”

Born in 1964, McKinley witnessed the change to Southside’s racial demographics as he grew up, and over the course of our interview, he would make small references to people and places he’d seen or met over the decades.

The history of Southside was something McKinley seemed to take immense pride in, as did his own place within it. He told me about the role St. James played as a stop along the underground railroad, about his time in the Air Force, and as an activist who stood before Ithaca’s Town Hall after experiencing police brutality.

His pride seemed to drive him to refuse many of the housing initiatives provided by the city, like the state-mandated Code Blue shelter that opens when temperatures drop below freezing. This past winter was the coldest Ithaca experienced in over a decade.

McKinley went on to echo identify the major consistency and coordination issues related to Ithaca’s Code Blue Shelters, as well as other housing initiatives.

The Joint City-county Code Blue Shelter and Navigation Hub policy, proposed in September of 2023, was scrapped by the City of Ithaca after Tompkins County withdrew support in May of 2025.

And after the city’s year-round homeless shelter closed in November of 2024, city officials scrambled to abide by Code Blue laws, temporarily housing homeless residents in a vacant county-owned building formerly owned by KeyBank.

“The thing is,” McKinley told me, “you can’t put up an emergency shelter in two months because you ain’t thought about it in two years. Yeah, people are dying on the street because you didn’t think about how you want to house the most vulnerable people.”

The gentrification of the Southside neighborhood has only exacerbated a homelessness epidemic that exists throughout Ithaca. A week before I spoke with McKinley, I sat down with another homeless Ithaca resident, one who echoed many of the same ideas about the state of Ithaca’s local government.

Gary, who declined to share his last name, is a familiar figure in the Commons, Ithaca’s metropolitan area located next to the Southside neighborhood. There, he plays the guitar, waving to familiar faces as they pass by. One girl, around seven years old and walking with her mother, he recalled meeting when she was only a baby.

Although Gary is White, his understanding of the Ithaca’s housing policies aligned with many of the Black Southside residents experiencing gentrification nearby.

When I asked about the Emergency Shelter Construction Project, a combined Code Blue and year-round homeless shelter proposed by Tompkins County in October of 2024 with a projected finish date of 2029, he responded by saying, “Ithaca’s all been out of touch. All the industry is gone. It’s a lot of money being pushed around and pulled out of the sky.”

Gary would slip me pieces of advice as we spoke. Pay attention to the history of housing policy in Ithaca. Follow the money and where it comes from. Buy silver and keep it on me. His distrust of Ithaca’s Common Council and the Tompkins County Legislature seemed the result of a life as tempestuous and uncertain as the policies we were discussing.

McKinley didn’t find the year-round shelter all that promising, either. This fall, Tompkins County will discover if it was granted a $14.3 million Homeless Housing and Assistance Program grant from the state of New York, which would allow the shelter to begin construction.

5th Ward Alderperson on the Ithaca Common Council Margaret J. Fabrizio noted that creating projects around anticipated funding is a typical practice for policy makers, as grant applications often require in-depth project outlines.

Fabrizio and her fellow Common Council members are very conscious of Ithaca’s reliance on outside funding.

“The city is trying to move away from doing those kinds of really short term, loans to itself, basically, for things that should be either in an operating budget or, you know, funded in some other way,” Fabrizio said.

Nevertheless, the intricacies of the policy decisions that affect Southside residents may make the gentrification of the area easier to understand, but not easier to bear.