With a limited amount of land available, less than six square miles, the city is looking at ways to get denser population wise. One way is to grow up which has been underway and hopefully will continue. The other is through infill housing. There's disagreement on that as noted n the Ithaca Times article:
https://www.ithaca.com/news/new-infi...87e26244e.html
Here are a couple of pics I took of the new infill nearing the end of construction (2015) mentioned in the article:
That's not to say infill isn't happening. Here are a couple of recent projects noted in the Ithacating blog:
https://ithacating.com/2019/07/18/81...update-7-2019/
https://ithacating.com/2019/07/12/12...update-7-2019/
Hopefully the city will help get more housing and taxpayers, especially since so much of the land in the city is tax exempt.