A report on downtown revitalization by six students at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management found that retail business can add to an established downtown but cannot anchor it. "The single most effective anchor of small downtowns is one or two high-density employers" -- companies that employ at least 1,000 people -- and the surest way to attract them is through exceptional city schools, they wrote.

Other important findings:

-- Closed-in areas generally fail to prosper as downtowns because they are seen as unsafe.

-- Essential, but often costly and unpopular, infrastructure improvements, such as widening or rerouting streets for better traffic flow through a downtown commercial district, are unavoidable for a vital downtown.

-- To achieve a successful downtown, civic leaders must have well-defined goals, agree with community residents on shared values and face low levels of strident opposition.

While there have been a number of studies of Ithaca, N.Y., the city where Cornell is located, the business students' report was the only one to compare the city with 13 other U.S. communities that are similar in size, character and resources. Among them were Saratoga Springs, N.Y., Boulder, Colo., Bloomington, Ind., and Bennington, Vt. The students made site visits to all 13 towns during the past year and assessed what made their downtowns vital and what detracted from them. They also took a long hard look at Ithaca's downtown to study what was working and what needed improvement.

The students -- Geoff Archer, Amy Gillett, Jay Krueger, Brian Lee, Shana Leiberman and Benjamin Wood -- presented their comprehensive study to Ithaca Mayor Alan Cohen, who commented: "I thought the report was thought-provoking, with some excellent, tangible ideas." Cohen plans to share its findings with his staff and with Ithaca's Common Council.

According to the students' report, even if a town is doing well overall, it suffers when its downtown doesn't flourish, because a thriving and attractive downtown has a symbolic value as well as an economic one, instilling a sense of pride in community. Conversely, a lackluster downtown embarrassed residents, particularly when they hosted visitors.

Wood said he was surprised to discover that communities with successful downtowns had all begun by taking a similar series of steps to improve their city's basic infrastructure -- the accessibility of the downtown commercial center, the flow of traffic to, through and around it, and the usefulness of the downtown's overall organization. "Although communities love to debate this issue, without it you won't go anywhere," he said.

The difficulty with trying to make these kinds of basic improvements, said Wood, is that it can be hard to convince a community to support the cost when the changes, while they make a downtown function better, don't make it look better. However, those communities that chose to invest in improved functionality of their downtowns reaped the economic benefits in the long run. An example Wood gave was Lafayette, Ind., which removed train tracks from the center of town.

On the report's finding that closed-in downtowns don't prosper because they appear unsafe, the students noted that some of the cities they visited had experimented with closed streets but had reopened them after a sharp drop in retail sales. They also found that when stores were within shoppers' "line of sight," they perceived them to be closer and were more likely to walk several blocks to get to them.

On the efficacy of having a high-density employer downtown, Wood said: "You bring one or two thousand people to a downtown and all of a sudden you have shops, you have restaurants, you have activity, you have commerce." He added: "Towns like Ithaca can have great success attracting employers who need a highly educated populace to recruit from."

The best way to attract a large, downtown employer, the students wrote, was by offering economic incentives and by improving schools to the point where people chose to relocate in a community, and commute great distances to work if need be, because of the quality of the schools. According to the report: "No city in the study succeeded in rejuvenating downtown without significantly improving its schools."

The report also touched on subjects familiar to Ithaca residents, such as parking and extended store hours, but offered fresh takes on them. "The probability that a city with a parking problem can attract a new employer to the downtown is almost zero," the report stated. But solving parking involves more than just having enough parking spaces. For one, shoppers often perceive a lack of downtown parking, even when that's not the case. Cities need to advertise to counter that perception. Also, while "on-street parking must be free," the loss of revenues from parking fees presents special challenges to university communities with limited tax bases. The students suggested that Ithaca might look to cities that had solved their downtown parking problems, such as Lafayette, Ind., which worked with downtown employers to set aside parking for their employees, freeing up more spaces for shoppers.

Another finding: Communities need to ensure that downtowns have people who live there as well as work there. Downtown residents encourage a vibrant night life and a safer environment in the evenings. But the housing mix must include people of different economic backgrounds to prevent downtown ghettos of a single economic class, poor or wealthy.

Perhaps the most disturbing assessment was that residents in a primarily academic community may have a vested interest in a less-than-vibrant downtown because it offers the benefit of lower-cost goods.

The study was one of the Service Leadership Projects undertaken by Park leadership fellows at the Johnson School. The Park fellowships, supported by the Ithaca-based Park Foundation, provide full tuition plus a living stipend to 30 of the Johnson School's top MBA students each year. Park fellows are selected through a highly competitive process. They receive an enriched leadership development program and, in return, are expected to complete a significant service project in the Cornell or Ithaca community.

Clint Sidle, the director of the Park Leadership Fellows Program, calls the service leadership projects the capstone of the Park fellows' leadership development. "By giving them an opportunity to practice their leadership skills in the community," he said, "we hope to inspire in them a lifelong commitment to public service as well as plant the seeds of change in the community."

In addition to the downtown revitalization study, Park fellows service leadership projects that benefited the community this past year included helping the Tompkins County SPCA develop a strategy to gain more members, developing a program plan for the Women's Community Building, attracting more funding for Ithaca Housing Authority and performing a needs-assessment study in Dryden for Ithaca's Catholic Charities, which wants to offer more services in that area. Projects now being worked on include developing alternative air service to Ithaca, working with the Chamber of Commerce to help nonprofits attract government funding and exploring the feasibility of a local venture capital fund to be run by students.

The Park fellowships are one component of the Johnson School's leadership development program, one of the most comprehensive offered by a business school. That program includes a broad-based leadership development curriculum, several annual speakers series, opportunities for service projects and the Center for Leadership in Dynamic Organizations, which will be launched this fall.