Living in Dryden

Dryden Junior Fire Day; development plans can improve

Cathy Wakeman's Dryden Town Talk visits Junior Fire Academy, a week of drills, training, and competition for 10 to 16-year-olds. She also reports on Music in the Park and Music in the Hollow, plus the opening of the 4-H Fair today and the upcoming Healing Harps service at Reach Out for Christ Church.

The New York Comptroller reports unsurprising news: time are getting harder for local government.

In a sign that local developers building high-density housing can bend - especially when faced with neighborhood and government opposition - developer John Novarr substantially redesigned his Collegetown Terrace project along State Street in Ithaca. We'll see if Stephen Lucente's upcoming announcements for Varna carry any such similar improvements.

County lists programs; Canada Geese under attack

Tompkins County has created a list of all of its programs (1.3MB PDF). This is the kind of thing I'd like every level of government to do - track down and make public the programs they spend money on. Reading budgets is rarely fun, and this looks actually useful.

Apparently Canada Geese across the state will be under fire soon. Hunting them (and eating them) is fine with me, though I'm not really thrilled with the 'grab, gas and bury' approach they're talking about Downstate. I also wonder how much reducing the population in western New York will do much to reduce the numbers in New York City, whose airports have problems. Connecticut and New Jersey seem more likely to matter.

Update: Apparently at the Ithaca airport, right on the Dryden/Lansing line, deer are the bigger threat. That couldn't have been a fun landing for either the plane or the deer.

Should the zoning advance from the Planning Board to the Town Board?

As I think is pretty clear by now, I'm not a fan of the latest zoning proposal. Last Thursday's meeting made it clear that even the people most looking forward to new zoning aren't delighted.

The Planning Board votes Thursday night on whether to pass this proposal on to the Town Board. At this point, I'm certain that the proposal needs cleaning up, but I'm not sure whether that is better in the hands of the Planning Board or in the Town Board.

The Town Board has lots of other things to do, and I worry that they'll have a hard time focusing on it. At the same time, the Town Board is elected, and as a result closer to the immediate mood of the Town, so there might be more incentive there to address as much as possible.

It's a hard question. The one thing I absolutely don't want to see is for this to go to the Town Board and be passed in about the same state as it is now.

Comparing Existing Zoning to Proposed - Allowed Uses

One of the more frustrating aspects of the zoning conversation is that a lot of people think we're going from "not very" zoning to something much much stricter. The reality is a lot more complicated than that, but very tricky to pin down. The two laws aren't precisely comparable, even on basic questions like which uses are allowed. The maps have some similarities, but a lot of differences.

I've put together a big table that includes the table of allowed uses from the July 2010 draft and also shows those uses for the older (originally 1988) zoning currently in effect. Creating that table was complicated by the very different structures of the two laws, and the different definitions they used. In many cases, the new law defines things that didn't exist in the old law, and sometimes creates larger categories. The old law, for example, mentioned golf courses, which is likely "Recreational Facility, Athletic" in the new law, but that doesn't mention golf. Similarly, libraries are a separate category in the new law, but unmentioned in the old.

The old zoning districts don't correspond neatly with the new either. To figure out what's changing for a specific area, you need to visit the old map (image or PDF), and figure out what zone the parcel is in. Then you need to visit the new map (image or PDF) to see where it's going. Then you can figure out how allowed primary uses are changing there.

Also, in the new zoning, there are overlay districts that don't fit into the table. The Optional Traditional Neighborhood Development Overlay Districts (OTNDO) are on the map, but not in the table. If you live in Etna or near the Village of Dryden, you probably should take a look at that definition to see what it might mean for you.

I've also left Elder Cottages out. I need to read the new and old laws to figure out what's going on there. It doesn't neatly fit these tables, and the rules have always seemed strange to me.

One feature of the old zoning law deserves special mention. The M-A zones - manufacturing - include a provision that permits any non-prohibited and non-allowed use to be included by Special Use Permit. That's why some of the unknowns in the table are still marked ? SUP.

This is only the allowed uses table - this doesn't cover difference on subdivision, signage, density, parking, etc. Hopefully it's a start, though.

Ten years organic at Jerry Dell Farm

This morning's Ithaca Journal Jerry Dell Farm, which seems happy ten years after converting from conventional dairy to organic:

"In the conventional world, it's all about volume and efficiency," he said. "Organics is more about taking care of the farmland and the animals."

They also take a look at the "hey, don't look at Albany! Abolish your own government!" law and special districts in particular.

To lighten things up a little...

No more articles today, just some happy pictures.

Konrad sleeps.

Sungiva enjoys some water.

Contentious zoning meeting

The Ithaca Journal reports this morning on Thursday night's zoning meeting , giving it the ominous headline "Dryden zoning issue spurs death threat". The Cortland Standard also reported, oddly noting the comment that ended with the threat without mentioning the threat. (I've added audio of the meeting to my earlier story.)

The Dryden Beautification Brigade received a laurel for its for its Open Gate Garden and Art Tour last Saturday.

It was a pretty calm time at the County Legislature, with lots of unanimous votes.

Community Garden underway

I finally got to visit the Dryden Community Garden this week, and was amazed. It's in a beautiful spot behind Town Hall, and though it's just getting started, it's promising and then some.

Path to the garden.

Plots growing in the garden.

They'll be having a work day and meeting this Sunday at 1:00pm, working on paths and clearing unused plots.

I've posted a lot more pictures in a a gallery, showing more of how to get there and the mostly beautiful views around it.

Most to least acceptable uses

Update: I'd left off a few residential uses, notably the home occupations, so added them in.

I'll be taking a closer look at the Allowable Use Groups Chart, §501 of the draft Dryden zoning. Before I got too deep, though, I thought it might be interesting to get a broad (and not necessarily accurate) sense of how acceptable uses might be.

I turned the table into a spreadsheet, and removed headings and the Elder Hostel use, which is sort of not really governed by the table. Then, to establish a rough scale of how acceptable a use might be, I turned categories into numbers as follows:

There's plenty of room to quibble with these, but I wanted the Special Use Permit to be a little less than half of "sure, go ahead!", the limited permit (adult uses) to be about half of that, and Forbidden to be zero. (Yes, use variances are possible, just not very likely.)

There are six basic zones - Rural Residential, Rural Agricultural, Conservation, Hamlet, Commercial, and Light Industrial Office, including LIO-A. (LIO-A is the area by 84 Lumber where Adult Uses are possible.) I counted them all the same for this rough calculation. That means the "most acceptable" score is 30, for uses permitted in all zone, and the lowest is 1, for a use only allowed in part of a zone.

The results, listed from most acceptable to least acceptable, and alphabetical when scores are the same, look like:

"Library" was the biggest surprise to me, at 4, but I'm sure other things will surprise other people. You're also welcome to download the spreadsheet and play with it yourself.

Arson, ash borers, building

Today's Ithaca Journal editorial reflects on the recent arson at the Etna home of Ithaca Police officer Bryan Bangs:

This is not the Ithaca we have come to know and respect. A community where differences and frayed feelings, even over the fatal shooting Bangs was involved with in the line of duty, are dealt with peacefully and rationally. In Ithaca, we pride ourselves on disagreeing, sometimes vehemently, but relying on our intellect and our words, not an act of arson.

Back in 2007, Stan Marcus talked a lot about the Emerald Ash Borer during his campaign for Town Board. He was prescient - not only is the beetle on its way, but municipalities are going to have to deal with the many trees it will kill. Residents will too, as the infestation spreads - I have ash all through my back yard. Now it's in Steuben and Ulster Counties.

Habitat for Humanity needs volunteers to work on a house in the Village of Dryden.

I'd thought that the latest NYSEG rate increase proposals had been scaled back, but this doesn't feel very scaled back. An extra $17 a month is a big chunk of my NYSEG bill.

A corridor of lumpy sprawl

When I first looked over the new draft of the proposed zoning law, I expected not to love the hamlet zoning. The response to the Lucente proposal had been much more eager than I was happy about, and I wasn't surprised to see higher densities creep in there.

I was startled, though, to find that commercial zones looked a lot like the densified hamlet zones, and that they'd spread far more widely across the Town - a band along 13 even to the northeast of the Village of Dryden, with odd freckles of commercial zoning between the villages of Dryden and Freeville.

The 2005 Comprehensive Plan suggested a possible overlay zone on Route 13 to accomodate the complicated and problematic mix of uses that had developed there. The Route 13/366 Corridor study suggested avoiding further growth along 13, instead concentrating new housing in the Village of Dryden, Varna, and a possible "new node" at NYSEG. The current plan says what the heck and encourages denser mixed use across all of those areas, plus further to the northeast along 13.

If it's put in the right place, higher density housing is a great idea. Increasing density is what makes cities vibrant, makes transit systems possible, allows more efficient use of resources, and, done right, makes it easier for all kinds of people to live together while finding the opportunities that excite them.

If it's put in the wrong place, higher density housing creates isolated commuter communities without a whole lot to offer their residents. Water and sewer and a bus stop are basic foundations, not cause for rejoicing. Coming home to a townhouse in a neighborhood with shops and parks and schools and bars can be very exciting. Coming home to a townhouse that has nothing around except other townhouses and maybe a commercial strip is still coming home - but it has few of those shared advantages.

The good news is that densities of more than one unit per acre (and less than ten) can't happen until water and sewer lines reach an area. The bad news is that lots of these places are not too far from those lines, often closer than Etna, which had frequently been marked for future development.

I thought I'd found some really scary news last night while sitting at the public meeting, because there's a difference between the ways structures are regulated in hamlet zones and commercial zones. I added that to my comments. I was wrong about that, however - multi-family dwellings of any kind still require a special use permit. (I've written the comments email address to let them know.)

Development pressure had seemed fairly slow lately until this year, when developer after developer in Tompkins County seems to be putting new plans forward. The current zoning draft could have been an opportunity to ensure that development proceeds smoothly in Dryden. Instead, it's become more of an invitation for developers to build isolated clusters that complicate traffic patterns, offer their residents few amenities, and will become ever more isolated should gas prices rise. I'm not really sure why the Town wants to encourage such patterns of development well beyond the "nodes" it keeps discussing.

Not much support for current zoning draft at public meeting

Last night's public meeting on the new draft of the zoning law was pretty different from the meetings (1 2) on the earlier draft. While the earlier meetings had included a fair number of "we need this zoning" and "I could almost support this" kinds of comments, last night's comments were almost universally of the "too much here is wrong" variety.

Part of the crowd at zoning meeting.

Jim Crawford (the Dryden Republican Committee Chair) seemed to sum up the state of the meeting best, telling the Planning Board:

"Devote yourselves to Varna, because I think the rest of the Town needs some more time on this."

I'd estimate that about three-quarters of the comments were either from Varna residents asking for more precise zoning or from people asking for far less zoning. While there's an argument that making both sides annoyed is a good sign of compromise, that really didn't seem to operate last night. Many of the folks talking about the law being too restrictive also seemed supportive of taking a closer look at Varna, and the Varna residents didn't call for a rush to pass the current zoning either.

Art Berkey, Jim Skaley, Mike Richardson, Melissa Amodei, and Jan Morgan all spoke in support of more precise zoning in Varna than the current goldenrod blob, mostly citing the recent detailed proposal. Amodei brought up the challenges of getting bank financing for business in a zone whose uses weren't clear, a concern that also echoed through later discussion about shared driveways. Jan Morgan suggested that the board take a close look at what causes problems in Varna:

"Some people seem to think of Varna as a problem that needs to be fixed. Varna is not a problem. The road that goes through Varna is a problem that needs to be fixed."

Environmental Planner Dan Kwasnowski mentioned the possibility of further study in Varna, which was received pretty enthusiastically but with the difficult question of "when".

Art Berkey speaks for the Varna Community Association.

Two of us spoke about the problems of the expanded map and uses of the commercial zones. I'll write mine up in my next post (and I was wrong about one piece of it). Vladimir Dragin (of the amazing Book Barn of the Finger Lakes) asked hard questions about why exactly it makes sense to extend commercial districts along Route 13 in an area the Town's been working hard to protect by purchasing development rights. He also pointed out potential traffic issues that could be created by connecting 13 to North Road through driveways.

Deb Shigley asked about the Workshop/Garage question I'd also had, and I'm happy to report that the answers were all of the "we meant to fix that earlier and we'll make sure it gets fixed" variety. She also asked about seemingly contradictory parking rules around paving, pointing out that the definitions section of the document needs work.

Nancy Munkenbeck suggested easing the limitations on what you can do in Rural Residential districts, a list I think I need to go through in much greater detail. In particular, I liked her bringing up churches that are no longer in use and how these prohibitions would make it really difficult to reuse them for anything other than housing.

There were a lot of broad comments about zoning taking away freedom, one of which ended with a threat:

"I'm not a developer, and I think our freedoms are being infringed upon here, okay? You guys want to have control, control, control, go someplace else and live, all right? This is the United States. I understand why we've gotta have some sort of coordination, but I'm sorry - don't tell me what I'm going to do with my land. [...applause...] And if you come to tell me that you're going to do something to me, you're going to find a body laying at the end of my driveway."

That did not go over well.

There were lots of questions about conservation subdivision, and many doubts about how restrictive the process would be. I have to admit that I've still not really figured out how it works, and I'm not sure that last night really helped me with that. On the one hand, it seems designed to minimize the amount of development in sensitive areas; on the other hand, conservation subdivision was mentioned as an optional way to get units into a plot in the Rural Residential and Rural Agricultural zones. I'm left wishing the Planning Board had followed earlier proposals to sort out the subdivision work first before tackling zoning as a whole, though I know they're intertwined.

David Bravo-Cullen asked if Section 500 of the law, which states:

Uses which are not explicitly permitted are prohibited,

could be reversed, allowing uses that aren't prohibited. I'm not sure that works in New York State, but that clause has been used before in Dryden (though not tested in court) with regard to Cornell's plans for a wind farm on Mount Pleasant. (The Town later passed an ordinance allowing residential-scale windmills.)

Bruno Schickel, who had written a piece opposing the earlier proposed zoning, continued his press on the zoning proposal as too restrictive. He was the only person I heard call for increasing density in Varna beyond the recent increases, but he also had lots of questions about the general drift of the law, conservation subdivisions, and the process.

The Planning Board will discuss passing the draft law to the Town Board at their meeting next Thursday, the 29th. Town Supervisor Mary Ann Sumner said that she "would love to wrap it up by the end of the year", a prospect I don't think most of the audience was enthusiastic about. There will be at least one more public hearing on the law.

I'm sure I'll disagree with Jim Crawford about the details of zoning when we finally get there, but for now, I think he's right. Slow down, and focus on getting the part of the Town that wants detailed zoning right. Zoning is supposed to last for decades, and though it can be amended, the kinds of questions asked last night raise hard questions about the overall approach, not just the nits.

Update: I've posted my imperfect recording of the meeting (37.6MB QuickTime). The first hour is mostly the presentation by Environmental Planner Dan Kwasnowski and consultant Mike Behan. I think it's comprehensible without their slides. Public comments start around 1:04 into the recording. The whole thing is about two hours and forty minutes.

Zoning meeting tonight, 7pm

You can see the new draft zoning proposals on the Town website, and there will be a meeting to discuss them this tonight, July 22nd, at 7:00pm at the Dryden Town Hall, 93 East Main Street (Route 392), in Dryden.

This is likely the last opportunity for public comment before the Planning Board. Future steps will be with the Town Board, likely in a more formal setting.

Zoning map change here - OTNDOs

Update: Per Dan's comment below, a new map has arrived (PDF version). The OTNDOs appear to be the Etna hamlet core and some areas east and south of the Village of Dryden. The McLean area doesn't have it marked, and neither do most other areas that were previously marked.

I wondered earlier what was up with the text of the draft talking about Optional Traditional Neighborhood Development Overlay Districts (OTNDO) as if they were on the map, but the map not showing them. I wrote the Town to find out, and apparently they are supposed to be on the map.

If you're thinking "I'm in rural residential, and most of this doesn't apply to me", you may want to wait and see the next release of the map. Of course, even though OTNDO districts might be on the map, they're only fully functional in areas with water districts.

I'll update this as soon as I see an updated map on the Town site.

A different approach to zoning Varna

While I've been marveling at the awfulness of the broad hamlet zoning proposed in the second draft of the law, Jim Skaley's been developing a proposal that does more than say "revert back to the first draft."

Skaley saw the huge undifferentiated splotch of hamlet zoning as something that could be improved upon.

Undifferentiated hamlet zoning - a big blob of goldenrod color.

He knew from his previous planning experiences that it's possible to zone hamlets much more precisely, and spoke at the July 7th Varna discussion of other hamlets that have gone that route, including Cheshire, in the Town of Canandaigua (19.3MB PDF), Jamesville, in the Town of DeWitt, and the Town of Wilton (725KB PDF), over in Saratoga County.

Building on the Varna 20-20 discussions and through conversations with lots of Varna residents, Skaley created a much more detailed map and plan for the hamlet.

An alternate approach to zoning Varna. (Click for 471KB PDF with more detail)

This seems like a vast improvement on both the original draft of the zoning and the revised draft to me. I do have one minor doubt, most notably the discussion of the road, and I'd exclude fewer Cornell properties from development. Overall, though this feels like it actually describes a functioning hamlet and not just a "we hope something happens here" scenario. There's power in those details that could help Varna tremendously.

He's sent this to the Planning Board, and I hope they'll take it seriously.

Here's the full text of the plan:

Many changes to the hamlet and commercial zoning

In an earlier post, I wrote that:

• The hamlet zoning density blasted up from a little over four to as much as ten units per acre, while still specifying, well, little vision for what a hamlet should look like. They also pulled the hamlet designation from Etna and McLean, leaving it only in Varna. Perhaps they knew the new version wouldn't make Etna or McLean residents excited supporters of either the zoning or future water and sewer infrastructure.

• The commercial zoning now supports residential densities cranked up much like those proposed for hamlets, and I'm not sure that's really what most people had in mind when commercial zones were discussed earlier. There's mixed use, and then there's apartment complexes. They're not the same thing.

The details of these are specified in a couple of tables. Originally, it was all in Section 600, which for Hamlet and Commercial zones looked like:

There are 43,560 square feet in an acre, so this meant about 4.356 units/acre as a limit for both of these zones. The way to get more density than that would be through the "Optional Traditional Neighborhood Development Overlay District (OTNDO)" described in Section 801, which allowed up to 6 units/acre. The configuration of those units was nicely specified:

Within the overall residential density figures in this overlay zone, new construction is to be predominantly single-family detached residential on a variety of compact village/hamlet-scale lot sizes, which should range in area from 6,000 sq. ft. to 12,000 sq. ft. with an average lot size of 10,000 sq. ft. Up to 40% of new units may be in two-family or multiple-family dwellings. When two-family or multi-family dwellings are proposed, they shall be integrated architecturally and in scale so that they can be physically incorporated within the same streetscape as single-family dwellings, and not isolated from each other in separate areas.(38)

That sounds to me like a good recipe for building hamlets. I actually thought six units too low for an overlay district, and wrote the board to reconsider how they use those, but instead they seem to have changed the hamlet and commercial zone rules to crank up the density without providing that kind of vision. The table in Section 600 of the new draft looks like:

Sections 605 and 606, which cover areas with water and sewer, are very similar tables, which I've combined below for easy comparison.

It's hard to know where to begin, because so much has changed from "4.35 units per acre". The limits "per building" don't seem likely to accomplish much, but I'm guessing it's a way of nodding in the direction of the "multiunit developments should be limited to a maximum of 20 units" of the Comprehensive Plan without actually doing anything about it. They also sometimes recommend the use of PUD - Planned Unit Development Districts, §1000 of the draft - without requiring them.

The rest of it pretty much creates open season for larger denser development than currently exists in most of the Town, even in places where water and sewer are available. Granting these uses by right Explicitly allowing these uses means that the only real fallback against gigantic poorly-planned projects comes from the Special Use Permit process:

§501 In the H District any use that includes a structure or structures larger than 10,000 sf requires a Special Use Permit. In the CC and LIO Districts, any use that includes a structure larger than 20,000 sf requires a Special Use Permit. Agricultural structures directly related to an agricultural use shall be exempt from such size limits.

Giant uses (update: and more generally multi-family dwellings) still need a special permit, but they start on much firmer ground than they would have if the Town had, say, reserved the OTNDO for rezoning requests to create denser areas. (I'm a little surprised, given the doubling in density allowed in the Hamlet and Commercial zones, that OTNDO has stayed at a mere six units.)

There are also lots of map changes, expanding the commercial zone and shrinking the hamlet zone to a smaller piece of Varna.

(Note that there is a separate zone for Light Industrial/Office, mostly along Route 13 from the 13/366 overlap and west.)

My cynical side wonders if the higher densities in the hamlet are an effort to negotiate with Stephen Lucente over his Varna project's density. He wants 16, existing zoning permits 14.5, and this would allow him 10, plus a much more leisurely application process. I'm guessing that's not it, though. Building such negotiations into the zoning code is a bad idea, and it doesn't sound like a density Lucente is interested in. It does feel, unfortunately, like the Planning Board felt prodded to crank up the density after that proposal arrived.

Overall, this draft offers developers lots of opportunities to build higher density in places where residents won't have a whole lot of activity immediately available, along roads that already feel congested. Though it may derive from "nodal development" ideas, it looks a lot more like "lumpy sprawl".

Hamlet and commercial zone map changes

I was writing a larger piece about the changes to the hamlet and commercial zones in the latest release of the proposed Town of Dryden zoning law, but I realized that the map changes are big enough to be worth noting by themselves. The commercial zones have grown, while the hamlet zones have shrunk.

The hamlet zone is now just Varna - which I guess makes it harder to rally opposition to these changes from Etna and McLean. It also no longer includes most of the properties along Turkey Hill Road.

I think all the changes to the commercial zone map are expansions. Going roughly southwest to northeast:

• The commercial zone at the 13/366 intersection has expanded significantly westward, from the Orchid Place, to around 1230 Dryden Road, including Cornell Plantations land.

• The commercial zone on Johnson Road expanded to its north almost to the Village of Freeville.

• There are small new spots of commercial zoning north of 13 along the Village of Dryden's western boundary, as well as on 38 just west of the Village of Dryden.

• A big chunk of land to the north and east of the Village of Dryden along Route 13 that had been marked Rural Residential is now marked commercial as well.

These are not small changes. I definitely encourage everyone to look at the latest map.

Update: A new map has arrived (PDF version). It doesn't appear to change the commercial zones, but I realize I missed some small spots on Route 38 north of Freeville. There definitely is some "spot zoning" in this document.

Zoning meeting Thursday night, 7pm

You can see the new draft zoning proposals on the Town website, and there will be a meeting to discuss them this Thursday, July 22nd, at 7:00pm at the Dryden Town Hall, 93 East Main Street (Route 392), in Dryden.

If there's a conversation that may determine the future of the Town for the next few decades, this is it.

(No, I don't like the zoning proposed.)

Varna 20-20

Varna residents came together a few times over the last few weeks to outline a vision for the hamlet. This document is the result of the June 21st meeting, and was sent out to all participants. It's a worthy addition to the library of Varna planning.

New Varna II news in "two to three weeks"

This morning's Journal finally notices the Varna development conversations of the last few months. The biggest news in it is that there's a possible date by which we might learn something new about the evolving proposal. Well, not exactly a date, but:

"I expect a lot more to be coming out in the next two to three weeks," Fabbroni said. "People will really see how impressive the project is and how it will breathe new life into Varna."

The Journal doesn't mention the questions at the July 7th meeting about how Lucente's general lack of management of his existing Varna properties keeps new life in Varna down, but that does come up in the Tompkins Weekly article (4.8 MB PDF) on the meeting.

We'll see what they come up with.

Also in the Journal today:

• State Senator Seward filed re-election petitions. So far as I know, he has no opponents.

• TC3 will be holding a blood drive next Wednesday, the 28th.

• Just across the town line, Hanshaw Road residents are considering legal action against the County over the expansion of Hanshaw Road. I have to say that reading the whole article raises lots of doubts for me about the wisdom of the County and the State - I'm not really sure why they're so excited about widening roads in places that already have speed problems.

Apologies - CAPTCHAs arrive

After seven years, the spam comments on this site have completely overwhelmed me. I've kept up with good comments (I hope) through email, but I still have 13500+ spam comments to delete from the web interface (a hundred at a time!), and that's only about a month's worth. I dislike CAPTCHAs, those odd shaded "type in these characters to leave a comment" thing - they're ugly, they're inaccessible to a lot of readers, and they're generally a pain in the neck. They don't stop all spam, either, though they seem to cut the volume down a lot.

I have a bit of reformatting to do, but eventually it should look okay. For now, I just need this to work!

We've had a few good conversations break out here over the past few months, and hopefully this will make it easier for me to encourage them. If you have difficulties, please contact me at simonstl at simonstl dot com.

Ellis Hollow Road Construction meeting tonight, 7pm

The Tompkins County Highway Department will be hosting a meeting on the rebuilding of Ellis Hollow Road tonight at 7:00pm at the Ellis Hollow Community Center on Genung Road.

I thought I'd posted this earlier, but apparently not - sorry for the late notice!

Past planning in Varna

I just had a very strange conversation that started with a complaint that Varna residents hadn't spent enough time discussing the future of the hamlet. That shocked me almost as much as someone else's claim that dense development was what the Comprehensive Plan recommended for the area.

Since I arrived here in 1999, I've seen Varna residents hard at work in conversations about:

• The 1999 Varna Community and Commercial Revitalization Plan, done as part of a county grant, substantial pieces of which have been realized.

• The 2005 Town of Dryden Comprehensive Plan, which was a much longer conversation over many years and meetings.

• The Route 13/366 Corridor Study, a county-sponsored nodal-development-promoting project in 2007.

• The Cornell-sponsored Transportation-focused Generic Environmental Impact Statement, which was much broader in scope but certainly received lots of Varna input and participation.

• Recent zoning proposals, which seemed to reflect resident preferences up until about the last draft.

I can't say those projects were all of equal value, but there's certainly been no shortage of conversation. I've also heard enough stories from Varna folks about the earlier 1968 Town Comprehensive Plan, the earlier zoning, and various issues around mobile home development to feel certain that these conversations were going on long before I got here. For an unincorporated place with no way to enforce its decisions, it's a huge amount of ongoing conversation.

Update: Just for completeness, I should note the two most recent Varna planning results: the Varna 20-20 summary and the proposed alternate zoning.

So how did we get to "nodal development"?

If putting dense-ish semi-suburban developments outside of cities is a bad idea, and creating them requires deeply disruptive cataclysmic change, how did we come to a point where nodal development seems like a great idea to mostly well-intentioned people in positions of power? (Here, anyway?)

I don't have a simple history, but working up to it from the other direction, the story seems to go like this:

1. New Urbanists decried sprawl as bad, listing in detail the many ways it wastes resources and produces a landscape that limits people's interests in looking beyond the boundaries of their own little piece. (For the most part, I agree with their analysis, just not with some of their founder's crazier recent statements.)

2. Upstate New York suffers from an especially strong version of sprawl, in which there isn't much population growth but residents abandon cities for the suburbs. The wasted infrastructures costs of this are especially dire. Rolf Pendall of Cornell's Department of City and Regional Planning wrote a classic Brookings paper on how this looks in Upstate.

3. Gas and road maintenance prices have spiked recently, and there's cause for concern that they'll continue to climb in the long term. This makes scattered housing more expensive both for its residents and for local government.

4. No one has the tools to force density back into the City of Ithaca. County Planning has no land-use authority. The City can promote itself, but promotion alone hasn't kept Tompkins County residents in its urban core.

5. The proposed answer to higher gas prices is more public transit. The old trolley system (and the old rail lines) can't be an option, though, as there isn't enough density even in the City to support them. Instead, the answer is buses. I keep hearing that buses need concentrated densities of 16 dwellings/acre are necessary to make transit generally profitable.

6. 16 dwellings per acre simply isn't generally going to happen when houses are built gradually by people making their own choices about what to create. Outside of Ecovillage, which is dense clusters surrounded by countryside, even the idea of shared walls and duplexes makes a property more a specialty item.

7. The kinds of density needed to support transit are only possible in areas with water and sewer systems, for public healty reasons. Those tend to be in places that had sufficient density already to make installing them a worthwhile investment, so those become candidates for 'nodes'.

8. By expanding the 'node' story beyond the City of Ithaca and the villages, County Planning can say to the rural towns that this isn't a plot to constrain their growth and their tax base - it's an opportunity for them to grow.

9. Because of the nature of the density proposed, these kinds of developments aren't going to be built by homeowners or even likely small builders. They'll be larger projects, centrally managed and financed.

This leads to things like the Route 13/366 Corridor Study. I remember asking a well-intentioned person why anyone would want to live in the proposed node along the Route 13/366 overlap, suggesting that it wouldn't ever get built. The response was "well, if we can find someone to take on a really big project..." For all that change, we'd see a grand total of maybe a 10% reduction in gasoline use.

Somehow, I don't think these proposals solve that problem well enough to cover the costs of the additional problems they create.

Gradual Money and Cataclysmic Money

While most of the rest of Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities is indeed about cities, there's another factor she discusses in urban contexts that also fits in suburban contexts. Money - both the lack and the surplus of it - causes problems:

Money has its limitations. It cannot buy inherent success... where the conditions for inherent success are lacking and where the use of the money fails to supply them. Furthermore, money can only do ultimate harm where it destroys the conditions needed for inherent success. On the other hand, by helping to supply the requirements needed, money can help build inherent success... Indeed, it is indispensable.

For these reasons, money is a powerful force both for ... decline and for ... regeneration. But it must be understood that it is not the mere availability of money, but how it isavailable, and for what, that is important. (292).

She describes three kinds of funding - conventional bank loans, government money, and "shadow money", which I think is similar to today's hard money. The details of all of these things have changed since 1961, fortunately - redlining is over, banks have to invest in the communities of their depositors, and the era of gigantic urban renewal projects seems to have ended. Nonetheless, while broader mortgage lending and home equity loans have made more incremental change easier, much construction still takes place at the scale she described as "cataclysmic":

Cataclysmic money pours into an area in concentrated form, producing drastic changes. As an obverse of this behavior, cataclysmic money sends relatively few trickles into localities not treated to cataclysm.

...these three kinds of money behave not like irrigation systems, bringing life-giving streams to feed steady, continual growth. Instead, they behave like manifestations of malevolent climates beyond the control of man - affording either searing droughts or torrential, eroding floods. (293)

Since Jacobs' day, gradual money has become easier to get, even the subject of odd frenzy and collapse as financiers realized there were profits to be made manipulating that market. The challenge of cataclysms hasn't gone away, though. Cataclysmic development on greenfield areas produces less obvious disruption if only because there's less to disrupt, but most houses in the United States are still built in developments, not one by one. Tompkins County has had relatively less of that, perhaps because we haven't grown very rapidly, but lately more and more people seem to be waking up and looking out their house and car windows to cataclysms in the making.