It's been nearly a month since I last posted pieces of the 1968 General Plan for Dryden, the never-adopted but highly informative complement to the current Draft Comprehensive Plan.
The newer plan notes:
Residential development, excluding residential development within the two villages, accounts for about 3,150 acres of land, or about 5.2 percent of the total land area in the town. Approximately 90% of dwellings existing in the year 2000 were singlefamily homes. According to the 2000 Census approximately 64% of all dwellings in the town were owner-occupied, compared to 51% for Tompkins County as a whole....
Hence the large majority of new homes built in the town of Dryden since 1960 have been built outside traditional centers of population. Comparison of the 1968 Dryden General Plan indicates that much of the development has occurred in the Ellis Hollow/Snyder Hill area, Yellow Barn/Ferguson Road area and south of Dryden village. (Map 2-5 [286KB PDF]) In addition the number of homes in the area of the town west of Caswell Road and north of Etna Road has grown from approximately 175 in 1968 to approximately 430 today, or an increase of 255 homes.
In 1966, according to the tables that conclude the land use section of the plan, residential use occupied 2.4% of the Town of Dryden's land outside of the villages. The tables are available in PDF (29KB PDF), plain text (2KB TXT), or rich text format (28KB RTF).
Looking ahead in the 1968 plan, they give the 1965 population of the town outside of the villages as 6382. The 2000 population outside the villages was 11016. That leads to a 72% increase in population since this survey was done, while residential land use increased 116%.
While Dryden is growing more than much of upstate New York, which seems to be facing sprawl without growth, Dryden's land use appears to have been outpacing its population growth.
Posted by simon at March 1, 2005 8:12 AM in history , planning and zoning