George Frantz wrote:
"There is plenty of land available in the Town of Ithaca
outside stream corridors and wetland areas that is both
suitable for development and has access to public water and
sewer infrastructure. There is great potential for the
development of affordable, walkable, bikeable, environmentally
sustainable and diverse neighborhoods in a number of locations
throughout the Town.
That is not going to happen, though, because all but a tiny
percentage of the land available for development in the Town of
Ithaca is zoned for minimum lot sizes of 15,000 square feet or
30,000 square feet."
The reason that much of the Town is zoned for large lots is to
encourage agriculture and thus enable the local production of
food. And this is why those same large lots (down to about 2/3 of
an acre -- I'm skipping over a lot of details here) are
specifically zoned to allow keeping most kinds of farm animals and
the structures needed to house them.
The attitude that would convert our remaining open space to
housing is the one that believes that food should come from
gigantic factories located Somewhere Else and brought to us by
unending supplies of cheap fuel. The conditions that made this
briefly possible are about to come to the end of the line, and
when that happens, we're going to need to have available every
square foot of arable land in the Town.
The right place for "the development of affordable, walkable,
bikeable, environmentally sustainable and diverse neighborhoods"
is in the settlements we already have in Tompkins County -- the
City of Ithaca, the villages of Trumansburg, Jacksonville, Dryden,
Freeville, Lansing, Groton, and Cayuga Heights, and hamlets such
as Etna, Varna, McLean, Peruville, Newfield, Enfield Center,
Danby, West Danby, Brooktondale, and Slaterville Springs. These
places have plenty of capacity, and in many cases the enonomic
need, for more residents. It's also possible for other reasons,
chiefly traffic flow optimization, that we might want to create
new nodes at Cayuga Medical Center and across from EcoVillage; but
generally speaking, the best way to achieve walkability and
sustainability in the County is to increase the density of
existing urban areas, not spread suburban living across already
threatened open spaces. (I thought from previous posts that
increasing urban density was George's position, so I'm puzzled at
the tenor of his latest message.)
The problem with the open land in the Town of Ithaca is not that
it's open but rather that it's currently unproductive. I think
what we need in the Town of Ithaca is something like the Land
Co-op that's being developed in the Town of Danby, where owners of
parcels both large and small are forming a cooperative to harvest
scrubland, including land too poor to support anything but native
grasses, for conversion to biomass that can be sold (and is
already being sold) to coal-fired power plants in the region. The
proposed co-op is to include people who would simply allow
contractors to come in every year and harvest the biomass. This
is the kind of initiative we need in order to deal with the future
we face here -- not development that would permanently remove more
land from production.
Jon
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