Sprawl Antidote

Opposing sprawl can be a lot like opposing winter, which is also costly, difficult environmentally and contributes to various human maladies. But winter arrives anyway, and would even if regulations were passed against it. As Maine’s first Smart Growth Summit convenes in Augusta today to consider ways to battle sprawl, its attendees might recall winter, against which it is pointless to curse but with effects that are possible to manage.

Sprawl is spread-out, car-dependent growth beyond city downtowns or town centers that represents blight to some people and a chance at a dream home to others. Many others, actually. Sprawl is hard on forests and farmland but it is also Maine’s greatest selling point: People don’t come here for the state’s urban excitement. To the extent they come at all, a substantial number arrive to find a little elbow room, woods out their back door and privacy in abundance. Sprawl, to them, is what someone else commits.

The consequences of these natural desires are easy to assess: miles of sparsely settled roads to maintain, schools popping up even when existing ones in town are below capacity, long school bus trips, costly electric utility infrastructure, etc. Over the years, hopeful (city) lawmakers have raised the issue of perhaps having some of these costs borne more by those using them than spread among all and have wilted under the retort of their rural lawmaking brethren. Elbow room is good; subsidized elbow room is even better.

Regulation is one way to try to stop sprawl; taxation is another. (Cut prop-erty taxes in half statewide; institute a revenue-neutral income tax to be returned to where the money was earned. Prepare for an explosion of protest from rural areas.) Both will find lots of resistance and generate a constant need to defend the policies.

Another way to persuade people to stay in town is to make the towns more attractive. There are blueprints aplenty for doing this: reducing traffic in city neighborhoods, providing open space, making main streets more attractive, trumpeting their convenience, safety and falling taxes. The National Endowment for the Arts has for 20 years offered The Mayor’s Institute on City Design, which helps communities solve specific problems in their cities and which a half dozen Maine city councilors have attended.

Many of them also attended the governor’s conference on the creative economy in Lewiston last spring, where they heard John Barrett III, the mayor of North Adams, Mass., talk about his town’s successful transformation from a dying mill town to an active, arts-centered city. His simple advice was, “Think pretty.”

Everything a town does should be done with an eye toward making the place more attractive, more inviting, he said. The local Wal-Mart was built with dormer windows and was repainted five times to get the right New England color. Even before the major rebuilding of the town, a supermarket with a western theme wanted to build, but was told either to change the way the supermarket looked so that it blended with the region or build somewhere else. The supermarket was redesigned.

Here is an easy exercise to demonstrate the importance of seemingly minor anecdotes like these. Go to home Web pages of Maine cities – say, Bangor and South Portland, which both have major malls and strip development. Look for pictures of these developments. You won’t find them because city officials know they will not attract people to live in their communities.

There’s no reason anti-sprawl groups should assume differently, but as long as cities allow for unattractive growth in a highly mobile culture, people will choose to live elsewhere.

Compared with stopping sprawl in those conditions, stopping winter would be easier.