Been to Conway, New Hampshire to enjoy nature lately? More likely you went to shop tax-free or to visit the state liquor store.

"Conway, NH is arguably the most dramatic example in New England of sprawl... Poor land use planning has led to uncontrolled sprawl development, which has harmed those very qualities of life and landscape that attracted people there to begin with. What was once a region treasured and sought for its extraordinary natural beauty--the White Mountains, Chocura, Cathedral Ledge--was transformed in a decade to a shopping mall mecca..." said John DeVillars, Regional Director of the Environmental Protection Agency, at last year's Eco/Eco Conference in Bar Harbor.

Sprawl is also easily recognized in towns like Falmouth and Scarborough where it has spread from adjacent Portland and South Portland.

While the aesthetic face of sprawl--strip malls, developments, parking lots--is most obvious, it is the furtive environmental face that is most troublesome for many: Sprawl adds pollution pressure to our waterways and to our air, and it forever changes delicate environmental balances by reducing and fragmenting wildlife habitat.

And there is much fragmentation. Sprawl, by its very nature, occurs piecemeal. It nickel-and-dimes the landscape, making it difficult to imagine the big picture--until the picture is developed. Windham Town Manager, Tony Plante, has said, "One house on one road is invisible. Nobody sees it. But 100 houses on 100 roads becomes a problem." He adds that Windham has been slow to react to the causes of sprawl, in part because it has been so incremental and spread so evenly across the town.

There is a strained face of sprawl: Windham Planning Administrator, George Dysio, says Windham has experienced growth of about 2500 to 3000 people in the past five years, and 150 new homes have already been approved this year. But, even before any new homes are built, Windham is already sorely lacking school classroom space at most grade levels, the number of town workers is insufficient, and public building space is inadequate.

In addition, at the current pace of over 100 new homes per year, at least 1000 new homes will be built in Windham over the next 10 years.

While portraits of sprawl include strip malls, housing developments, strained local services, and environmental degradation, there is another face--urban decay: As a city's more affluent residents leave for outlying towns, inner-city neighborhoods are often left struggling to maintain extensive infrastructure with a declining tax base and shrinking property values.

If the faces of sprawl are many, so are the causes. But, simply put, the marketplace favors sprawl; and governments encourage it.

On the demand side, sprawl is ingrained in the American dream. People want their several acre houselots for the privacy and closeness to nature they provide. They want what they perceive as a slower pace, cleaner air, better schools, lower taxes, and less traffic. It allows them to escape crime, noise, and landlords.

Supply is there to feed that demand. While land is relatively expensive in places like Falmouth and Scarborough, it is more affordable in the Lakes Region. In Windham, as in the other region towns, there are tracts of undeveloped land available for housing. The town is within easy commuting distance to employment centers, and it has a convenient commercial center of its own. Adding to supply, developers often offer top dollar for farmland, tempting farmers to sell their land for subdivisions.

While marketplace forces of supply and demand are at work, our governments are encouraging, even financing, sprawl. Policies, such as the state's transportation and education funding formulas, reward rural and suburban communities for population growth while they penalize cities. Those policies, developed when urban areas were centers of wealth and rural areas were poor, encourage city residents to relocate to outlying communities.

Other factors, such as a national policy of cheap fuel, and technological innovations that allow instant communication, allow many of us to live increasing distances from our sources of livelihood.

While individuals may find sprawl attractive because of the lifestyle it implies, collectively the resulting faces of sprawl can be ugly.

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