Scarborough has long been a community that lacks a center. Instead, it’s made up of small clusters – Higgins Beach, Prouts Neck, Pine Point, Dunstan, Oak Hill, Pleasant Hill.

While each of those distinct communities is part of the character of this town, planners and business owners have pined in recent years for some sort of center for commerce and community life – something akin to a traditional downtown.

That’s what makes a proposal an architect presented to the Planning Board this week so appealing. The owner of the Oak Hill Plaza wants to expand onto 20 adjacent acres along Route 114, nearly doubling the size.

The new portion of the development would include two- and three-story buildings with a mix of retail stores, offices and residential housing. The owner would also redevelop the existing portion of the Oak Hill Plaza. Part of the objective would be to create a commercial center that was designed as much for walkers as it is for drivers, with walkways and small parks throughout.

The plan presented to the board Monday night was an early conceptual plan the developers put together to see whether it was a plan the community could support. It will likely be years before they get the necessary approval to go forward with the project. The expansion would have to be built on wetlands that would require mitigation – creating wetlands elsewhere.

By the time this project is built, it’s hard to know what other developments will be as big or bigger than Oak Hill Plaza. Haigis Parkway? Dunstan? Oak Hill, however, makes an ideal center of town, with the high school, town hall, the library, the police department, a Hannaford grocery store, banks and other Oak Hill businesses all clustered in one place. (Full disclosure: the Current’s office is also located in Oak Hill.)

The only thing it lacks is more housing and more ways to walk between everything. Although it wouldn’t solve the problem of pedestrian crossing of Routes 1 and 114, this project would improve both of those problems. It would be good for the businesses there and it would be good for the community to have a true center. That’s why the town should support this project.

Gated neighborhood

Imagine driving through a residential neighborhood in Cape Elizabeth and running into a gate crossing the road. It would seem strange wouldn’t it?

Well, that’s exactly what the Cape Elizabeth Planning Board is prepared to do to appease neighbors opposed to the Spurwink Woods housing development.

These neighbors have legitimate concerns about the effect this new housing development will have on their neighborhood. Nobody wants more traffic coming down their road. People move to quiet, dead-end roads to enjoy a little suburban solitude and raise a family.

Despite that, putting a gate across a road to stop traffic is absurd. Why even build a road in the first place? Imagine if communities everywhere were to start putting up gates across the road to keep cars to their designated neighborhoods. We’d all be navigating a labyrinth of gates and dead-ends.

That might be preferable to some of the people living in those dead-end neighborhoods, but it wouldn’t be sound community planning. If the concern is safety, planners can design roads that force cars to travel slowly. Putting a gate across a road is simply a bad idea.

Brendan Moran, editor