Weary of Runaway Growth, Cape Cod Voters Put on the Brakes : Development: In downtown Hyannis, the landscape has changed dramatically. One resident calls it a ‘pigpen.’ A commission has been formed to try to protect the small-town charm.

You can still drive to the corner of Irving and Scudder avenues in Hyannis Port and peek down at the white-shingled Kennedy compound, nestled on rolling green lawns overlooking the broad expanse of Lewis Bay.

The neighborhood of large, stately summer homes, which includes a tiny red post office and a weathered dock at the end of the street, looks almost exactly as it did the summer before John F. Kennedy was elected President 30 years ago.

But less than two miles away in downtown Hyannis, the landscape has changed dramatically--and not necessarily for the better. As a result, Cape Cod residents have approved a sweeping new measure that they hope will curb helter-skelter growth and restore some of the area’s rural charm.

“It’s a pigpen here,” says Alexander Theroux, a Yale professor and writer who has lived in West Barnstable since 1974. “When I moved here, it was a lovely place.”

Route 132, once a pastoral road linking Hyannis with the rest of Cape Cod, is now a dizzying strip of fast-food restaurants, billboards and shopping malls. Construction is almost complete on the enormous, and controversial, Christmas Tree Plaza. Traffic is often backed up for miles.

Elsewhere on the cape, a flat, sandy peninsula attached to mainland Massachusetts by two bridges spanning the Cape Cod Canal, signs of trouble are everywhere:

Contaminated shellfish beds. Ponds tainted by acid rain. Overflowing dumps. Ground-water pollution.

The intersection at one corner in Harwich is called the “Dust Bowl” by locals because of the swirling dust kicked up by a 24-acre construction site for an office and shopping center that has been stripped bare for two years.

“I miss the tranquility and independence that used to be out here,” says Jack Smith, 65, the owner of Jack’s Outback restaurant in Yarmouth and a 50-year resident of the cape. “I miss dirt roads and I miss pulling out onto Main Street knowing there wouldn’t be anyone coming in either direction.”

The population on the cape, a 67-mile strip that runs from near Plymouth out to Provincetown, has swollen in the last two decades. In 1960, the oldest town on the cape, Sandwich, had 2,000 residents; now it numbers 16,000 and is still growing.

Many Cape Cod residents, weary of the mini-golf outlets and Kandy Korner shops that have sprung up to accommodate the influx of tourists, have decided it’s time to take action.

In March, they approved the Cape Cod Commission Act, which resulted in the formation of a county commission to regulate development on a regional basis. Up until now, the 15 towns that compose the cape have overseen development on an individual basis.

The 19-member land use and planning commission is designed to control developments that will affect the region and protect critical natural and man-made resources.

The commission is not unlike other regional and statewide planning agencies around the country. The Adirondacks State Park in New York, Lake Tahoe, Pine Barrens, N.J., and Martha’s Vineyard island off Cape Cod are areas with similar policies. The California Coastal Commission regulates coastal development along the coast. The Cape Cod Commission also borrowed heavily from Florida’s statewide land-use policy.

Proponents hope that the roughly 70,000 acres of developable land left on Cape Cod will be more stringently monitored.

“People said we’re sick of growth and development and we’re sick of the dismantling of Cape Cod,” says Susan Nickerson, executive director of the Assn. for the Preservation of Cape Cod, formed in 1968 when residents became alarmed over a proposal to cut a waterway into Nauset Marsh for oil tankers.

Some of the statistics compiled by the group:

* Cape Cod’s population growth is 10 times the state average.

* The number of housing units on the cape has doubled in the last 20 years.

* More open space was lost on the cape during the 1980s than any other region in the state.

* The average home price on the cape has tripled just in the last decade.

* About 6,000 acres of shellfish beds remain closed, an eightfold increase in just eight years.

Most of those statistic apply to the so-called upper cape, the communities around Hyannis and to the west. The lower cape, which is the farthest from the mainland and includes more rural areas such as Truro and the art colony of Provincetown, has escaped what one environmental activist called the “schlock” of the upper cape.

“It’s a special place,” says Nickerson, a lifelong Cape Cod resident. “It shouldn’t be turned into Long Island.”

But real estate developers disagree. They contend that the Cape Cod Commission will drive up prices for single-family homes and hamper the right of landowners to develop their properties.

“The cape thrives on the building business,” says Nick Franco, a Cape Cod developer for 17 years who has projects in Hyannis and Marstons Mills. “The sad part is that there is a very little supply of land. When you take that supply away from developers, there will be a lot fewer homes and they’ll be a lot more expensive. A lot of the working people will have to leave Cape Cod.”

But Franco says it’s a “misconception” that all developers opposed the commission. He voted for the commission, he says, because he knew he would profit from the sudden crackdown on development.

“Land is becoming dearer because of this,” Franco says. “The day after the vote, every one of my lots became worth 15% more.”

Environmentalists, including former U.S. Sen. Paul Tsongas, who has a home on the cape, dismisses claims that housing will become too expensive, saying the real mission is to preserve the quality of life on the cape.

“Left unchecked Cape Cod would lose its character,” says Tsongas, who chaired a committee that recommended a moratorium on building on the cape. “It’s one of the few places in the country that really have a separate identity. The concern was that Cape Cod was beginning to look like everything else.”