Archives
Welcome to the archives of Better Cities & Towns, a publication founded by Robert Steuteville as New Urban News in 1996. This archive holds two decades of the best news and analysis on compact, mixed-use growth and development, from 1996 to 2015.
Photo caption 1: DPZ Town Planning Director Gahlina Tahchieva leads an open-source session on suburban retrofits at CNU XVI.
Emily Talen won this year’s award for best article in the Journal of Planning Education and Research, for her analysis, “New Urbanism, Social Equity, and the Challenge of Post-Katrina Rebuilding in Mississippi.” Talen, a planning professor at...
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(All graphs are: (Residential land value per SF x Density (Units per Acre)
Studies of transit-oriented development show that rising materials...
The Hercules, California, City Council approved a new urbanist conceptual plan July 22 that calls for construction of 1,224 housing units, 42,000 sq. ft. of retail, 81,000 sq. ft. of offices, and 134,000 sq. ft. of flex space on 42 acres of the city...
On August 21 NPR reported on a steel mill that is being converted to a town center at the interestion of state routes 29 and 202 in Malvern, Pennsylvania. The 100-acre Uptown Worthington, now under construction, is planned to include 745,000 square...
The first phase of Liberty Harbor, a 28-block project near the Hudson River in Jersey City, New Jersey, is nearly complete, with a dense collection of multi-story structures ranging from glass-box Modernist townhouses to traditional buildings with...
Whittaker Homes, the successful developer of New Town at St. Charles, Missouri, is stalled in efforts to build a similar, even larger development in the city of Liberty, near Kansas City, according to a report in The Kansas City Star. The holdup for...
Jonathan Rose Companies of Katonah, New York, broke ground June 3 on Metro Green Apartments, 50 units of affordable housing in Stamford, Connecticut. Metro Green Apartments is the first phase of a project that includes 238 mixed-income rental and...
When Sonoma Mountain Village, a northern California new urban community for 5,000 residents, begins construction in 2009, its developers intend to outfit it with an unusual array of energy- and water-saving techniques.
Seven hundred housing units, plus other buildings, will be constructed in a tight configuration around the Forest Hills rail and bus station in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston if the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has its way. The...
To expedite development along avenues in Toronto, Ontario, and to encourage more and better-designed mid-rise buildings, the city government is seeking proposals from a multi-disciplinary consultant team, including experts in urban design, mid-rise...
n the mountains of western North Carolina, planning isn’t all that popular. Three of the Tar Heel State’s seven westernmost counties have no subdivision regulations, and when planning is proposed, some longtime residents deride it as “socialism.”...