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.
Since 2002, Albuquerque developer Rob Dickson has completed three phases of converting the long-vacant Albuquerque High School to housing. Now his Paradigm & Company LLC is about to start the fourth and final phase, which calls for building 54...
If economic feasibility studies turn out favorably, there’s a good chance that Wal-Mart will combine its rebuilt store in Pass Christian, Mississippi, with 300 to 500 townhouses and apartments.
Since last October’s Mississippi Renewal Forum, new...
A senior vice president of a real estate financing and development firm, Faison Enterprises, recently criticized the financial returns of new urban town centers. Frank Herring, who is based in Winter Park, Florida, says town centers cost 30 percent...
By John Nolen Introduction by Charles D. Warren University of Massachusetts Press in association with the Library of American Landscape History, 2005, 228 pp., hardcover $35
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Orton Family Foundation will develop new planning tools and processes that coastal communities can use. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation will give the Orton Family Foundation $250,000 to introduce...
The Oregon Supreme Court in February upheld Measure 37, a law that could undo the state’s three-decade-long effort to restrict development outside urban growth boundaries. The law, approved by voters in November 2004, requires governments to let...
In a year when new urbanists are bringing historic plans and real optimism to the hurricane-hit Gulf Coast, the fourteenth annual Congress for the New Urbanism will feature four days focused on getting great plans implemented wherever they’re...
Sandy Sorlien and Jonathan Barnett spoke in a University of Pennsylvania symposium in February on “Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina.” This summer Penn Press will publish a volume of the symposium papers, edited...
A design that Washington, DC, architect Milton Grenfell produced for the Mississippi Renewal Forum last October was the cover illustration for the February issue of Traditional Building. Inside the magazine was a 4,000-word feature by Period Homes...
New Mexico state planner Ken Hughes is staffing Gov. Bill Richardson’s Livability Task Force, which this spring will begin establishing the criteria for transit-oriented development at each station of the Albuquerque area’s commuter rail service....
Vulnerable neighborhoods like those in Biloxi, on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, need buildings that are “able to take a swim every 30 years,” architect Stefanos Polyzoides said last October during the Mississippi Renewal Forum. Some disagreed. They...
The alley offset, described in the last Technical Page, is a way of modifying alignment of alleys from one block to the next. It is used where baroque excess in vehicle size and speed would otherwise result in corrosion of the alley system’s...