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.
Oshara Village in Santa Fe County, New Mexico, was approved in June, and what a difference a dozen years makes in terms of permitting, according developer Alan Hoffman. Aldea, the county’s first traditional neighborhood development (TND), was...
The developer of Clarksburg Town Center, a 1,300-unit project being built in Montgomery County, Maryland, is feeling the sting of a resident backlash. Homeowners who, based on marketing literature, had expected the development to include a...
Congress in late July passed a six-year $286 billion transportation bill that includes approximately $52 billion for mass transit and $612 million for the Safe Routes to School program. Under the school program, state transportation departments will...
The Congress for the New Urbanism will continue to benefit from the oversight and guidance of its founders while welcoming four talented new members to its board, based on actions taken at the CNU board of director’s June meeting in Pasadena.
At...
Combining the strengths of several disciplines, the University of Michigan this year will offer a new certificate program in real estate development that focuses on building well-designed, sustainable, communities. Christopher Leinberger, a...
San Francisco’s newest multiway boulevard will be completed by mid-September, further aiding the revival of what had been a bedraggled portion of the Hayes Valley neighborhood southwest of downtown. The four-block thoroughfare, known as Octavia...
The benefits promised by New Urbanism spring directly from its emphasis on walking as the main way of moving through the world. Where places are made genuinely walkable, private vehicle mileage likely will be reduced and public transit will...
The first houses are under construction at Villebois, a TND in Wilsonville, Oregon. Developer Costa Pacific Homes, which built the acclaimed Orenco Station in Hillsboro, Oregon, has gone to great lengths to secure federal funds for environmental...
Developers are increasingly replacing the skin on dull postwar office buildings and converting the interiors to condominium apartments to meet downtown housing demands, The New York Times reported July 6. Since many 1950s and 1960s office buildings...
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have created the Governors’ Institute on Community Design, modeled on NEA’s highly successful Mayors’ Institute for Community Design.
The Governors’ Institute...
A paper from the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, “Terrorism, Transit and Public Safety: Evaluating the Risks,” analyzes the overall safety of public transit, taking into account all risks, including recent terrorist attacks. The study by...
New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr. announced in late June that he would like to convert a short expressway segment near the Connecticut city’s downtown to a boulevard. Filling a sunken, less-than-one-mile section of the Route 34 Oak Street Connector...