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.
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...
The Urban Land Institute is going nationwide with a program that should make it easier for smart growth and new urban projects to win the governmental approvals they need.
Within the past three years, ULI has taken the lead in forming two regional...
Mission Meridian Village, a collection of 67 varied housing units along the Gold Line light-rail tracks in South Pasadena, California, opened in June and is expected to be completed and fully occupied by September.
St. Louis Park, a first-ring suburb of Minneapolis, is two-thirds of the way through constructing a town center — a pedestrian-scale gathering place that the 45,000-person community has wanted for more than a decade. Where strip commercial buildings...
Routledge, 2005, 318 pp., paperback $38. If you hang around advocates of the New Urbanism for even a short time, you are bound to come across references to Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, John Nolen, Benton MacKaye, Daniel Burnham, Werner...
Village Gardens, a TND in Lincoln, Nebraska, is in the groundbreaking stage and is slated to begin construction of residential units this fall. The Campbell family, which ran a nursery business on their 215-acre property for 90 years, decided to...
Jim Horne found a new hobby when he moved into Doe Mill (see photo), a TND in Chico, California. “After seeing Doe Mill, I wanted to see what else has been built using the same principles,” he says. Horne, who runs a family business manufacturing...
Portland, Oregon, is succeeding in its efforts to cut greenhouse gases — largely through public transportation and boosting pedestrian and bicycle activity, according to the New York Times. In 1993, Portland became the first local government to...