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.
Researchers presented findings at
the Congress for the New Urbanism annual conference that show substantial energy savings from higher-density urbanism — greater savings than can be achieved from the US government Energy Star program (see...
Developer Scott Wolstein is proposing a $225 million mixed-use neighborhood on the east banks of “the Flats,” an entertainment-oriented area along the Cuyahoga River near downtown Cleveland. In an area that has deteriorated during the past several...
New data has come out quantifying office workers’ support for retail, according to retail consultant and town planner Robert Gibbs. “A recent survey by the International Council of Shopping Centers found that office workers make a significant amount...
Matt Taecker has left Catalyst to form his own firm, Taecker Urban Design & Planning in Berkeley, California, which will focus on revitalization of urban neighborhoods through design and community organizing. Taecker intends to emphasize...
Danish architect Jan Gehl, who shared CNU XIII closing keynote duties with author James Howard Kunstler, was a modernist and “less is more” believer when he graduated from architecture school in 1960. Then he married a psychologist and set himself...
It began with an idea from planning consultant Brad Scheib of Hoisington Koegler Group in 1998: Why not build a mixed-use development in Ramsey, a growing suburb 20 miles northwest of downtown Minneapolis? “Mostly the reaction was ‘we can’t do that...
Island Press, 2005, 304 pp., paperback $29.95. Ann Breen and Dick Rigby run the Waterfront Center, a nonprofit Washington, DC-based organization they founded in 1981 to promote the best possible redevelopment of urban waterfronts. They travel a lot...
Post Properties, a leading new urbanist developer in the late 1990s, is constructing its first project in several years. Like many real estate investment trusts (REITs), Post saw its profits fall with the slow economy of the early part of this...
Granor Price Homes, a developer of mostly conventional suburban projects since the early 1970s, got a taste of the New Urbanism with Lantern Hill in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, an infill development of 117 townhouses and 60,000 square feet of office...
Americans paid more for gasoline in 2004 than in 2003, and the biggest cost escalation occurred in metropolitan Los Angeles, where the average household’s expenditure rose by $316. That finding is contained in “Driven to Spend,” a new report from...
Five years after the nation’s largest builder suffered a setback when its first new urban development was rejected, the project has come back with a new developer and new design.
Vizcaya, a 160-acre traditional neighborhood development designed by...
Dan Camp, developer of the Cotton District in Starkville, Mississippi, was elected mayor of Starkville June 7, winning 61 percent of the vote. Camp argued during the campaign that a new police headquarters and municipal court facility should be...