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.
One-bedroom apartments in San Francisco command rents averaging $1,731 a month, and nearly a quarter of the city’s renters pay more than half their income for housing, according to a local real estate source, RentalGuide.com. Consequently the city...
Online requests for the SmartCode rose significantly after DPZ announced that it was dropping the licensing fee (April/May 2005 New Urban News). One of two websites that are allowing the code to be downloaded, www.tnd
townpaper.com, said that 18,...
City planners in Punta Gorda, Florida, won a dispute with the city housing authority over plans to replace public housing destroyed by Hurricane Charley, according to the Herald-Tribune newspaper. The authority originally planned 184 campus-style...
The first phase of the Martin Luther King development, a HOPE VI project designed by Torti Gallas & Partners, opened in Philadelphia in April. Phase 1 features 49 rental townhouses. The total project will have 247 houses, 109 of which will be...
Carol Coletta has been named president and CEO of CEOs for Cities. She will continue to host and produce the public radio program “Smart City.”
Active Living Research has released three new research summaries that present scientific findings for policy makers, planners, developers, public health officials, and others trying to increase physical activity in communities and reduce childhood...
New Urban News won an award for Best Single Topic Newsletter in 2005 from the international Newsletter and Electronic Publishers Association, based on “overall excellence, clarity and thoroughness of writing, and usefulness to subscribers.”
The higher the initial cost of a given public transit technology, the less likely a system using it will be built. From the outset, this tough reality must be recognized. The last Technical Page considered the higher levels of technology and...
Ohio developer Robert Stark has created a new urban town center by the name of Crocker Park outside Cleveland. Now he is eager to use the ideas to revitalize the historic city.
“I feel I am in possession of a great truth,” he told Cleveland Plain...
Transect-based codes like the SmartCode provide new opportunities for municipalities to promote New Urbanism and smart growth. But the difficulty of applying these codes to local conditions remains a hurdle to widespread implementation. One method...
Artists are moving into 61 loft apartments in the five-story Read’s Department Store building, which had stood vacant for more than 20 years in downtown Bridgeport, Connecticut. Norwalk-based developer Bill Kraus worked with nonprofit Artspace...
Fourteen projects that fulfill and advance the principles of the Charter of the New Urbanism will be recognized as this year’s best examples of New Urbanism when the 2005 Charter Awards are formally presented in a ceremony at CNU XIII in Pasadena on...