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 final leg of the 12-mile Hiawatha light-rail line connecting downtown Minneapolis to Twin Cities International Airport and Mall of America opened in December, fostering housing development at both ends of its route. One study has associated the...
Ellen Greenberg, former director of policy and research at the Congress for the New Urbanism, is now a principal with the urban design firm Freedman, Tung & Bottomley.
Baldwin Park, a new urban redevelopment of a former naval training center in Orlando, has a town center that is far behind schedule, according to the Orlando Business Journal. Tenants signed on to the project soon after Unicorp National Developers...
How do you propel a second-tier state university into academia’s upper echelon? In the case of the University of Connecticut, you spend billions of dollars from the state government to improve the campus — and you hire consultants steeped in New...
The Macon-Bibb County Planning and Zoning Commission unanimously approved ordinances Jan. 10 establishing the Beall’s Hill Historic Planning Development District. The Commission’s action is expected to spur well-conceived infill development in the...
Treasure Coast Regional Planning Council (TCRPC) in Stuart, Florida, has sponsored approximately 90 new urban design charrettes in the last 17 years, far outdistancing any other public agency. Among the 537 regional planning councils in the US,...
An investigation by The Boston Globe found that firefighters respond faster to blazes in Boston and other big cities than they do to fires in many suburbs. A January series of articles revealed that the response time of American fire departments is...
Ken Hughes is staffing the task force, which he says is “on a fast track (pun intended) to get support for TODs, to complement the new intercity rail service the governor is pushing.” Hughes notes, “We’re slated to have rail service up and operating...
The Vermont Forum on Sprawl has issued a four-page color publication on the Vermont Neighborhoods Project, showing how new housing can be inserted gracefully into three Vermont communities: Shoreham, Middlebury, and Vergennes. The plans reflect...
In Drachten and other small communities in northern Holland, traffic engineer Hans Monderman is stirring debate by eliminating many of the customary elements of streets and roads, such as traffic lights, speed limit signs, and pavement markings. “...
McCaffery Interests, which built the highly successful Market Common, Clarendon transit-oriented, mixed-use project in Arlington, Virginia, has another project in the works of the same name. Market Common in Myrtle Beach is described as an “urban...
The East Beach project along Chesapeake Bay in Norfolk, Virginia, is attracting homebuyers to a section of the city that used to be so dangerous that cab drivers and pizza deliverers refused to go there. “Forty-five to fifty houses are under...