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.
“In 2003, 4,827 Americans (11.3 percent of all traffic fatalities) died while crossing the street, walking to school or work, going to a bus stop, or strolling to the grocery, among other daily activities,” the Surface Transportation Policy Project...
Pottstown, Pennsylvania, enacted an innovative land-use ordinance aimed at reinforcing its historical development pattern. “Several new homes are being built on small lots that had been vacant for decades and we are seeing higher quality proposals”...
Shelley Poticha, former executive director of CNU, will succeed Hank Dittmar as president and CEO of Reconnecting America when Dittmar departs to become chief executive of London-based The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment. Poticha left...
Washington, DC, architect Dhiru Thadani’s work at mapping all the “outdoor rooms” of the city’s monumental core, block by block and building by building, was the subject of an Aug. 27 article in the Washington City Paper. Thadani began the project...
Pittsburgh’s East Liberty section is on the upswing, aided by the East End Growth Fund, which since 2001 has invested more than $5 million in loans and recoverable grants and supported projects ranging from live-work loft conversions to the arrival...
More than a hundred thousand people showed up to tour the first houses in East Beach, a new urban infill project in Norfolk, Virginia. The 100-acre development, planned a decade ago by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ), was the site of this...
St. Louis-based developer Richard Baron, cofounder, chairman, and CEO of McCormack Baron Salazar, Inc., has won the Urban Land Institute’s J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development. In presenting the $100,000 prize, ULI cited McCormack...
A new study by Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute finds that cities with large, well-established rail systems have lower per-capita traffic congestion costs, fewer traffic fatalities per capita, lower per-capita consumer...
Real estate development’s most tediously repeated truism is that the three most important factors in property value are location, location, and location. That observation has now been stretched into a self-fulfilling prophecy. American retailing, in...
Dan Burden, doubtless the most constantly traveling traffic-tamer in the United States, carried his narrow-the-roadways message to an unlikely venue Oct. 27 — a cars section in The New York Times. In an interview that filled nearly half a page above...
New mini-cul-de-sacs are a problem in Winchester, Massachusetts, a town of 21,000 northwest of Boston. It’s become increasingly common for developers to demolish a house and replace it with a small cul-de-sac and three or four new houses. “There are...
Thirteen mid-career professionals from a variety of fields began 2004-2005 Knight Fellowships in Community Building at the University of Miami. They are: Tom Cotruvo (MN); James Epstein (Washington, DC); Lisa Hogan (FL); Michael Jones (MS); Yon...