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.
Winmore, a new urban project planned for 66 acres in Carrboro and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has changed hands for $5 million. Partners Phil Szostak, Bob Chapman, and Herman Greene sold to local developers Scott Kovens and Eric Chupp. With 232...
The owners of 70 houses on large lots in suburban Vienna, Virginia, are banding together to sell almost the entire Poplar Terrace development to Centex Homes, which would then try to build 1,326 townhouses and condominium units on the 40 acres...
By a 60 to 40 margin, Oregon voters approved Measure 37, a law that reverses land use regulations made over the last three decades if landowners owned their property before the restrictions when into effect.
The effect on urban growth boundaries (...
A report entitled “Making the Case for Mixed Income and Mixed Use Communities,” accompanied by a CD-ROM containing technical reports, has been produced by Atlanta Neighborhood Development Partnership. The Partnership’s website is www.andpi.org.
By Stephen A. Mouzon with Susan M. Henderson McGraw-Hill and New Urban Guild, 2004, 294 pp., paperback $39.95. “It would be absolutely tragic if a society so big and smart and strong and rich were to settle for architecture that is inferior to...
With the drawing of the streets and blocks during the charrette, the battle to reclaim human-scale streetscapes had just begun. Transportation engineer Rick Hall designed the street sections four years later. Now the streets are under construction...
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...