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.
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...
“Big-box stores married to residences are appearing in Chicago, Washington, Seattle and San Francisco,” The New York Times reported Aug. 19 in an article titled “Shopping on 1, Sleeping on 2.” “To satisfy the needs of commuters tired of commuting...
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...
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”...
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...