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.
“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...
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...
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...
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...