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 Howard Husock Ivan R. Dee, 2003, 256 pp., $26. When President Bush proposed eliminating any new money for the HOPE VI program, he was following a recommendation of Myron Magnet, editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, and of Howard...
K Street in downtown Washington, DC, is to be reconfigured for bus rapid transit, which will run down the middle of the roadway. In The Boulevard Book, published in 2002, Allan Jacobs, Elizabeth Macdonald, and Yodan Rofé described K Street as a...
South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford has rescinded the state’s minimum acreage requirements for schools in an attempt to “bring back smaller community-centered schools.” Sanford, a Republican, told constituents that eliminating the requirements “makes...
More news on Stapleton: it will be studied as part of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Active Living by Design program. The Friends of the Center for Human Nutrition received a $200,000 grant from the foundation to demonstrate that the design of the...
Longtime Yale University architectural historian Vincent Scully, who has helped generations of architects appreciate the qualities of traditional urbanism, received the Urban Land Institute’s J.C. Nichols Prize, awarded to an individual whose career...
The Institute for Justice, a Washington, DC, nonprofit organization that challenges what it sees as widespread misuse of the governmental power of eminent domain, has published Public Power, Private Gain: A Five-Year, State-by-State Report Examining...
Sales are picking up at Mt Laurel in Shelby County, Alabama. The Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND) has about 100 homes built and a growing town center. Sales were slow for a couple of years, but increased to five per month and have held...
Atraditional neighborhood design offering affordable housing and other amenities for Navy personnel in San Diego has won a National Award for Smart Growth Achievement from the US Environmental Protection Agency. Torti, Gallas & Partners of...
Last fall, ridership on a Metrobus route in Arlington County, Virginia, suddenly jumped 30 percent. The reason? At 22 bus stops on the route, the county installed displays of the bus schedule and a laminated drawing of the bus route overlaid on a...
There continues to be an explosion of publications and conferences about the benefits of developing densely. At the Urban Land Institute’s fall meeting, on “Building Better Communities Through Well-Planned Density, “ Michael P. Buckley, director of...
Modern-style townhouses and condominiums are now for sale in the Stapleton development in Denver. The 68-unit Syracuse Village by builder BMW Realty Partners was designed by Wolff Lyon Architects and is among the most affordable housing in Stapleton...
Clark’s Grove, an infill neighborhood in Covington, Georgia, now has 27 houses built, and live/work units are scheduled for construction in January, 2004, town planner Randy Vinson told New Urban News. The developer of the 90-acre project is Clark’s...