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.
The proposed Montecito Town Center in Las Vegas, billed as the “largest town center in the United States,” is designed with substantial new urbanist elements. The project is on a 254-acre site that the city had planned for a new urbanist type town...
The commercial portion of the mall redevelopment Paseo Colorado in Pasadena, California, is 90 percent leased and ready to open in September. Exterior construction of the residential buildings will be completed at the same time, and the first...
New urbanist developer Vince Graham, a partner in acclaimed TNDs I’On and Newpoint, has run into political interference in Norfolk, Virginia. Graham’s firm, Civitas, was chosen as the developer of East Beach, a 100-acre project designed in 1994 by...
Federal Realty Investment Trust appears to be succeeding with its new urbanist projects in the Washington, DC, area. Bethesda Row, which includes 340,000 square feet of shops, offices, and restaurants in downtown Bethesda, Maryland, is 99.6 percent...
With appeals, litigation could continue for several years over Miles Point, an 89-acre TND denied by the town of St. Michaels, Maryland. At issue, according to developer George Valanos of the Midland Companies, is an inherent conflict between the...
A bill to create 1.5 million units of affordable housing during the next 10 years through a National Housing Trust Fund was introduced by US Sen. John Kerry. The bill was endorsed by the Sierra Club.
Category: public open space. Subcategory: plazas and squares.
In understanding the components of urbanism at any point along the Transect, it is useful to differentiate between the organization of movement and the organization of spatial...
Randal O’Toole is a man whose neighborhood was replanned by government officials as part of Portland Metro’s 2040 planning process in the mid-1990s — an event which launched his career as an anti-new urbanist. O’Toole is profoundly pessimistic about...
In its latest report, Driven to Spend, the Surface Transportation Policy Project (STPP) set out to determine how sprawl patterns and public transit choice affect people’s transportation budgets. STPP concluded that residents spend most on...
“Since 1982, while the US population has grown nearly 20 percent, the time Americans spend in traffic has jumped an amazing 236 percent. ... The average driver now spends the equivalent of nearly a full work week each year stuck in traffic. That’s...
Sarasota County in Florida has hired the Orlando planning and consulting firm Glatting Jackson to lead a team of advisors that will flesh out the details of the county’s Resource Management Area (RMA) approach to future growth. The incentives-based...
Recent developments in the Washington, DC, area demonstrate a variety of techniques for placing a large grocery store in a mixed-use urban environment.
Of all the big box store types, supermarkets are the most common, are used most frequently by...