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.
Just as home owners can learn to improve their homes, citizens can learn to take active part in the improvement of their communities. That’s the philosophy behind Real Towns: Making Your Neighborhood Work, written by Harrison Bright Rue and...
Not since the 1940s have so many older cities enjoyed population growth.
For most of our major metropolitan areas, the 1970s were a disaster. St. Louis, for example, lost a little more than a quarter of its population. A fifth of the people in...
Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ) is negotiating with a major land-use law firm to disseminate new urbanist zoning codes to municipalities.
Today, public planners and elected officials who want a new urbanist growth model for their...
Former West Palm Beach Mayor Nancy Graham is starting her own urban-focused development and consulting business, Urban Principles, which will have an office on Clematis Street in West Palm Beach. As mayor from 1991 to 1999, Graham focused on the...
New interactive site provides a wealth of information.
The CNU website, CNU.org, went through a transformation at the end of
April. It now has a new look and contains many times more information than ever before. The new site is designed to...
Houston’s Main Street is getting a face-lift, to create a transit-oriented environment in preparation for coming light rail. In 1999, Mayor Lee Brown created the Main Street Coalition, a public/private partnership, for the purpose of transforming...
Avalon at Arlington Square, which opened its doors this January in Arlington, Virginia, is a new urbanist take on the rental apartment community. Master planned by Torti Gallas/CHK of Silver Spring, Maryland, (in collaboration with SKG Architects...
The first homes are selling well in Del Paso Nuevo, a 150-acre TND in Sacramento, California, under construction with the help of $10.4 million in grants and loans from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. The houses, the first of...
Eight new townhomes, each designed with flex space for home office use, will be built in Avalon Park’s town center by American Heritage Homes. Located southeast of Orlando, Avalon Park is a fast-selling project with many new urbanist design elements...
The second phase of the satellite city of Bahcesehir, 30 minutes west of Istanbul, Turkey, was designed by Torti Gallas and Partners/CHK using new urbanist principles. The completed 3,500-unit first phase is a conventional mix of identical high-rise...
Holt & Haugh, developers of Fairview Village in Fairview, Oregon, bought out their equity partners in the Chinook Way Apartments, a 124-unit apartment development within the village. The apartments were slow to absorb during the first six months...
Do you need help convincing fire officials that narrow neighborhood streets can accommodate fire engines and other emergency vehicles? One avenue is the new video Walkable Streets and the Fire Department put out by the Local Government Commission in...