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.
After 12 years on the drawing board, Embry Mill (formerly Boulder), a planned greenfield development in Virginia, has won rezoning approval from Stafford County. Among other factors, a controversy over impact fees and a recession has kept the...
Many major US cities are gaining population for the first time in decades, according to the latest numbers from the 2000 census. “This is the first hard evidence that the predictions of an urban renaissance are true,” Robert Lang of the Fannie Mae...
Category: public open space. Subcategory: plazas and squares.
Most urban open space, whether it is a plaza, square, or green, is detached from the surrounding blocks by a surrounding street. An attached open space is one that shares its urban...
The Project for Public Spaces (PPS) has released How to Turn a Place Around, a primer on evaluating and transforming public spaces into centers of activity. The handbook favors an approach to planning that begins with the community defining the...
“Don’t let Atlanta’s environmental activists take away your right to live where you want and drive when you want. They’re trying to use laws and lawsuits to move families out of the suburbs and into downtown, and even insist we give up our cars....
Riding the crest of a strong economy, projects in New Urban News’ latest annual survey sell nearly twice as many homes as in 1999.
With the stock market in a tailspin and housing starts in decline nationally,
there is room for concern that the...
Virginia project features new urbanist design principles and looks like another Hope VI housing program success.
6Just a few blocks from downtown and adjacent to I-264 in Portsmouth, Virginia, a new neighborhood of vibrantly colored,...
Michael Lamb and Richard McLaughlin, formerly with Town Planning Collaborative, have joined Hammel, Green and Abrahamson, Inc., a Minneapolis-based architecture, engineering and planning firm. Lamb will be leading the new urban design and planning...
Following up on Principles for Inner City Neighborhood Design, published last year, CNU has released Strategies for Successful Infill Development, produced in cooperation with the Northeast-Midwest Institute, a policy think tank. The 130-page book...
A Circuit Court judge in Oregon has ruled that the controversial Ballot Measure 7 is unconstitutional. The measure, passed by Oregon voters last November, would require the state to compensate land owners for loss of property value due to planning...
The redevelopment of a naval base may become the first phase of a revitalization of 3,000 acres in the community of North Charleston, South Carolina. The city intends to buy 350 acres from the Charleston Naval Base Redevelopment Authority and then...
Three hundred units of rental housing and about 125 for-sale homes have been completed and occupied in NewHolly, a Hope VI redevelopment in Southeast Seattle. The new mixed-income neighborhood replaces Holly Park, a functionally obsolete and unsafe...