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.
Underwriting and financial criteria must be changed, and permitting must be expedited, to enable new urbanist developments to compete with suburban sprawl, according to the developer of Abacoa Town Center.
All’s well that ends well, but developer...
National Center for Smart Growth Research and
Education
Location: University of Maryland at College Park. Activities: Monitoring and evaluation of smart growth laws, education of public officials, research in growth management, development of...
Developers, environmentalists, Realtors, builders, planners, governors, citiizens — nearly everybody is talking about smart growth. In just three years this term has become a buzz word nationwide, a concept that makes so much sense “it’s hard to...
In the year 2018, the NIMBY wars are over, consumers have learned to recognize the difference between hybrid new urbanist developments and the real thing, and typological coding has replaced conventional zoning. These and other hopeful predictions...
CNU and the movement in general generates increasingly sophisticated coverage.
One way to take the pulse of the new urbanist movement is to see how we are being portrayed in major newspapers, magazines, and web sites. CNU continues to have a...
PrimRose Beach, a planned TND in Currituck County, North Carolina hit a snag in October, when the owner of the 80-acre property cut ties with developer Scott Shepard, who has struggled for three years to secure financing for the project....
Torti Gallas & Partners/CHK of Silver Spring, Maryland, recently completed an economic development and commercial corridor study for Charlottesville, Virginia. After studying the market and assessing the conditions in the corridors and...
Construction began in January in Cherry Hill Village, a TND in Canton Township, Michigan. Unlike the majority of new urbanist greenfield projects, Cherry Hill Village is focused on, and will extend from, the crossroads of an existing community. The...
The Town of Cranford, New Jersey, still has a traditional, mixed-use downtown, and town officials are taking a proactive approach to staying competitive while keeping growth small-scale and incremental. Alberto & Associates of Odessa, Delaware,...
The recent approval of Vickery, a new urbanist village development in Forsyth County, Georgia, (see October/November 2000) came at a price. Reacting to fears of density among the area’s residents, the Forsyth Commission cut the number of housing...
Public officials in Frisco, Texas, visited new urbanist town centers in nearby Addison and Plano, and decided their city needed something similar. A 140-acre site, which extends from Frisco’s historic downtown to the busy Dallas North Tollway,...
High-tech wizards, nose rings, and the proliferation of “bourgeois bohemians” may all be harbingers of a renaissance in American urbanism, according to some experts. A recent conference in Atlanta, “The New Urbanism for the New Economy,” explored...