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.
Former HUD Secretary and major builder Kaufman and Broad join forces to construct housing in cities.
Prompted by the wave of revitalization efforts sweeping American cities, Henry Cisneros and Kaufman and Broad have formed a joint venture company...
Facilitated by a number of start-up businesses and organizations, car-sharing is starting to become available in urban centers around the US, according to USA Today. Cooperatives and car-sharing companies now operate in Boston; Seattle; San...
Urban redevelopment continues to gain momentum in Milwaukee. Beer Line B, a project going up on a former brownfield site on the Milwaukee River, now has 480 new homes completed or under construction. “The area has a flavor of San Francisco, with...
Joe Alfandre, former developer of new urbanist projects Kentlands and Belmont Forest, has been chosen as the co- executive director of the National Town Builders Association (NTBA) in Washington, DC. Neil Takemoto, who served as the executive...
The Urban Land Institute, whose members consist of the developers who have built suburbia in the last six decades, now recommends that conventional strip centers be converted to urban places. The “reinvention” of commercial strip development can...
Hercules, California, the former site of a massive dynamite works, has grown from about 300 to 26,000 residents in the last quarter century. The conventional suburban municipality has no downtown.
Developers and designers are exploring ways to incorporate vinyl siding into human-scale neighborhoods without destroying the streetscape.
Vinyl siding is being used innovatively in a few newurbanist projects around the country to improve the...
Change in land use practice takes time. It is frustrating to watch an innovative development move forward at a glacial pace, or to see a handful of municipalities adopt new urbanist planning codes — while knowing that mixed-use neighborhoods remain...
Ridenour is one of the few large-scale developments planned in partnership with an environmental group. The goal was to “create a mixed-use community that would adhere to the principles of Georgia Conservancy’s ‘Blueprints for Successful Communities...
An obscure requirement of the 1997 Standard Building Code has temporarily stalled home construction in Longleaf, a TND in Odessa, Florida, reports developer Frank Starkey. Thirteen homes were already out of the ground when the local building...
A new research center on the Florida Atlantic University (FAU) campus in the new urbanist community Abacoa in Jupiter, Florida, will be devoted to studying the physical and social effects of new urbanist design. FAU’s Joint Center for Environmental...
The ever-growing new urbanist movement brings in new voices for four days of intense discussion. What does it take to keep the momentum?
CNU 2000, “The Politics of Place,” drew a record 1,500 architects, planners, activists, government officials...