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.
A potentially ground breaking traffic calming project has hit a road block with the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT). The project would bring calming measures to a 20-mile stretch of Rural Route 50 which runs through three historic...
With startup funding from the Siemens Corporation, the Notre Dame School of Architecture established the South Bend Urban Center. The purpose is to use the urban design expertise of faculty and students to work with public officials and developers...
Valencia Town Center Drive is the first main street in California to be built from the ground up in recent decades. The half-mile street is an extension of Valencia Town Center, a regional shopping mall in the master-planned community Valencia, 30...
Firm wants to finance apartments near town centers.
Kensington Marquette Partners of Chicago, a firm that manages assets from several state teachers’ pension funds, is seeking to invest in apartments in traditional neighborhood developments (TNDs...
The nation’s broadest implementation of new urbanist zoning ordinances is underway in Wisconsin, where a 1999 smart growth law mandates that all cities, towns, and villages with a population of more than 12,500 adopt a model TND ordinance by January...
The state and Baltimore County are partners in the Owings Mills Town Center, a transit-oriented development.
Owings Mills, a rapidly growing “edge city” in Baltimore County, is about to get a main street and town center on what is currently 46...
Public transportation ridership has risen to a level not seen since 1960. New statistics from the American Public Transportation Association reveal that Americans took 9 billion trips on mass transit in 1999, up from a low of 6.5 billion trips in...
The Department of Housing and Urban Development is launching Design Advisor, a web-based tool for community development organizations building affordable housing. The goal of the program is to improve design literacy and help community organizations...
On the subject of dysfunctional zoning: Karrie Hanson, a resident of the historic town of Westfield, New Jersey, reports that the town’s zoning regulations jeopardize porches. The problem is that zoning rules are based on the footprint of a house –...
Dave Mayfield, developer of Afton Village in Concord, North Carolina, and landscape architect Richard Burck visited cities across the Carolinas and Georgia to survey and measure porches and to discover what elements create the right balance between...
A new CNU report, still unreleased at press time, shows that the 350 to 600 dead and dying malls in the United States offer prime new urbanist redevelopment opportunities.
The report, co-written by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the Harvard...
ServMart, a Chicago area firm, has developed a retail concept that provides many services — e.g. dry cleaning, mail services, copying/faxing, video rental, photo processing, repairs, tailoring, flowers — in a single small location. The firm makes...