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.
Twenty-five years of regional planning has left Portland with a renewed downtown, a spirited and informed public debate, and lots of sprawl that still needs fixing.
Portland has a long-standing reputation as a model for regional-scale progressive...
Washington Town Center has overcome bureaucratic entanglements and developer opposition to benefit from a hot
real estate market and become the object of high expectations.
Like many suburban communities, Washington Township, New Jer-sey, has...
New study sends message to developers and public officials: there is a market demand for new compact development in Southeastern Pennsylvania.
Builders and developers in the Philadelphia metropolitan area have taken notice of the potential for...
The Building Homes in America’s Cities Initiative is a major new effort led by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to build more than one million new homes in the nation’s cities over the next 10 years. The program’s focus is to...
Attorney Doris Goldstein has developed a set of model legal documents for TND development. Goldstein says she offers the service as a cost-effective alternative for small developers who want to avoid the high price of drafting new documents and the...
For years, CNU members in various parts of the country have urged us to work more on the local level. We have generally demurred out of concern that we would end up spending all our time on local issues and neglect the big picture. Our new Regional...
While Walgreen Co. has agreed to follow new urban design guidelines in the construction of 35 stores in the Chicago area (see the January/February 2000 issue), the drug store chain has refused to make substantial changes in the suburban design of...
The City of Chattanooga, Tennessee, was awarded the 1999 White House Joint Center Sustainable Community Award for instigating the redevelopment of the failing Eastgate Mall into a main street retail and office district with a future residential...
Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream was published by North Point Press on March 1. This new urbanist manifesto by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck assesses sprawl’s economic, ecological,...
A new urbanist community is far more complex, and therefore more risky to finance, than a conventional subdivision. But with this complexity comes the possibility of creating a much greater long-term value. That’s the conclusion drawn by Tom Low, an...
The New Jersey state plan calls for compact, mixed-use development, but the bureaucracy supports sprawl. Washington Town Center has forced officials to confront this inconsistency.
When Washington Township created its town center plan, it applied...
Even as recent estimates indicate a rise in the amount of money going to TNDs, the conservative financial market still hedges its bets on the New Urbanism.
More than 125 traditional neighborhood developments (TNDs) are under construction, as are...