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.
New Urbanism provides alternative vision for growth.
A wave of recent anti-sprawl initiatives and legislation is intended to promote compact, infill development in a number of states, particularly in the Northeast. While the New Urbanism is...
• New developments are human scale. Superblocks are divided into smaller blocks. High-rise buildings are demolished and replaced with townhomes, single homes and/or relatively small apartment buildings.
• Homes are designed to look like...
Rezoning was approved for Longleaf, a 1,000-unit traditional neighborhood development (TND) in Pasco County, Florida. The mix of uses and housing types, (including apartments), narrow street standards and alleys did not generate much controversy.
“Cities in Context: Rebuilding Communities within the Natural Region,” will take place April 30 through May 3, 1998, in Denver, Colorado.
More than half of new development in America occurs at the periphery of existing settlements. The percentage...
The cover article of the New York Times Magazine of December 14, 1997, featured Celebration, Disney’s new town near Orlando, Florida. The town generally was praised for its architecture, walkability, amenities and the way it fosters community...
I have been a subscriber to New Urban News for the past year and have read with interest most issues. The September, 1997, issue featured an article and commentary regarding the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ (ITE’s) new publication...
• Program was approved in October, 1992.
• Fifty-nine implementation grants have been approved to date in 53 cities, disproportionately in older cities in the eastern U.S.
• Total cost of program to HUD is $2.5 billion, including demolition...
The Crossings, a transit-oriented development designed by Calthorpe Associates in Mountain View, California, continues to sell homes nearly as fast as they are built. One hundred and six single homes and about 50 townhomes are complete. Apartments (...
It appears that detached garages do sell in the upper Midwest, an important traditional neighborhood development (TND) issue in the snow belt. Twenty-five homes have sold in Centennial Crossing in Vernon Hills, Illinois, since the project went on...
City and suburban streets usually are categorized according to an automotive hierarchy of local collector and arterial streets. St. Paul, Minnesota, where the downtown is built on a grid of streets, is developing a pedestrian hierarchy. All streets...
“The most attractive” Toys R Us store in the country is located on a downtown intersection of Santa Mon-ica, California, with an impressive corner entrance and street-fronts fully lined with windows, according to a recent publication of The National...
Financing of New Urbanism amounts to a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of billions of dollars that annually pour into conventional real estate projects, according to Robert Chapman’s report on page 1 of this issue. Judging by the dollars...