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.
Residents of Madison, Connecticut, voted Jan. 26 to buy 42 acres along Long Island Sound from LeylandAlliance, which for nearly a decade had been planning to build a development called Madison Landing on the site. Leyland, which had paid $4.2...
Modular-adaptable designs are seen as a possible solution to Northeastern housing needs. How do you fit short-term housing for some 60 musical theater people into a 19th-century Connecticut village, the kind of place that tenaciously resists...
Kentlands-based entrepreneur says the time has come for smaller houses and less elaborate developments. Nearly everyone connected with real estate development has been hurt by the economic calamities of the past two years, publishers included. It’...
The groundbreaking manual for context-sensitive urban thoroughfares jointly created by the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) and the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) is a draft no more.
In the Town of Islip on Long Island, New York, the chairman of the Community Development Agency proposed last year that modest houses on the order of Katrina Cottages be built to accommodate townspeople of modest means. In response, Planning and...
Moule & Polyzoides Architects and Urbanists of Pasadena, California, was selected in late January to lead the planning and design of 7,000 acres of Fresno, California, the state’s fifth largest city with approximately 500,000 people.
The Humphreys Company of Oklahoma City began clearing land in December in eastern Oklahoma for Carlton Landing, a lakeside, mostly second-home community that will include an organic farm, a town center, and a wedding chapel. Developer Grant...
Looking for a new urbanist take on The Old Farmer’s Almanac? Tom Low and others in the Charlotte, North Carolina, office of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. have assembled the Light Imprinter’s Almanac for 2010, which offers advice to “growers and...
The New York State Environmental Protection Fund’s Smart Growth Grant Program awarded $500,000 in grants for smart growth planning projects in the Hudson Valley.
Newland Communities, developer of the 1,200-unit, 270-acre Clarksburg Town Center in Montgomery County, Maryland, has been fined $22,000 by the County Planning Board for building in ways that were at odds with what the county had approved.
After three years of work, Pine Hall Development Corporation received general plan approval for a 150-acre traditional neighborhood development called Pine Hall in Ferguson Township, near State College, Pennsylvania. The project will begin approvals...
Hammond’s Ferry cuts costs while trying to preserve essential features.