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.
The City of Baltimore unveiled the multiphase Charles North Vision Plan to turn a 100-acre arts and entertainment district north of Penn Station into a $1 billion “cultural crossroads” including 1,900 housing units, 557,000 sq. ft. of retail, 300,...
After spending a week last August studying how to improve the downtown of Davenport, Iowa, Jeff Speck presented recommendations aimed at slowing the vehicular traffic and making the place more comfortable for pedestrians. The Washington, DC-based...
Blue Back Square, a 20-acre mixed-use addition to the long-established town center in West Hartford, Connecticut, has fared well during its first year despite the national financial crisis. “In a bleak economy, more than 90 percent of the retail and...
The Charlotte, North Carolina, office of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. completed a vision plan for Camden, South Carolina, and is being invited back to discuss additional work, including a zoning rewrite, adoption of “Light Imprint” New Urbanism...
The Vintage Group, led by Riverhead, New York, developer John Burke, is planning a four-acre mixed-use project that that would be a pivot point between downtown Riverhead and a panoply of transit connections — existing Long Island Railroad commuter...
The California Air Resources Board (CARB) set final targets for greenhouse gas reductions that included 5 million metric tons from land use and regional transportation sectors. That target, considerably lower than what environmental groups were...
Hopes rise for location-efficient mortgages, which in limited tests have bucked the nationwide wave of bad housing debt by producing no known foreclosures.
Downtown Silver Spring, an arts, entertainment, office, and shopping complex in the formerly deteriorated heart of Silver Spring, Maryland, won this year’s Smart Growth Achievement Award for “overall excellence” from the US Environmental Protection...
Charter Awards 2009 honor the urbanism the world needs now
Where conventional sprawl generates enormous amounts of carbon emissions, erodes the bonds of community, and strains the connection between cities and the rural areas that help sustain...
The City of Stockton, California, has agreed to reduce sprawl and allow construction of 18,000 new housing units within the current city limits in an effort to address global warming, according to the Local Government Commission based in Sacramento...
The Victoria Transport Policy Institute in British Columbia has explored location-efficient mortgages and the related concept of “location-efficient development” in great detail in a chapter of the Institute’s Online TDM [Transport Demand Management...