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.
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...
Hopes rise for location-efficient mortgages, which in limited tests have bucked the nationwide wave of bad housing debt by producing no known foreclosures.
New Urban News asked some leading new urbanists to write open letters to President-elect Barack Obama in an effort to identify a new national agenda for urbanism. In many cases, the letters were shortened significantly for print publication, but the...
Since street network connectivity affects all new urbanist projects (and too many good projects are held back by a lack of traditional urban street grids beyond their borders), both individual urbanists and the overall movement will benefit from CNU...
New York City created an esplanade this summer on one of Manhattan’s busiest streets — Broadway from 35th to 42nd Street — by eliminating two lanes of vehicular traffic. Benches and chairs were installed on block-long stretches of the newly carved-...
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...
Edited by John Morris DixonVisual Reference Publications, 2008, 304 pp., $60 hardcover
The Gulfport, Mississippi, City Council in early November accepted the largest gift in the history of the US Department of Veterans Affairs, according to the Biloxi SunHerald. The 92-acre Veterans Affairs property was given to the city. “The new...
Mashpee Commons on Cape Cod “is weathering the storm very well,” Douglas Storrs says of the impact of the national economic downturn on one of nation’s longest-established new urban mixed-use centers. “It is interesting to note how well our...
Foreclosures are lowest in historic, gentrifying, and new urban neighborhoods, according to a preliminary findings of an analysis of the Louisville, Kentucky, region.
While distance from downtown correlates with higher foreclosure rates, this didn’...
Oliver attributes Vickery’s recent financial problems partly to a lack of price diversity.