• A mixed-use center for town and gown

    The redevelopment of a suburban commercial strip area across from UConn has made Mansfield, Connecticut, a better place.
    For a town with a major educational institution—the University of Connecticut—Mansfield was surprisingly short of urban amenities until a few years ago. “Mansfield,” noted Connecticut Magazine , “offered little more than a couple of fading strip malls and a dilapidated restaurant along the...Read more

  • Two simple SoCal housing solutions

    Beach density and climate action zones offer a proven, two-tier approach to fitting housing comfortably within our current lifestyle.
    California’s Bay Area housing disaster tells Southern Californians that our housing crisis will only get worse and doing nothing is both an irrational and irresponsible response. We are faced with deciding to have more neighbors or pay more taxes as we desperately need money to fix our city’s...Read more

  • The four phases of New Urbanism

    As revitalization of cities moves forward, urbanists are partway through a multiphase process that is changing America.
    The New Urbanism began mostly as a large-project, greenfield movement. Some new urbanists concentrated on infill in the 1980s and 1990s, but their efforts attracted less media attention and investment. Intellectually, the movement aspired to revitalize entire regions—especially historic cities and...Read more

  • A walkable urban retail primer

    Nuture unique historic character in walkable formats and don’t build leasable space that you can’t lease. For downtown to have a critical mass, the goal is to capture 20 percent of the retail market share.
    A couple weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of working with Bob Gibbs in Las Cruces, New Mexico , looking at ways to help downtown outperform the suburbs, helping Main Street be more profitable than strip malls. The top lessons were to nurture unique historic character in walkable formats and don’...Read more