• Healing small cities through land use and transportation

    On the Park Bench experts reveal how to overcome barriers to healthy, thriving cities in America’s heartland.
    “We don’t know how. It costs too much. It won’t work here.” These three objections are raised by public officials when confronted with the need to reform land use and transportation, according to Mark Fenton, who presented on CNU’s On the Park Bench webinar Healing Small Cities . Fenton and co-...Read more

  • Spokane streamlines ‘missing middle’ housing

    A house plan catalog is designed to expedite construction of compact housing that fits the neighborhood context throughout the city.
    Spokane, Washington, is moving forward with highly streamlined approvals for a catalog of “missing middle” building plans in response to rising housing costs. The city of 228,000 people, where home prices increased substantially in recent years, officially declared a “housing emergency” last summer...Read more

  • Objective design standards are form-based codes

    The state of California is responding to the nation’s second highest housing costs (behind only Hawaii) with regulatory reforms that promote form-based codes along transit lines and commercial corridors.
    California's long standing “Not-In-My-Backyard” (NIMBY) culture has exacerbated the problems of high housing costs and homelessness. Over the past 50 years, conventional zoning ordinances and entitlement processes have conspired to support NIMBY intentions to stop new housing from being built near...Read more

  • Feds release plan for compact communities to counter climate change

    The US National Blueprint for Transportation Decarbonization lays out goals for practitioners of New Urbanism and smart growth “to increase convenience and reduce emissions by making it possible for people to take fewer or shorter trips.”
    Read the official CNU media release here . The US government on Tuesday released a groundbreaking Blueprint for Transportation Decarbonization that fully recognizes the critical role of compact, complete communities in reducing carbon emissions and addressing the nation’s climate issues. No federal...Read more