• 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

  • The American strip is a relic

    California’s new legislation may be the catalyst for transforming America’s dying commercial strips
    “The Strip” was once the glue holding together the American Dream’s new world of subdivisions, shopping centers, and office parks. It was the place to cruise, a new type of social space, lined with landmarks, trademarks and yes, gathering places. But no more. Today we do our cruising online and...Read more
  • A suburban neighborhood of tract housing within the city of Colorado Springs, Colorado, United States; culs-de-sac are hallmarks of suburban planning.

    Suburbia was a housing program

    We used to understand that housing construction was in the public interest
    Note: This article first appeared on The Deleted Scenes .​ Public Square editor Robert Steuteville is on leave through the last week of October. I’ve had this note sitting in my possible newsletter posts document: “Suburbia was a housing program.” I’ve alternated between thinking that was banal and...Read more