• Focusing on transportation affordability

    A new report highlights how planners can help households reduce cost of living through policies that boost low-cost modes of mobility.
    Housing affordability has become a national political issue, but maybe we are looking at affordability in the wrong way. We tend to look at housing costs in isolation. Rarely are household transportation costs given the same treatment, yet they are the second highest cost that households face—...Read more

  • Model cottages for hurricane recovery

    A tiny village of affordable cottages has just been built in Asheville, and the timing is fortuitous. That region desperately needs emergency housing that could also last and contribute to long-term sustainability.
    As the Asheville region recovers from the terrible effects of Hurricane Helene, the coming year will see a huge need for emergency and long-term housing. As it happens, a nonprofit called Beloved Asheville is just now completing a tiny village that could be a model for building housing affordably...Read more

  • Responding to disaster with placemaking hubs

    New urbanists are working in devastated areas in North Carolina, helping to set up the kernels of community rebuilding.
    After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, new urbanists ran a charrette in an enormous ballroom, drawing elaborate plans to rebuild 11 cities and town on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. That historic effort had long-term benefits, but was arguably far removed from day-to-day realities of the victims at the time...Read more

  • From expressway to parkway

    The plan for the Scajaquada Expressway would help bridge the divide in the central part of Buffalo, New York, bringing back the glories of an Olmsted-designed greenway.
    At the same time that New York State is looking at burying a freeway in Buffalo, the state DOT is also studying a plan to replace the 3.5-mile-long Scajaquada Expressway with a parkway and boulevard. Since the 1950s, the Scajaquada Expressway in Buffalo has divided a Frederick Law Olmsted-designed...Read more