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.
General Growth Properties (GGP) submitted a plan to Howard County, Maryland, officials Oct. 1 that calls for building 5,500 townhouses and apartments and 1 million square feet of retail space during the next three decades in and around Columbia Town...
The first three homes at Brytan, a new 150-acre traditional neighborhood in Gainesville, Florida, have earned LEED Silver status by the US Green Building Council. According to planner Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company the homes are the first in...
CNU Board Chair Ray Gindroz has retired from the Board of Directors of Urban Design Associates in Pittsburgh and is now principal emeritus and senior consultant to the firm. He continues to work with UDA on projects in Norfolk, Virginia; Boca Raton...
Oliver attributes Vickery’s recent financial problems partly to a lack of price diversity.
Early in this decade, doubters wondered whether an upscale new urbanist beach town could succeed in an economically depressed part of the Washington coast that’s soaked by nearly 80 inches of rain a year. Yet since 2004, Casey Roloff and his...
By Thomas L. FriedmanFarrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008, 438 pp., $27.95 hardcoverThomas Friedman is a powerhouse author — someone who apparently only has to pick up the phone to talk or meet with political, industrial, economic, and intellectual...
Vertical construction is now underway at Twinbrook Station, formerly called Twinbrook Commons, a major transit-oriented development in Rockville, Maryland, that won a CNU Charter Award in 2004. JBG Companies, joint developer with the Washington...
The Health Line, a seven-mile-long bus rapid transit (BRT) route, is expected to begin operating on Cleveland’s premier street the last week of October. At a cost of about $200 million, mostly from the federal government, the BRT line has been...
New York architect Robert A.M. Stern will receive the tenth Vincent Scully Prize of the National Building Museum Nov. 12 in Washington, DC. The museum is honoring Stern for his “years of teaching at Columbia and Yale Universities, his leadership as...
Designs of three LEED-ND projects in Beijing feature green technology, but the rating system doesn’t guarantee good urban design.The Beijing Olympic Village, containing 22 six-story buildings and 20 nine-story buildings on 160 acres, won a Gold...
A two-year study in New England found that when uses are mixed, 24 percent less parking is needed.
Norman Garrick and Wesley Marshall of the University of Connecticut examined six centers in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont. Three were...
A Reuters article in July reported on how a family of four has saved money by moving to the Stapleton development in Denver, Colorado. This has allowed the family to get by with one car. “Resident Evelyn Baker says Stapleton appeals to a ‘cheapskate...