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.
Jennifer Henry, director of the LEED-Neighborhood Development program for the US Green Building Council, is leaving that organization at the end of June. She is moving to Chicago, where she will become real estate sector manager for the Natural...
Eco-urban legends will connect past and future of sustainable communities, while transportation summit will explore need for networks
Paul Crawford, a nationally known expert on form-based codes and a practitioner admired among new urbanists, died of a brain tumor May 21 at his home in San Luis Obispo, California. He was 60.
The case for developing in more compact ways — and thus reducing global warming — is made with dozens of color graphs and tables in Growing Cooler, a new book published by the Urban Land Institute. The 170-page, $39.95 hardcover explores climate-and...
Baxter Village, a 1,033-acre traditional neighborhood development in Fort Mill, South Carolina, recorded its 1,000th home sale this May, nine years after the first house was sold. The final 400 lots are under development or planned, leading the...
Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems encourage transit-oriented development (TOD), a new study for the Bus Rapid Transit Policy Center suggests. The Center’s newsletter, Transport Innovator, reported in its March-April issue on a draft study of TOD in...
Kenneth Schwartz, who collaborated on a master plan for Crozet, Virginia, that won a 2005 CNU Charter Award, will become dean of Tulane University July 1. Schwartz will move to New Orleans from the University of Virginia, where he has had several...
A $100 million fund that will invest in urban mixed-income housing developments was announced in late April by its two partners — Goldman Sachs Urban Investment Group and L&M Development Partners. The fund, GSLM Capital Partners LLC, expects to...
Table 1 title: Housing price change for selected Zip Code areas
Table 2 title: Change in housing prices
New Urban News has reported for some time, based on observations and published stories, that urban neighborhoods have performed better than...
Edited by Tigran HaasRizzoli, 2008, 349 pp., $50 hardcover
Doug Farr’s book Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design With Nature, published by Wiley and reviewed in the Dec. 2007 New Urban News, went into a second printing after only six weeks on the market. Farr has begun a national series of training seminars...
Most of the communities along the Gulf Coast in Mississippi are demanding that “Mississippi Cottages” — small, vernacular dwellings designed by new urbanists for Hurricane Katrina survivors — be hauled away by next spring.
Nearly 2,400 cottages...