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.
In its latest report, Driven to Spend, the Surface Transportation Policy Project (STPP) set out to determine how sprawl patterns and public transit choice affect people’s transportation budgets. STPP concluded that residents spend most on...
“Since 1982, while the US population has grown nearly 20 percent, the time Americans spend in traffic has jumped an amazing 236 percent. ... The average driver now spends the equivalent of nearly a full work week each year stuck in traffic. That’s...
Sarasota County in Florida has hired the Orlando planning and consulting firm Glatting Jackson to lead a team of advisors that will flesh out the details of the county’s Resource Management Area (RMA) approach to future growth. The incentives-based...
Recent developments in the Washington, DC, area demonstrate a variety of techniques for placing a large grocery store in a mixed-use urban environment.
Of all the big box store types, supermarkets are the most common, are used most frequently by...
The Congress for the New Urbanism prefaced its ninth annual congress with a daylong series of lectures and discussions by luminaries in the new urbanist (NU) movement. “New Urbanism 101” was designed to give an overview of NU history and principles...
No hurdles in sight for the passage of a code that 60 of the state’s largest cities and towns must adopt by 2002.
Wisconsin is the first state in the nation to attempt to set statewide standards for traditional neighborhood development (TND).
Houston’s Main Street is getting a face-lift, to create a transit-oriented environment in preparation for coming light rail. In 1999, Mayor Lee Brown created the Main Street Coalition, a public/private partnership, for the purpose of transforming...
Avalon at Arlington Square, which opened its doors this January in Arlington, Virginia, is a new urbanist take on the rental apartment community. Master planned by Torti Gallas/CHK of Silver Spring, Maryland, (in collaboration with SKG Architects...
The first homes are selling well in Del Paso Nuevo, a 150-acre TND in Sacramento, California, under construction with the help of $10.4 million in grants and loans from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. The houses, the first of...
Eight new townhomes, each designed with flex space for home office use, will be built in Avalon Park’s town center by American Heritage Homes. Located southeast of Orlando, Avalon Park is a fast-selling project with many new urbanist design elements...
The second phase of the satellite city of Bahcesehir, 30 minutes west of Istanbul, Turkey, was designed by Torti Gallas and Partners/CHK using new urbanist principles. The completed 3,500-unit first phase is a conventional mix of identical high-rise...
Holt & Haugh, developers of Fairview Village in Fairview, Oregon, bought out their equity partners in the Chinook Way Apartments, a 124-unit apartment development within the village. The apartments were slow to absorb during the first six months...