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.
The Tolkin Group recently won a competition sponsored by the City of Manhattan Beach, California, to develop Metlox Block, a 3-acre, mixed-use extension of downtown. The developer plans to break ground in late 2000 on the project, which was designed...
Fannie Mae, the nation’s largest source of financing for home mortgages, recently committed to invest $1 billion in the four-year “House Washington” initiative. House Washington is a nine-point plan to remove regulatory barriers to residential...
BARRY SPITZNASS, 53, a charter member of the Congress for the New Urbanism, died suddenly on Wednesday, June 2. He was an avid new urbanist who developed several projects in the Bloomington, Illinois, area, including Goose Creek Apartments, Woodland...
Editor’s note: more coverage of CNU VII appears on page 20 of this issue.
The seventh annual Congress for the New Urbanism, the largest ever, concentrated exclusively on city issues. “There are no suburban projects being shown at CNU VII and that...
The Town of Huntersville, North Carolina is looking for a developer with significant experience in the New Urbanism to redevelop a 32-acre former mill site situated along the planned rapid transit corridor linking the town to nearby Charlotte. A...
Citizens for a Better Environment has created a community preference survey that helps local government officials and planners determine how citizens want their communities to look. Residents are shown slides of different developments and building...
Richard Bernhardt, director of planning for the City of Orlando for 17 years, resigned from that position to start a specialty town planning and urban design office for EDAW, a nationwide design firm. The studio, based in Orlando, will focus on new...
Who says traditional design has to be expensive? The Neighborhood Housing Development Corp. (NHDC) of Gainesville built homes designed by architect Robert Orr of New Haven, Connecticut, for $42 square foot, according to David Herkalo, NHDC director...
The developer of Carpenter Village in Cary, North Carolina, was able to convince local officials that the project’sTND design would result in a 50 percent reduction in vehicular trips. The assertion was supported by research by Cary’s traffic...
After a decade, Joel Embry is finally seeing his dream of building a walkable town becoming a reality.
Challenges such as financing and approvals often put new urbanist projects on hold for years, but few developers have persisted as long as Joel...
Everyone is writing about sprawl and the New Urbanism these days. Time magazine recently described the “The Brawl Over Sprawl” in an article
reporting on a host of initiatives on local, state, and national levels to curb suburban development....
A new bimonthly publication for new traditional neighborhoods, The Town Paper, seeks to make potential homebuyers more comfortable with the traditional neighborhood development (TND) concept by offering them residents’ perspectives on TNDs. Through...