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.
While the New Urbanism is still strongly discouraged by most subdivision and zoning ordinances, an increasing number of local jurisdictions are approving laws that allow mixed-use, pedestrian-oriented developments.
New Urban News and the Congress...
Northwest Landing, a traditional neighborhood development near Tacoma, Washington, is outdistancing its competitors by a long margin. From January to September, 101 homes were sold in the project, compared to 58 in Russellwood, the next best selling...
Residents of Kentlands, the Gaithersburg, Maryland, TND, took control of their destiny with regards to Midtown, the town center. The developer, Guy Beatty, wanted to build a 180,000 square foot Target superstore — claiming that a smaller, pedestrian...
CNU’s Task Forces have taken an active role this year planning our annual Congress. CNU VII: The Wealth of Cities will be held in Milwaukee, June 3-6, 1999. The Task Force Chairs are meeting in San Francisco this month to help cull through the many...
Federal money finally came through to begin construction of Del Paso Nuevo, a 150-acre new urbanist neighborhood in Sacramento, California. Designed by Jeff Townsend of Vail Engineering, Del Paso Nuevo was one of the first Homeownership Zones...
The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) responded quickly to two recent attacks on sprawl, one by Vice President Al Gore and the other by the Sierra Club (both are reported in this issue of New Urban News). Perceiving that its industry is...
The Pritzker Prize, “the Nobel of architecture,” is generally a glorification of modern architectural achievements. This year, at a White House presentation of the prize, the nation’s architectural elite was treated to an overview of what went wrong...
An adaptive reuse of an automotive shop is spurring a larger redevelopment of a depressed Detroit neighborhood. The 1921 shop is being converted into 28 market-rate, for-sale residential lofts, according to J.C. Cataldo of Canfield Lofts LLC, the...
A long-awaited train station recently opened at The Crossings, the transit-oriented village designed by Calthorpe Associates in Mountain View, California. The promise of a station helped to sell homes at the 16-acre mixed-use project, which is 80...
The Inner City and Transportation Task Forces have been asked by the Northeast-Midwest Institute, a Washington DC-based nonprofit, to copublish a book on implementing urban infill and transit-oriented development. Funding comes, in part, from the U....
Edward Bohrer Jr., the four-term mayor of Gaithersburg, Maryland, died on August 27 at the age of 58. A public servant of vision and integrity, he was an important role model in the early days of the New Urbanism.
Together with developer Joe...
We’d like to thank Architecture magazine for explaining The Truman Show,
Peter Weir’s blockbuster 1998 movie. We saw it, and thought it was about a megalomaniac television producer who keeps the fictional show’s star, Truman Burbank (played by Jim...