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Economic turmoil alters development landscape
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New Urban News Article with images and sidebar, 10/1/2008
The US lending crisis has cut homebuilding nearly everywhere, but walkable, transit-oriented developments are suffering least.
Housing construction across the US has dropped to its lowest volume since 1991, and many new urbanist developments are seeing their sales fall off. The latest Standard & Poors/Case Shiller Home Price Indices, released at the end of September, show that prices of existing single-family houses in 20 large metropolitan areas sank by a stunning 19.5 percent in the past two years.

So far, new urban projects weather downturn better
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New Urban News Article with images, 10/1/2007
Product diversity, closeness to transit, and the appeal of urban living help offset the biggest housing decline in years.
Sales of new housing slowed in August to the most laggard pace in seven years, and some conventional homebuilders reported losing tens of millions of dollars per quarter. New urban projects, however, have kept chugging along — many of them marginally affected by the market’s decline.

Financial crisis hits New Urbanism
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New Urban News Article with images and sidebars, 12/1/2008
Economic troubles spread from housing to other development sectors, including retail and offices.
From one end of the US to the other, new urbanists are entering tough times, thanks to the combination of a severe credit squeeze and a rapidly deteriorating national economy.

Coping with economic crisis: how new urbanists are responding
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New Urban News Article with images, 7/1/2009

Subdividing homesites, writing form-based codes, and assigning white-collar staff to blue-collar jobs are three of the many courses of action.

Roughly 10 months into the world economic crisis, hardly anyone in the new urbanist fold remains unscathed. Architects, builders, developers, planners, lawyers — many have seen their work decrease, their incomes shrink, their projects cut back or cancelled.

Q&A: Robert Gibbs on the downcast state of retail
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New Urban News Article with images, 4/1/2009
The current downturn, says a top retail expert, is “shaking out plans and centers that were poorly conceived.”
Robert Gibbs, head of Gibbs Planning Group in Birmingham, Michigan, has advised town center developers, municipalities, and new urbanists through good times and bad. He is known especially for his consulting on retail development. In the current economic crisis, New Urban News decided to get Gibbs’s views on how new urban retailers and their centers are doing and what strategies they should pursue. Gibbs was interviewed by Senior Editor Philip Langdon.

Surviving the market turmoil
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New Urban News Article with images, 4/1/2008
Developers are adapting to the tough economy by cutting costs and using the flexibility inherent in Transect-based plans.
The housing industry is facing a “perfect storm” — the result of a combination of overbuilding, a credit crisis, and the bursting of a speculative bubble, according to Todd Zimmerman of Zimmerman/Volk Associates.

Economic sustainability is about placemaking
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New Urban News Article with image, 3/1/2009
Lessons from a quarter-century of development in Arlington, Virginia
No regional economy or locality is totally recession-proof. However, good planning is about nurturing long-term economic sustainability that allows a place to overcome all kinds of economic shock.