Reports: Development

New Urban News Article with images and sidebar, 9/1/2006
Seaside’s New Institutes Program helps communities establish nonprofit organizations different from homeowners’ associations.
A fundamental premise of New Urbanism is that if streets, sidewalks, and other public and semipublic spaces are laid out properly, community life will tend to flourish. But a growing number of new urbanists argue that it’s not enough to get the physical design right. What’s also needed is community institutions — particularly nonprofit organizations that will sponsor activities and enrich local life.

New Urban News Article with images, table, sidebar, 1/1/2007
In a South Carolina case study, “light-imprint” infrastructure reduced anticipated engineering expenses 31 percent.
In the December issue, we reported that new urbanist developers are increasingly turning to “natural drainage systems” — techniques that allow much of a community’s stormwater to soak into the ground rather than be piped to rivers, lakes, treatment plants, or large, unsightly detention ponds. A newly completed study led by Tom Low shows that these more natural methods could sharply reduce engineering costs for traditional neighborhood developments (TNDs).

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.

New Urban News Article with image, 6/1/2006
Developers get into trouble when they fail to address the following issues in building a new urban community.
It is much easier to develop a traditional neighborhood development (TND) today than it was a decade ago. At that time, discussions were dominated more by entitlement and financial issues than by design, marketing, and construction. Few tools were available to help in the process. There was no Best Practices Guide from New Urban Publications, no Lexicon, no SmartCode, no National Town Builders Association. There were few built projects to visit and study, even fewer development teams with TND experience, and no email listserves that connected practitioners across the globe.