What exactly is “by right” development, and how might it not match what’s actually built in your community?
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Too many neighborhoods have a demand and need for additional housing, but builders believe there's not enough existing lots to build on. Here's how to demonstrate otherwise.
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Developers and builders often ask the same question: “What can I build on x lot?” But what is it that they’re actually looking for, and how can the urban planners they work with help them make the most of a given space?
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Zoning restrictions in this Minneapolis suburb have rendered much of its original development in violation of its current rules. The city’s leadership is looking to change that.
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A troubled project in Mission, KS, speaks to the problems with large, single-developer projects—but also why fixating on the "bad developer" narrative isn't necessarily helpful.
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The Conservancy of Southwest Florida has done the math on a proposed development in rural Collier County, FL, and what they discovered enabled them to take a large-scale developer to court.
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If it takes a village to raise a child, then it takes a whole community to build a building. The small-scale developers of South Bend, IN, are showing how to do just that—and do it successfully in the long term.
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The way we build our neighborhoods in North America is nothing like making a pizza. But maybe it should be.
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Mixed-use development was once the norm in cities and towns, but most Americans no longer remember how it works. Here are 3 easy-to-understand forms that mixed use could (and should) take in your community.
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Many of us are keen to express the “what” that we’d like to see in the built environment, but unwilling to think rationally and clearly about the “how.”
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A recent article from The Wall Street Journal claims that land must be positioned in a very specific way to support more development. What’s the Strong Towns take on this?
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Part of why we can't agree on constructive solutions to traffic congestion is that our basic mental model of what causes traffic is wrong. But what if we made a slight update to that model?
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Counterintuitive though it may feel, sometimes to build a better city, we need to prune things back, rather than adding more.
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Congressman Jake Auchincloss: "We don't need a gas tax holiday. We need a gas tax reset: an overhaul of how we approach transportation funding.”
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Today, city planning departments obsess over what happens inside buildings but pay scant attention to the quality of the space outside them.
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Aldo Leopold was an ecologist, not an urban planner, but insights from his Sand County Almanac can resonate with anyone interested in urbanism.
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We tend to choose larger homes than we want our neighbors to choose. The result: suburban-style development that doesn't match what people actually want from their communities.
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"Developers in my city are only building luxury housing. They're not building anything that ordinary people can afford." If you’ve said this lately, or heard someone else say it, here are five possible reasons why.
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We love organically grown, incrementally developed cities…but could we replicate their success if we started a new city from scratch?
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Residents of Pensacola, FL, are working to make their city a better place to place to live, work, and thrive in as they implement incremental changes.
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