Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Can Transit Grow Pittsburgh Neighborhoods?

From Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Each weekday, light-rail cars packed with a total of 13,000 commuters rumble through the Beechview business district, which is dotted with vacant storefronts. Buses haul another 30,000 riders on the Martin Luther King Jr.East Busway, passing the Homewood station, surrounded by long-standing blight and decay. Can railcars and buses be engines of rebirth for those and other struggling communities? A growing body of planners, nationally and locally, thinks so. They have embraced a concept they call transit-oriented development, the aim of which is to create and sustain walkable neighborhoods with a mix of housing and retail development and transit hubs -- light-rail or busway stations -- at their core. "If the single-family home in the suburbs was the American Dream of yore, the new American Dream also includes lofts, townhomes, live-work spaces and apartments in walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods near high-quality transit," says Reconnecting America, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that promotes transit-oriented development.