In the Wilkinsburg-Brushton Station Area Plan, PRT proposes to shift the Wilkinsburg Station to the other side of the park-and-ride lot, closer to Downtown Wilkinsburg and the businesses / homes along Penn Avenue. Relocating the station closer to Downtown Wilkinsburg will make it much easier and more practical to use.

Shifting the Wilkinsburg Station closer to Downtown Wilkinsburg provides an opportunity to add a new station (Brushton Station) to serve the neighborhoods of Point Breeze North and Homewood South. Brushton Station will be placed between the existing Homewood Station and the relocated Wilkinsburg Station.

Right now, a large portion of Homewood South lies far from both the existing Homewood and Wilkinsburg stations. When Brushton Station is built, residents of this area will have a much shorter walk / bike / roll to reach the high-speed transit along the East Busway.

Major investments in transit can lead to inequitable development patterns by contributing to rising housing costs. Good public transit is seen as a major "perk" that people want to live next to, which leads to demand for housing near transit rising and housing getting more expensive.

If not paired with thoughtful, community-driven planning, major transit investments can lead to people who have lived in neighborhoods for decades to suddenly get "priced out" of their neighborhoods. For example, when the East Liberty Transit Center on the East Busway was renovated, it directly led to housing prices increasing in the surrounding neighborhood.

Learning from this experience, we are going to proactively create a plan to ensure the new busway station benefits the neighborhood first. We would like to redevelop our properties into mixed-use development with public input so that the community has a say in what is built around the Brushton Station, before the station itself is constructed. We'd also like to look into policy and program recommendations that will allow existing residents to benefit from the station's construction.

We will work with the community to create site plans and implementation manuals for mixed-use development on three specific sets of publicly owned vacant properties in the area within a 10-minute walk of the Brushton Station site.

City and PRT staff will hold two public design workshops to get a sense of what types of uses people would like to see on these sites. From there, we will work with an urban design consultant to create site plans based on the input we receive. Then, we will work with other City agencies and the Council District 9 office to transfer these properties to a developer that will build out the site plan the community created with us.

In addition to redeveloping sites, DCP will work closely with partner agencies to establish policy and program recommendations tailored to each site that will ensure new development benefits the people who already live in the area.

This study will be guided by the community priorities established in previous planning efforts such as the adopted Homewood Comprehensive Community Plan and the Homewood Cluster Plans.

The City will leverage its own property holdings for mixed-use development. We would like to repurpose three sets of our vacant properties into a mix of housing at different forms (1-4 bedroom apartments, townhouses, etc), parks and open space, community-serving retail, neighborhood-serving businesses, and employment uses.

This aligns with general planning best practices for properties that have access to strong public transit.

We'd like to consult the community to learn exactly what that mix of uses will be and what buildings themselves will look like. We want to learn what types of housing the community needs, what types of businesses the community would benefit from, and what the neighborhood wants buildings to look like.

It is important for development near reliable public transit to consist of a mix of different things. Being able to develop different kinds of housing and businesses near reliable transit service makes it much easier to maximize the impacts of public transit.

This study is jointly funded by the Department of City Planning and Pittsburgh Regional Transit. Because this study is primarily focused on City-owned land, DCP staff are taking the lead here, but DCP is working with an urban design consultant contracted with PRT.

DCP staff will be working closely with the Homewood Community Development Collaborative and its member organizations for community engagement. The Homewood Collaborative helped us scope the study out. We will also work with Homewood residents throughout the course of the study to ensure that development in the station area reflects the community's vision, needs, and values.

Once the study ends, we'll work with the Department of Mobility and Infrastructure (DOMI), the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), the Department of Permits, Licensing, and Inspections (PLI), and the Pittsburgh Land Bank to prepare City-owned properties for development. We'll also be continuing to stay present in the community to provide updates after the project formally ends.

The study's advisory committee consists of a combination of the following:

• Community leaders and representatives from community organizations.
• People who live in the study area.
• Planners, engineers, and development managers from various City agencies and authorities.
• Representatives from the Council District 9 office.

This committee's job is to make sure that development on City-owned property near the Brushton Station is both technically feasible and aligned with community priorities. This body will meet three times to provide oversight, input, and feedback at key milestones.

DCP will work with community organizations to plan two public design workshops for the study.

The first public design workshop will be structured as an interactive event where we'll invite participants to help brainstorm conceptual design ideas. We want input from community members to help shape what development could look like on vacant properties, and we want to know what the community wants us to do with these properties. We'll use the feedback from this first workshop to create draft site plans. which we'll present at the next workshop.

The second design workshop will be an open house for attendees to share their opinions on the draft site plans. We want feedback to refine the development proposal for each site. We want to make sure that the design concept that we create for each site aligns with what the community wants.

City Planning staff will ensure that the event is accessible for people who attend the design workshops in person. In advance of each workshop, we'll also try to understand if there are any language translation or ASL interpretation needs. Online versions of the workshop activities will be published on this page for folks who can't make it in person.

Yes! Recognizing that people have jobs and other commitments that may limit their ability to participate, we'll also build in opportunities for people to share their feedback with us both in-person and virtually.

These activities will include:

• Publishing online surveys for participants to fill out and send in on their own time.
• Printing copies of surveys and giving them to local businesses and community spaces to ensure people without access to the Internet can still share their thoughts.
• Sharing the materials used for each interactive workshop on EngagePGH and pairing them with online workshop activities that participants can complete on their own time.
• Attending regularly-scheduled community meetings outside of the design workshops to share project updates and get feedback.
• Holding regular and recurring "office hours" for the project where people can stop in, learn more about the project, and get updates.

We'll be combining a data-driven approach, looking at plans that have already been created for the area, and vetting them with the study's advisory committee.

After assessing the City's land holdings in the Brushton Station area, we'll be selecting sites for further study based on:

• Proximity to the proposed Brushton Station site.

• Guidance from previous planning work (the Homewood Comprehensive Community Plan, the Homewood Cluster Plans, etc.)

• How feasible it is to develop the site - we'd like to avoid building in areas that are prone to flooding or require a lot of infrastructure investment.

• Site size and the ability to combine parcels.

• Any other relevant findings from the initial existing conditions analysis.

We will then run these sites past the study's advisory committee. From there, we'll present these sites at the first public design workshop to get ideas on what community members want us to do with these properties.

PRT is currently working on the design and engineering documents for the redesigned Wilkinsburg Station and the new Brushton Station. They are close to 30% complete with this task, and once PRT reaches this milestone, they will update community members with their progress. PRT is actively seeking funding for the construction of Brushton Station.