Cornerstone village how to#
Cornerstone village professional#

Cornerstone village how to#

It also presents a new model for how to build mixed-income communities at a financeable per-unit cost through high-level design values, significant sustainable technologies (the first phase achieved Enterprise Green Communities, Energy Star and LEED for Homes Platinum certifications), and using myriad public/private financial sources. Cornerstone has helped to knit back the community, connecting it to larger areas of opportunity around the disinvested core. What was once an isolated, disinvested, impoverished community is becoming a stable, sustainable, desirable community of Choice for diverse families from all income levels. The CNI grant was awarded in June 2014.Ĭornerstone Village, the Housing Component of the Larimer/East Liberty Choice Neighborhood is helping to create a new, broader paradigm for how low-income and mixed-income housing development can change the trajectory of an entire neighborhood. With the Vision to Action plan serving as a blueprint, the City, the URA and HACP, together with McCormack Baron Salazar, the non-profit Urban Strategies, Inc., and the public school district, submitted a FY 2013 Choice Neighborhoods Initiative Implementation grant application for Larimer/East Liberty.

The effort resulted in the “Larimer/East Liberty Vision to Action Plan.” The collaborative Vision to Action Plan built on the tremendous private investment taking place along the edges of the neighborhood in East Liberty while focusing on enhancing the positive aspects of the Larimer community.

Cornerstone village professional#

In Larimer/East Liberty, which was traditionally inhabited by steel workers and masons, the problems of a shifting economy were exacerbated by urban renewal efforts that concentrated poverty and isolated residents into a large public housing site and several subsidized housing developments.įor over fifteen years, residents of the community joined with the City of Pittsburgh, the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh (HACP), the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), professional experts and community stakeholders to develop a long term plan for the transformation of the Larimer/East Liberty community into a “21st Century Green Neighborhood that Works.” Pittsburgh experienced a transformation from industrial to post-industrial city, which brought a dramatic decline in population and major shift in employment opportunities. The Larimer/East Liberty neighborhood exemplifies the transition that many urban neighborhoods in older industrial cities underwent in the second half of the twentieth century.