PA: The Editorial Board: Editorial: PRT holds the keys to transit-oriented development

Pittsburgh Regional Transit is rightly looking to redevelop prime real estate near its Dormont Junction light rail station, space that's currently used, and underutilized, for parking. It's a smart way to kickstart transit-oriented development (TOD), bringing more people to the area and more riders into the system.

With fewer workers commuting to Downtown, vast parking lots near bus and light rail hubs are going unused. This is a tremendous waste of what could be some of the most desirable land in Allegheny County. Activating these sites, however, has proven difficult, as the demise of the long-awaited Shannon Transit Village makes clear.

The parking lot for the Castle Shannon light rail station must be one of the most extensive fields of concrete in the region. Around four acres, it has spaces for over 500 cars, but far fewer use it today. All the way back in 2000, PRT began to consider using some of that pavement for a TOD project. Sixteen years later, the agency formally announced plans for a 152-unit apartment building along Castle Shannon Blvd.

But the project was hampered from the start by bureaucracy, as well as concerns about parking spaces and the affordability of the proposed housing. Much of the surface parking was to be replaced by a parking garage, worrying some commuters who feared there would not be enough spaces.

The Pittsburghers for Public Transit advocacy group opposed the project for being entirely market-rate. And the Federal Transit Administration had an archaic rule that required that every lost parking space be replaced, one-to-one. That rule, happily, was loosened under the Biden administration.

In 2021, still in the throes of the COVID pandemic, PRT finally cancelled the plan, over two decades after it was first created. But there's a digital artifact: Google Maps lists the " Shannon Transit Village" as existing on the site, even though it remains a field of pockmarked concrete to this day.

Plans for the Dormont Junction parking lot also have a long history, but ran into similar issues. It'll be important, this time, to select high-quality partners focused on getting shovels in the ground.

One possible snag: The new process for choosing a developer requires that 15% of units in new residential construction must be affordable to households making 80% or less of the area median income. This inclusionary zoning requirement is actually written into Dormont Borough's development code for land near transit stations, and it's a little more complicated than it seems.

The borough's IZ rule has an unusual quality: The income cap for renting households is 50% AMI, and for buying households is 80% AMI. This means that, because the development is likely to be rental, the affordability requirement is, in practice, 50% AMI. That increases the funding gap for developers — this is an unfunded mandate — and could limit development opportunities.

A targeted application of IZ near transit hubs is much better than the blanket unfunded IZ proposed by Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey, given the high desirability of such properties. But if, in this high-interest-rate, high-cost environment, PRT and Dormont struggle to find compelling partners, the borough must consider amending its IZ rules. If no housing gets built, no one gets affordable housing.

For PRT, this Dormont project should be a trial run for further TOD projects on its fields of pavement. The agency should revisit Castle Shannon, for instance, and look at Washington Junction in Bethel Park, and — if the Silver Line survives — Library Station in South Park.

These areas do little good now. PRT and its partners must turn them into productive, economically valuable housing.

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