How Pittsburgh Yards Is Pioneering Community-led BeltLine Development

South of downtown Atlanta, 31-acre project aims to be an inclusive economic catalyst

During each morning commute for many years, Toni Morrison-McBride would load into her car, drive about two blocks to University Avenue, and wince. A City of Atlanta clerk and doting grandmother, Morrison-McBride has lived nearly all of her 60 years in Pittsburgh, a neighborhood two miles south of downtown wedged up against the Connector. Her drive to the interstate entailed a glimpse at something both unavoidable and painful: the ruins of a sprawling trucking facility that symbolized the area’s economic hardships. …

As of six months ago, that’s all changed. Construction launched in March on Pittsburgh Yards, a multifaceted adaptive-reuse venture spearheaded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a philanthropic organization that aims to better the lives of American children, alongside partners Core Ventures and Columbia Ventures, a company with local expertise in affordable housing. The site is several blocks east of the Atlanta Beltline’s Westside Trail; even more crucially, its southern border will one day be the Southside Trail, which engineers indicate will swoop down to Pittsburgh Yards’s back porch, so to speak, leaving an elevated former railroad for future transit.

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Courtesy of Curbed Atlanta