A team of eight Carnegie Mellon University students has won a national prize for creating a blueprint that brings a grocery back to the Hill District.

Each year, the JP Morgan Chase Community Development Competition evaluates student projects that seek to show how investing in high-risk areas can turn neighborhoods around and that universities and local communities can work together.

The students' win means $25,000 will go to the Hill House, a neighborhood social services agency, as seed funding to pursue the grocery plan.

The CMU team designed a two-story brick store. It would feature large windows and be environmentally friendly, using recyclable materials and having a grass-covered roof to absorb rainfall. The second level would offer small-business office space and there would a street-level outdoor cafe, planned as a social center to attract pedestrians and churchgoers.

As designed, the store would sit in the middle of the lower Hill, across from the Hill House, the neighborhood's 40-year-old social services agency, where students believe it would create a core of density that would draw small businesses and patrons.

It would be a nonprofit enterprise that would hire employees from the neighborhood and use earnings to offer training, day-care and other services to the community.

Developers have long said a grocery store is the missing piece of neighborhood renewal for the Hill. It's been more than two decades since a full-service market was in the Hill District. Developers have offered plans, only to pull out at the last minute.

The CMU project grew out of the university's Urban Laboratory, a grass roots program that puts students to work with local residents, public officials and private organizations to envision future development. An Urban Laboratory has been working in the Hill District since 1991.