Bill Wade, Post-Gazette In their office at the Gulf tower, Dana Kalowsky, left, meets with Martene Bryan in their sub-group before meeting with the rest of the 15 Carnegie Mellon University Heinz School students conducting a study on Downtown living. Click photo for larger image.

The study, which is being conducted by a group of 15 students as their senior thesis, will provide what may be the most comprehensive picture yet of how Downtown rates not as a business district, but as a neighborhood.

Mike Sriprasert, a student at CMU's Heinz School of Public Policy and Management, got the idea from reading news reports about Downtown. "As long as I've been in Pittsburgh, I've read about how there's nothing happening Downtown," he said.

When he began to see stories about the surge in residential projects that will bring some 700 units of housing to the Downtown area, he began to think about doing a study focusing on Downtown housing.

The Heinz School requires the students' work to involve an actual client, so Sripasert signed up the Downtown Living Initiative after pitching his idea to the nonprofit's program director, Patty Burk. Burk, whose organization promotes and encourages Downtown residences, gave him guidelines on what types of research would be useful.

The students also are working with Jerry Paytas, director of CMU's Center for Economic Development, as their academic adviser for their project, dubbed the Downtown Pittsburgh Living Collaborative.

Graduate student Ethan Brinkman-Hansen volunteered for the project because he believes "there's a real need for better Downtown housing and a need for more people to live Downtown." Too often, he said, Downtown is "deserted" after 5 p.m.

For Amber Keech, the project provides an opportunity to "give back to the city that we've grown to love" as students.

Paytas saw an opportunity to bring more rigor to discussions about Downtown living.

"I think a lot of people look immediately at the costs," of living Downtown without analyzing the benefits, he said. "This is looking at what does it really mean to live Downtown."

The group is divided into four subgroups. One will do a cost/benefit analysis, another will focus on marketing Downtown living to young professionals, a third will focus on studying tax incentives for living Downtown and the fourth ill use geographic information systems to collect information about what types of housing are located where.

Besides the Heinz School students' research, the study will incorporate the work of CMU architecture students who will create designs for apartments and condominiums geared toward young professionals.

"We're trying to determine, for those earning between $25,000 and $45,000 a year, what they can afford, and what are their preferences," Burk said.

The collaborative members plan to complete their study and deliver the results to the Downtown Living Initiative by mid-December. The initiative will then make the results available to developers and others with an interest in Downtown living.

An unusual aspect of the project is that the students have set up a Downtown office as their base of operations, on the first floor of the Gulf Tower.

Even in an age of e-mail, Web sites and cell phones, they find that their location helps their work, allowing them to meet with real estate brokers, developers and Downtown merchants more easily than they could in Oakland.

And, they said, they are having "lots of meetings" -- among themselves, Downtown businesses and executives and every two weeks, with an advisory committee of Downtown businesspeople and representatives from the Urban Redevelopment Authority.

The study is being supported with donations of furniture, Internet service and equipment from Mellon Financial, the Full Service Network and Office Furniture Warehouse.

The office space also was donated by the Gulf Tower's owner, Rugby Realty Inc., partly because the project had an inside connection. Broker and manager Larry Walsh graduated from the Heinz School.

"I am very familiar with how the projects work and what great research these students do," he said, adding he was eager to help.

After their first meeting with their advisory committee, Paytas seemed confident that the students will produce valuable research. "They have an aggressive piece of work ahead of them but they've scoped it out pretty well," he said.