Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Alethea Sims leads an East Liberty citizens group that has helped the community transition to a housing mix for all income types, like the new Penn Manor units under construction on North St. Clair Street, where Ms. Sims stood yesterday. Click photo for larger image.

At the midpoint of East Liberty's latest housing transformation, Saundra Truss lives in the only high-rise still standing.

In a year, according to her plan, she will be ensconced in her chosen apartment in the new Liberty Park low-rise apartments at Broad Street and Collins Avenue. A high-rise on that site was razed in 2004.

When finished, the first phase will include 16 three-story buildings with 124 units of mixed-income rental housing.

Alethea Sims is passing on Liberty Park and Penn Manor, a three-story development of 55 units that will be ready for rent next month. She wants to live on the footprint of the East Mall high-rise, where she lived for 20 years.

Plans are nascent for redevelopment of the site where the 17-story building straddled Penn Avenue. It was razed last summer, and Ms. Sims watched the effects of the wrecking ball from a replacement apartment at Penn Plaza across the street.

When all the East Liberty high-rises are gone, most former residents -- about 300 -- will have bided time in temporary housing with dibs on their more community-friendly replacements. Rents will be commensurate with what people were paying before.

Six years ago, East Liberty's comeback centered around 10 new townhouses on Mellon Street and the arrival of Home Depot. But the journey started a decade ago, said Rob Stephany of East Liberty Development Inc.

"In 1996, the citizens began meeting, and the consensus was that East Liberty was a 'traditional town' that needed to undo the effects of urban renewal," he said.

Many low-income people tolerate musical-chairs housing scenarios cyclically. In the most recent cycle, planners and policy makers have deemed high-rises big mistakes and devised human-scale, streetscape planning that avoids isolating the poor and the social problems that shadow them. But it also usually avoids their input.

Ms. Sims, president of the Citizens Organization for East Liberty -- called CORE -- asserted the right of its membership to sit at the table when East Liberty's planners began building a master plan.

"It wouldn't have been done right if it wasn't for CORE," said Ms. Truss. "People would have just been put out."

Ms. Sims said it has taken awhile for the people she calls "the suits" to see the wisdom of listening to people who actually live the plans being hatched.

"They're getting better at it," she said. "I don't know of any other neighborhood where the residents had this much input."

The staff at East Liberty Development Inc. say they have been committed to the needs of displaced tenants.

"It was imperative that we were," said Mr. Stephany, the group's director of commercial development. "With the earlier urban renewal [of the 1960s], the people didn't see the plan, but they bought it, and they got burned."

"When we started the process with residents," said Ernie Hogan, East Liberty Development's director of residential development, "it was agreed we would replace unit for unit for tenants who wanted to return." Mr. Hogan said his group did a four-day outreach to former high-rise tenants this past summer.

The discussions "went back and forth a lot until they were a little friendlier to people who are low- to moderate-income," she said. "Our thing was we didn't want it to be like Crawford Square [in the lower Hill], where people who gave up their homes can't afford to live now."

The company that developed Crawford Square -- McCormack Baron Salazar -- is the developer of the new Liberty Park.

Another housing plan involves scattered-site apartment buildings along the border with Highland Park. Some will include support services for the disabled and recovering addicts, in partnership with East End Cooperative Ministries and Sojourner House, said Mr. Hogan.

He said people are on waiting lists for all the proposed housing.

Some of Ms. Truss' neighbors in the Penn Circle high-rise will be moving into the spanking-new Penn Manor at Penn Avenue and St. Clair Street next month, but she's satisfied to wait another year for Liberty Park.

"There's a smaller number of units in the buildings," she said of her choice. "I'll have my own washer and dryer, central air and a security system. I'm excited to have a new apartment."

Liberty Park is on a 13-acre site, four acres of which will be configured into a public park, said Kendall Pelling, planning and acquisitions coordinator at East Liberty Development.

He said the three-phase project will be completed by 2010.

Some of the homes for sale in the last phase will have deferred mortgages to help entry-level homeowners, "but we will also have market-rate rentals, something the neighborhood hasn't had," said Mr. Hogan.

"East Liberty lost 4,000 houses to urban renewal" in the 1960s, he said. "We know we won't be able to bring it all back, but we're looking at how to bring some of it back in the most meaningful way."

Today, Penn Manor will celebrate its near-completion with a 4 p.m. open house at Penn Avenue at St. Clair Street. Tomorrow at 1 p.m., developers are throwing a "hard-hat party" for the Liberty Park project, which is one-third completed, at Broad Street and Collins Avenue. The public is welcome.