Progress and Larimer rarely share the same sentence, except from the mouth of Ora Lee Carroll, the city neighborhood's perennial wagon-puller.

But that's been changing.

If you avoided the corner of Larimer Avenue and Meadow Street a few years ago but you walk there now, you know it is. Mike Fiore of Mike's Auto Body shop, watching the return of traffic on Meadow to and from Highland Park, knows, too.

A less subtle sign is Walnut Capital's $113 million Bakery Square development now being built on the site of the former Nabisco plant on Penn Avenue. Bakery Square may not be the neighborhood, as Roland Costen-Criswell pointed out at a recent community meeting, but it is in it -- facing Shadyside, but in Larimer.

The flurry of investment has softened Larimer's borders with Shadyside, East Liberty and Highland Park. Ms. Carroll, who for years has touted her neighborhood by pleading for investment, now is plotting the future with Pat Clark, a community development consultant who has worked on land-use and investment strategies for communities throughout the region.

In the way of symbiosis, others have come up with strategies of their own.

Mr. Fiore is doing more than watching traffic. The owner of the body shop he used to ride his bike through as a child hopes to build a training center for aspiring mechanics in a lot beside his shop at Meadow and McDonald streets.

It will be an expansion of his shop, he said, and a classroom. He has an architect's rendering and some of the land he needs.

"Now seems like the time for Larimer," he said. "The bus is here, and the doors are open."

Two young couples, one with two children, have bought and fixed-up two homes on Carver Street since 2005. With help from friends who travel on bicycles, they cleaned adjacent lots so they could garden.

Courtney Sage's husband, Nathan Mould, bought first with a friend in 2005 for $16,000, and then he and she bought across the street for $17,000. Another friend since has bought on Mayflower Street.

"Everything's been great," she said. "People seem pretty interested in us" because of their pierced skin, tattoos and dreadlocks. "It's not such a bad neighborhood. It gives young people a chance to own a house, and it feels good to take old houses and fix them up."

Tonyaneka Azeen hopes to add to the population. She took five weeks of classes to clear up her credit so she could buy one of three houses to be built on Carver Street, possibly this year. At a recent community meeting, she held up a certificate of achievement from the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency, to applause.

Olahfemi Mandley said she has a dream of living in Larimer, upstairs from her catering business.

"Now it's a goal. I hope that by August, I am established" in a building she is renovating on Larimer Avenue, Ms. Mandley said.

"You cannot revitalize a community by putting new facades on buildings," she said. "People need to have an example."

With Ola, Appetit!, she said, "my goal is to live, work, employ and teach cooking classes, presentation and etiquette."

Mr. Clark, while interviewing residents to help them build a plan for future development, said he has heard lots of frustration.

"You hear people saying, 'I want to buy a business, I want to buy a house, I want to buy that ugly property next to me,'" he said, but the obstacles are discouraging, from unreturned phone calls to bureaucratic snags.

The people with dreams, goals and this kind of patience are the backbone of Larimer's chance to succeed, he said. "We can't lose these people."

Larimer has lost roughly 70 percent of its population of 40 years ago. Vacant lots and vacant homes outnumber those occupied, and only a handful of businesses remain.

Last year, Penn State Cooperative Extension's local office began low-maintenance plantings on vacant lots, from which the city had hauled away truckloads of rubble and invasive plants.

It planted trees, shrubs and grasses on cleared properties in the neighborhood, starting with the gateway to and from Highland Park, at the end of the Meadow Street bridge. Mike's Auto supplied hoses for Ms. Carroll to water the plants last summer.

One planting on Larimer Avenue is a biofuels project being done with GTECH, a nonprofit group, said Deno De Ciantis, the extension service director in Allegheny County.

"We are planting sunflowers to collect the seed pods and grind them for biodiesel," he said. Also this year, greening strategies will be horticulture and landscape design training for teenagers and young adults.

These lots create a holding pattern until the market shows up, but they can create their own spin-offs, said Rob Stephany, deputy executive director of the city's Urban Redevelopment Authority. "It's starting to get people excited about green commerce, green technology, green markets."

He said Larimer's "adjacency to stability affords an opportunity they haven't had for 40 years. There are mixed-income housing market pressures a few blocks away. So instead of Larimer surrounded by blight, Larimer finally has some strong edges to build off of."

"And if you do it right," said Paul Svoboda, legislative assistant to state Sen. Jim Ferlo, D-Highland Park, "the people who have been invested can stay invested, and they will get to meet new and diverse neighbors."

Ms. Carroll hopes that happens in her lifetime.

"I've been carrying this neighborhood on my back for a long time," she said. "I want to sit in a rocking chair."