By Teresa F. Lindeman / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

When officials at search engine giant Google were considering whether to put offices in the Bakery Square project in Larimer a few years ago, they had a question: Is Target coming?

The retailers decision to move into East Liberty was one of series of cascading steps that have helped drive redevelopment in an area once known mainly for deteriorating buildings and concerns about crime, according to Mark Minnerly, director of real estate at the Downtown-based Mosites Co.

Mr. Minnerlys remarks came Wednesday during a webinar hosted by the Urban Land Institute, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that has been pulling together information on issues of retail in underserved communities.

The institute, where former Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy is a senior resident fellow, put together a report that looked at three neighborhoods that have brought about change driven in part by retail. In addition to the East Liberty effort, other case studies considered were Union Market in Washington, D.C., and Old Spanish Trail in Houston.

Specifically, conclusions in the report issued Wednesday were drawn from the exchange at a forum in February that included the institutes representatives, as well as officials from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and from the New York trade group International Council of Shopping Centers.

Among the conclusions was one that called for choosing a bridge location a place like East Liberty that could draw on both low- and high-income neighborhoods. Once improvement has taken hold there, interest spreads to nearby areas, as it has to the Garfield neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

In the case of East Liberty, Mr. Minnerly along with Mr. Murphy and Steve Mosites, president of the Mosites Co. said getting Home Depot to come was the first step in getting momentum to reverse damage done by misguided urban renewal efforts decades earlier.

The Mosites Co. hasn't been involved in all of the projects in the neighborhood, but has been a key player in the revitalization effort.

The Home Depot store opened in 1998, with help from public funding. It is the largest volume store in the Pittsburgh market, Mr. Minnerly said.

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East Liberty's revitalization efforts studied