Developers hope transit-oriented projects will spark revitalization.

Pasadena residents will soon see the Blue Line pull into Memorial Park Station, where the train's long, serpentine form will disappear into a tunnel beneath a building. Sitting directly atop the tunnel, like a beacon, is a 374-unit Mediterranean-style apartment complex with 11,000 square feet of restaurant space at street level, located within a block of the popular Old Town shopping district.

The Holly Street Village Apartments, which opened in January, is the most recen example of a new type of development, or at least new to Southern California: the transit-oriented development. Such projects combine housing, office space, stores, restaurants, museums and other attractions within a short distance of transit stations.

Projects in or around transit stations can serve a larger agenda, by acting as "catalysts for revitalizing the areas of the city," according to Steven J. Schafenacker, project director for Janss Corp., the Santa Monica-based develope of the Pasadena apartments.

Transit-oriented development also makes sense for transit operators, because studies indicate that people who live within 1,000 feet of transit stations ten to use buses and trains more than their cars. By concentrating housing and service businesses near train stations, Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials hope they can encourage ridership in a city still unaccustomed to rail.

Most transit-oriented developments are planned within a one-mile radius of the station, "so each becomes a little center of the community and helps provide th local community with its own identity," said Harshad Patel, a Beverly Hills-based architect who is designing the Pasadena light rail station. He went so far as to predict that transit-oriented development will "change the culture of L.A. eventually," into a series of pedestrian-oriented communities linked by rail.

With more than 50 Metro Rail stations to be built in the next 30 years, station offer a major opportunity in urban design, according to Nick Patsaouras, an MTA director. "We can no longer design transit and cities as if they were separate. We need a master vision," said Patsaouras, who ran for mayor of Los Angeles las year on a platform of using transit projects as a springboard for both economic revitalization and urban renewal.

"My vision is to try and combine two elements -- land use and transit -- from a urbanistic point of view," he said.

The Pasadena station is the second transit-oriented project for Janss, which completed Pine Square in Long Beach within a mile of a Blue Line station. That project contains 142 apartments, a 16-screen cinema multiplex and 37,000 square feet of restaurants.

Another notable example is Grand Central Square in downtown Los Angeles, where developer Ira Yellin is retrofitting the upper stories of the Homer Laughlin Building and Million Dollar Theater on Broadway near Third Street with 121 apartments and 20,000 square feet of office space. The project, which the MTA and Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency helped to finance, is a block south of the Hill Street Metro Rail station.

Patsaouras said design quality has not always been paramount at the county's transit agency, and he is particularly scornful of the first four Metro Rail stations in downtown Los Angeles, which he claims relate poorly to their surroundings and add little to civic life. "They're a disgrace -- and you can quote me," said Patsaouras. "What I find particularly infuriating is that they design the station first, and try to fit development around it, which is totall backwards," he added.

More recently, the notion of a more sensitive relationship has gained support. In November of last year, the Los Angeles City Council adopted a "Land Use/Transportation Policy" that specifically calls for high-density housing and businesses to be clustered near rail stations. "Surrounding the transit stops are high-activity, livable, pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods that are linked t other neighborhoods via rail, bus and other modes of transportation," the document states.

In December, the MTA board adopted specific urban-design guidelines for "joint development" projects, which are public-private collaborations between developers and the transit authority. In some cases, MTA has bought additional land near rail stations to make land available for housing.

The Willow Station in Long Beach is the first joint-development project undertaken with the full participation of MTA. In addition, the transit authority has issued "requests for qualifications" to developers interested in building projects on or near 10 additional stations that are part of the Metro Rail second and third segments, which run along Wilshire Boulevard and up through Hollywood and into North Hollywood and Universal City.

But if some transit officials, government leaders and urban designers are sold on transit-oriented development, many real estate lenders are not.

"We found it to be a very hard sell to lenders, at least in the financial community of Southern California," said Janss' Schafenacker, speaking of the effort to find financing for the Pasadena apartments.

Eventually, he added, the developer found financing from lenders in Portland, New York and Tokyo. "I think it's more than coincidence that each of those cities has mass transit," he said.

Schafenacker acknowledged that it's too early to argue for the success of transit-oriented projects in the Los Angeles area, but cited success in other cities. "We find that in other cities with rail transit, the closer you get to the stations, the higher the properties' values are."