“The team hopes that construction will begin in April of 2020.” That was what many Four Corners community members wanted to hear at a public meeting on Monday on the status of a long-awaited housing development said to be close to a launch.

Community organizing and planning aimed at transforming a large vacant lot into something useful has been ongoing for more than a decade and many residents at the gathering in the Greenwood Memorial United Methodist Church were eager to hear that things were on the move.

The proposal by the Codman Square Neighborhood Development Corporation (NDC) includes a 4-story, 32-unit main housing structure with ground-level commercial on Bowdoin Street and a 3-story residential townhouse building consisting of three-bedroom units on adjacent Bowdoin Avenue.  

The project has been “sitting around in one form or another since 2006,” according to Fernando Domenech, Jr. from DHK Architects Inc., the designer of the buildings.

Development plans were most recently approved in 2015. Then, at a public meeting in June of this year the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA) presented the community feedback, which suggested a reduction of commercial space in favor of more rental units. The agency filed a request for changes in early August that reduced the size of the proposed commercial retail space from approximately 8,000 square feet to 4,000 square feet and increased the number of residential apartment units by four to address the lack of affordable housing in the neighborhood.

“In lieu of that space [for] the commercial end of the building, we’ve now found another four units of housing,” Domenech Jr. said. There will be 36 parking spaces: 11 will be reserved as commercial and the remaining 25 will be residential.  

A combined 35 units will be available for rent in either the main structure or in the townhouse development. Housing options will include three studio units, nine one-bedrooms, nineteen two-bedrooms, and four three-bedroom rental apartments. All of the units will be affordable housing— with eight units at 30 percent below Area Median Income (AMI), eight units below 50 percent AMI, and the remaining below 60 percent AMI. 

A rendering shows what a cluster of townhouses would look like along Bowdoin Avenue. Courtesy DHK Architects, Inc.

“We’re trying to peg these units to [be affordable] to people that have incomes that are similar to incomes in this neighborhood,” said Gail Latimore, the executive director of the Codman Square NDC. “Some of the units are made for folks who have incomes even lower than that.” 

Viable tenants for the commercial space “have been hard to find,” said Megan Reagon, a project manager for Codman Square NDC, noting that as another reason for trimming back the space for retail.

“Without having the project built, it’s very hard for retailers to commit this long out,” Reagon added, “but we’ve been working with our broker and expressing what the community does or does not want to see.” 

“One of the things we do have a track record of doing in this community,” said Latimore, “is trying our best to identify and support local small businesses. We can’t give the space away, but we do favor small businesses in our commercial spaces. We have to determine that as we go along, but we try our best.” 

The next steps in getting everything to yes for a launch in April are: Formalizing the approval process for the latest changes with the Department of Housing and Community Development, outlining constructing prices, and selecting a general contractor. 

The process “can be pretty fast from this point forward,” said the BPDA’s Edward Carmody, who was filling in for project manager John Campbell. “The team hopes that construction will begin in April of 2020.”

When an attendee asked if the developers had gathered feedback from abutters, several residents in the room noted with some emotion that the project had gone past that point for some time. 

“This has been going on for at least 13 years. We have been trying to build on that space since 2000,” said Theresa Latson, president of the Four Corners United Neighborhood Association (UNA), adding that the group “voted for this in June so that we would have four additional low-income housing units.”

“At the end of the day,” Latson said, “we’ve gone to so many meetings and we’ve changed those plans several times. It’s time for us to do something. We sat on all kinds of committees to beautify this community, and nothing has occurred as of yet. And we need housing that our young people can afford.” 

Iris DuPont of the Mt. Bowdoin Betterment Association concurred with Latson: “It’s time to just get it going.”