A well-known Roxbury development corporation last month purchased a large vacant lot in Grove Hall that sits next to the post office and includes 1 Crawford St. and 639 Warren St. for $3.2 million.

Leslie Reid, the CEO of Madison Park Development Corporation (MPDC), said her team envisions a new building with affordable housing and the possibility of retail space.

“We were approached by a broker and that’s how the parcel came to our attention,” she said. “We have already had over a dozen community meetings with stakeholders and elected officials. We did that while the property was under agreement and before we purchased it…We felt that good people appreciated we came early in the process and that was good because we could have walked away if people had ripped and tore into us, and our project didn’t maximize community benefit.”

Reid said the consensus in those meetings was to have affordable housing units, which could be rental or ownership, and a non-residential space, likely on the ground floor. “We got great feedback,” she said. “We felt pretty confident people wouldn’t be totally opposed to it,” she said.

Reid is now busy assembling a team of architects, engineers, accountants, and others – with a mind to hiring women-owned or BIPOC-owned firms. Once they have the team assembled and have specific plans, they will come back to the community.

She predicts it could be two years before a shovel hits the ground, but in the interim, MPDC has joined the Roxbury Sunflower Project led by artist Ekua Holmes. While it awaits development, that project will activate the vacant lot, aiming “to bring nature, beauty, and color through community wide Sunflower plantings particularly on the Grove Hall line,” according to project’s website.