The Tufts Daily piece
In early January, Rep. Ayanna Pressley hosted a community roundtable with Somerville Mayor Katjana Ballantyne and local authorities to discuss affordable housing, specifically, the plans for the Clarendon Hill Redevelopment Project. This project seeks to add 375 apartments to Clarendon Hill’s original 216 units, totaling 591 units of mixed-income housing across three buildings and several townhomes.
This meeting came after the City of Somerville received $2.4 million in federal funding from the full-year 2023 federal budget to refurbish and renovate the Clarendon Hill apartments, which are over 70 years old. Renovations will include fossil-fuel free and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-certified buildings with improved common spaces and unit sizing, as well as safer routes to local stores and services. In addition to the existing 216 public housing units, the new construction will create 80 affordable housing units that will be rented at market rate. The city is also redesigning the Alewife Brook Parkway and Powderhouse Boulevard intersection with pedestrian and bike safety in mind.
Construction for the first phase of the Clarendon Hill Project began in 2023 and is currently slated for completion in November 2024, with the hope to move residents in by the end of 2024.
“As with any construction project, there are many steps to achieve approval to move families in, but the end of 2024 is our current target,” Cory Mian, senior vice president for real estate development for the Preservation of Affordable Housing, wrote in an email to the Daily. Preservation of Affordable Housing is one of the nonprofit organizations behind the project’s development.
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