Two nonprofits are breathing new life into a vacant site that once housed the Cote Ford dealership in Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood. The Planning Office for Urban Affairs (POUA) partnered with Caribbean Integration Community Development, which has deep ties in the community, to create the 76-unit Cote Village for residents with a diverse range of incomes.
To revitalize the site and fit the scale of the surrounding neighborhood, the team created four townhouse buildings and a five-story apartment building. It also reused the semi-underground part of a concrete and steel building on site to accommodate parking and auxiliary spaces for the new development. In addition, a playground benefits Cote Village residents as well as the community at large.
Cote Village is providing affordable and workforce housing for families earning between 30% and 100% of the area median income, with 10% of the units set aside for residents who have previously experienced homelessness. The demand for this new mixed-income housing was substantial, with over 2,000 applicants for the 24 townhomes and over 2,400 applicants for the 52 apartments.
“This has been a blighted and vacant site for decades at the entrance to Mattapan Square, the commercial and community hub,” says Shaina Korman-Houston, director of real estate at POUA. “We’re very excited to have attractive new housing there and to have some commercial space for this community. It’s also right at a new commuter rail station so it’s going to give these 76 households transit access to the city and the broader region.”
The $48.6 million development, which received funding from both the city and the state, was primarily financed through low-income housing tax credit equity.
