Revitalizing public housing communities: Bunker Hill Apartments open its first new building

Thanks to the Boston Bar Association (BBA) and Ian Urquhart at Nutter, McClennen & Fish, for recently coordinating a BBA member walkthrough of Stellata , which is the first-completed of 15 proposed new buildings at the Bunker Hill Apartments site in Boston’s Charlestown. A joint venture of Leggat McCall Properties and Joseph J. Corcoran Company is redeveloping the original 1,100 federal public housing units into modern, green multifamily buildings ranging from 4 to 10 stories, delivering 2,699 total units within a public housing replacement component and market-rate component, together with commercial space, open space, a community center, and public realm improvements. 

The walkthrough was preceded by a presentation on the public-private partnership approach and the approval pathway, with comments by:

• Megan Pasquina, Vice President and Partner at Leggat McCall Properties, with permitting counsel at Goulston & Storrs; and
• Dean Papademetriou, General Counsel at the Boston Housing Authority, with outside counsel Kathy Murphy at Krokidas & Bluestein.

The median time needed to complete Boston’s public review of large real estate projects is 10 months, with a small handful of city-sponsored meetings. In this case, the first Bunker Hill Apartments filing was submitted in 2016, and the approval came five years later in 2021, after 15 city-sponsored meetings and extensive community outreach with abutters, elected officials, local non-profit organizations, and neighborhood civic associations. It was heartening to visit an actual new building after all that coordination. Importantly, pre-redevelopment Bunker Hill Apartments households can return to income-restricted units as each of the new buildings open.

Most of the buildings are programed as mixed-income, while a few buildings such as Stellata are entirely income-restricted. Through the permitting process, concerns were voiced about ensuring that public housing residents do not receive second-class treatment. For example, one public housing resident previously had experienced a delayed and perfunctory response to a public safety call. Would public safety and other services be as available to entirely income-restricted buildings as luxury housing buildings?

Firstly, income-restricted and market-rate units of the same bedroom count are indistinguishable. Stellata is effectively a luxury housing building at an affordable price point. Secondly, among other strengths of mixed-income communities, quality property management is necessary to retain market-rate renters. This means all residents at all income levels share in that first-class treatment.

The redeveloped Bunker Hill Apartments will include a substantial number of three- and even four-bedroom units. This is atypical. Urban multifamily apartment buildings often are not geared toward families despite the name suggesting otherwise. The accepted maxim is that families look for suburban homeownership opportunities, mostly leaving urban apartments to singles and empty nesters. In reality, children continue to grow up in apartments given that 35% of US households do not own.

Renting families in multifamily buildings can benefit from economies of scale. Much like urban crowds support restaurants, museums, sports teams, and much more, residential density in apartments can support amenities, programming, and modernizing improvements. In this way, public housing redevelopment is a unique opportunity to create rental spaces that families can call home. The Bunker Hill Apartments redevelopment team is seizing this opportunity. The children that grow up in Stellata might not even miss the suburbs.