Seven-story apartment building for seniors proposed for Maverick Square

The East Boston Community Development Corp. has filed plans to renovate the four-story building it owns at 191 Sumner St. in Maverick Square and building a new seven-story, 42-unit building behind it.

Under the $18.7-million proposal, filed this week with the BPDA, the current senior and disabled residents of the building would be moved into apartments in the new building, with the rest of its units rented to seniors at "affordable" rates. The 17 current units would be renovated and rented as "workforce" housing, which generally means for people making up to 120% of the Boston area median income.

All of the units in the new building would have either one or two bedrooms. Also proposed: Eight parking spaces.

East Boston CDC says it will also rehabilitate the existing ground-floor commercial space in the current building, now occupied by Aries Communications, Metro Management Company and the Mexicali Sushi Bar. It did not specify if these tenants would have to move out during the renovation work.

The non-profit explains the benefits of the proposed project:

The proposed project offers the immense benefit of increasing the number of senior affordable housing units in Maverick Square. The EBCDC is acutely aware of the demand for senior affordable housing in East Boston as developers and managers of several elderly affordable housing developments in the neighborhood. There are over one-thousand households on the EBCDC’s waiting list for its elderly affordable housing developments. Moreover, the proposed project will create workforce housing in the heart of Maverick Square, adding a diversity of incomes and ages to development.

191 Sumner St. small-project review application (15.2M PDF).