Were it not for the coming together of community development corporations, neighbors and elected officials to create affordable housing on what had been considered unbuildable land, Monique Carroll wouldn’t envision herself buying a home in Boston in the foreseeable future.

“I’m excited and happy,” said Carroll, 28, who is moving out of her old three-room rental in Dorchester into her new three-bedroom triplex at 26-28 Wensley St. in the Back of the Hill section of Boston’s Mission Hill. “My rent was pretty high, so this will work out. I’ll be saving money, because rent goes up every year.”

Carroll’s new home, which she attained through a city lottery, is one of 22 units in 11 new buildings constructed on a vacant city-owned 58,261-square-foot site bordered by Wensley Street and Bickford and Fisher avenues, as part of the Mission Hill New Housing Initiative. Hers is one of six free-standing two-family houses, each containing an ownership unit and a rental unit; each of the other five buildings comprises two semi-attached single-family triplexes.

Averaging between 1,300 and 1,400 square feet plus basement storage, the homes range in price from $130,000 to $160,000 for the semi-attached townhouses and cost about $180,000 for the two-family dwellings. As part of Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s “Home Again” affordable housing program, they were marketed to first-time homebuyers in an income bracket of between $30,000 and $50,000, or 50 to 80 percent of the median city income for a family of four. All owner-occupied units are sold or under agreement.

The March 3 ribbon-cutting, led by Menino on the front steps of 22 Wensley St., celebrated the near-completion of the $4 million project. It is the first part of a four-phase 80-unit development spearheaded by the Back of the Hill Community Housing Initiative, an alliance of the Back of the Hill Community Development Corp. and the Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Corp. The ceremony – attended by future residents, neighbors, CDC leaders, City Councilors Maura Hennigan and Mike Ross and state Rep. Kevin Fitzgerald – capped a two-year planning, financing and development process with input from more than 200 Mission Hill and Jamaica Plain citizens.

“Our two groups got together in 1998 and noticed a lot of land in and around Heath Street that had been vacant for 20 to 40 years,” said Richard Thal, executive director of JPNDC. The 25 acres of land had been cleared in the 1960s to build a facility for the Lahey Clinic, which instead decided to set up shop in Burlington in the early 1970s, leaving the parcel as a dumping ground for trash and stolen cars. “One of the obstacles was getting people mobilized to thinking something good could be built there,” said Thal.

Beginning in the fall of 1998, the Back of the Hill Community Housing Initiative held 12 small group meetings in neighbors’ living rooms to determine the use of the land and the design of the homes. The agreement was to build residences with a “neighborhood” feel, no more than three stories high, using extant two-families and three-deckers as models.

“We wanted a design that fit in the neighborhood contextually, and we wanted something of quality – not just building housing, but rebuilding a community that had been destroyed,” said Pat Flaherty, project manager for JPNDC.

Another consensus was to impose 20-year resale restrictions so the new homes would remain affordable over an extended period. “For somebody planning to put their roots down here, it’s a wonderful opportunity,” said Bob Carlson, a Heath Street homeowner who participated in the nine-month planning process.

In the winter of 1999, the initiative conducted three community workshops at the Benjamin Health Care Center on Fisher Avenue to develop a proposal for the site, which the city approved the following spring, designating the initiative as the project developer. After financing was secured, including $1.22 million from the city’s Neighborhood Housing Trust and $2.27 million from FleetBoston, Menino led the groundbreaking on Jan. 29, 2000. “It’s the first affordable housing program to break ground in Boston in the new millennium,” said Thal.

Detailed Work
The 22 houses, modular-built but given different color schemes to avoid “Levittown” sameness, were designed by Nick Elton, principal of Elton Hampton Architects of Allston, in accordance with community specifications. “We wanted to make the buildings fit within the vernacular of the turn-of-the-century neighborhood,” said Elton. “We also wanted a reasonable amount of detail on the houses so they wouldn’t look like ‘the projects.'”

Exterior details include clapboard siding, elevated porches, bay windows and roof gables for the two-families, and bracketed awnings and cornices for the three-deckers. Each unit contains three bedrooms, one and a half baths, a living room, an eat-in kitchen and a rear door to a private back yard. The eight units on the steeper slope have rear decks. The hillside affords all units abundant sunlight and views extending into the Blue Hills.

The second phase of the project will be a 34-unit limited-equity co-op on a Heath Street site opposite the Hennigan School. Designed by Elton with the scale of “rambling Victorian houses,” the building is expected to break ground next winter.

The third component of the project will see construction of 23 houses and a community-owned park on a parcel bordered by Fisher Avenue and Parker, Wensley and Bucknam streets. This month the initiative will submit a joint application to the city to be designated as the developer. Plans for the final phase have not been finalized.

BOTHCDC has developed affordable housing on vacant city land since its founding in 1971. Projects include the Back of the Hill Apartments at 100 South Huntington Ave., a subsidized 125-unit building for elderly and handicapped residents completed in 1981; 18 units of manufactured housing on Lawn Street finished in 1985; and cosponsorship of 165 mixed-income brick condo units in the Heath/Lawn area with the Bricklayers and Laborers Nonprofit Housing Corp. in 1985.

“Everybody should have a decent place to live, even with the [high] cost of housing in the city,” said Menino. “The involvement of the community is so important to affordable housing in the city of Boston.”