The Somerville Community Corp. wants to convert the former St. Polycarp’s Church property in the city’s Winter Hill neighborhood into a mixed-income community with more than 80 housing units.

In what will be the largest project undertaken in its 35-year history, a community-based development group in Somerville plans to convert a three-acre church property into a mixed-income community with more than 80 housing units.

The Somerville Community Corp. is slated to close on the property – which includes five buildings and is located at the corner of Mystic Avenue and Temple Street in the Winter Hill neighborhood of the city – today.

Owned by the Archdiocese of Boston, the site was home to St. Polycarp’s, a Catholic church that merged with nearby St. Ann’s nearly seven years ago. As part of its plan to redevelop the site, the community development group wants to sell the church building to another church, and sell the rectory to a Cambridge-based nonprofit group called Just-A-Start House. Just-A-Start House, which serves pregnant and teenage mothers and their children, has leased a former convent on the site since 1995.

The convent building – along with two other structures that were formerly used as a school and garage/library – will be demolished and replaced with housing, according to Kristin M. Blum, SCC’s director of housing development.

The group plans to build about 25 rental units – all of which will be affordable to people earning 60 percent or less of the area median income – and 60 condominiums that will be sold at market-rate and below-market-rate prices. Included in the project will be some first-floor retail space along Mystic Avenue.

Several of the rental homes will be available to households with very low incomes, those at or below 30 percent of the area median income, according to Blum.

The affordability mix and total number of housing units has not been finalized. Blum said there will be at least 20 condos that will be affordable to people earning 80 percent or less of the area median income, but the hope is that as many as half of the condos could be below market-rate.

“We’re trying to do as many affordable condos as we can,” said Blum. “Our interest is building affordable housing. We’re doing the market-rate [units] because it’s [the project] too big to do all affordable.”

SCC was one of several developers to submit a proposal for the property to the Archdiocese of Boston last year. Competing bidders included the Planning Office for Urban Affairs, the financially independent development arm of the archdiocese, and The Equity Cos., a for-profit residential developer based in Malden.

SCC became interested in the property because it is currently building 15 condos on Temple Street, a short walk from the St. Polycarp’s site. The Temple Street project, expected to be finished in the fall, is located on about a half-acre parcel that belonged to St. Polycarp’s Parish, which the archdiocese sold to SCC three years earlier.

“We are already engaged in the neighborhood and familiar with this property,” said Blum, referring to the larger St. Polycarp’s parcel. “We heard that this parish was getting ready to sell this property and we tried to determine whether an affordable housing property was feasible at this site.”

‘Community Assets’
Blum said another reason the site was appealing to SCC was because St. Polycarp’s was an important part of the community for so many years. Once the archdiocese issued a Request for Proposals, leaders from the community development corporation began meeting with residents and organized a community meeting that attracted about 80 people to discuss possible uses for the property.

Through those community meetings, SCC was able to get a better idea of what local residents desired.

“Church properties are community assets and we felt strongly that it should continue to be a community asset,” said Blum.

Danny LeBlanc, chief executive officer of SCC, said the archdiocese did not set a price for the property but the CDC did research and “had a pretty good feel for what that price needed to be.”

SCC leaders declined to reveal the selling price because the purchase had not been finalized as of last week.

In addition to offering a competitive price, the CDC also had another advantage over other competing bidders. LeBlanc said the archdiocese likely was impressed with the community group’s involvement and reputation in Somerville.

The archdiocese notified SCC that it was the winning bidder last October.

“I think the archdiocese decided we were a credible developer as well as being someone meeting the price [that it needed],” LeBlanc said. “They wouldn’t have selected us if they didn’t believe we would do a credible job.”

The CDC owns and maintains 92 rental units and has developed about 100 homes that have been sold. In the mid-1990s, the group acquired and renovated a series of two-, three- and four-family properties that were later sold to property owners, who intended to live in one unit while renting the rest, at affordable prices.

But as prices for multifamily properties escalated, the group had to alter its development strategy.

“Property is so expensive now. Most of the time we can’t make the numbers work when we buy small properties,” LeBlanc said. “You can’t build enough scale to make the project work economically Â… The economics that worked then don’t work for us anymore.”

Beginning in the fall of 1999, as the group’s housing development operation was struggling, SCC leaders decided to pull back on some of its other ventures and focus more on housing, according to LeBlanc.

In addition to the Temple Street condos currently under construction, in the last four years SCC has developed a 42-unit apartment community on Linden Street and purchased and renovated a 12-unit apartment building on Walnut Street that is home to lower-income tenants.

The St. Polycarp’s proposal is the largest development that the group has undertaken to date.

“Our capacity and reputation is growing so we feel like we can handle larger projects and city and state funders also believe we’re able [to complete large-scale development],” LeBlanc explained.

With its housing operation and production pipeline in good shape, the group is now hoping to expand and looking at developing an array of support services to help local residents compete economically, said LeBlanc.

In the meantime, CDC leaders will be spending upcoming months trying to secure construction and development financing for the St. Polycarp’s project, which is estimated to cost about $23 million.

SCC lined up the acquisition loan through the Community Economic Development Assistance Corp., or CEDAC, and Blum said the group will be trying to win a mix of public funding for the project. The big unknown with any affordable housing development, Blum said, is “will there be funds there when we need them?”

“We anticipate that this is a project that the city and state wants to fund,” Blum added. “We don’t anticipate any problem with that.”

Besides funding, SCC leaders also will have to obtain city permits and approval for the proposed development.

The site is currently zoned for two- and three-family residences, Blum noted, and the commercial uses aren’t permitted.

Blum said SCC will probably seek a rezoning of the site to permit a neighborhood business district that allows for the development of smaller-scale businesses and denser housing. The rezoning was suggestion of the city, which is working collaboratively with SCC on the project.

“The city has been excited about this being a mixed-used development [and is] advising us on a rezoning process,” she said.