Mary Ellen McCormack Redevelopment, South Boston

The Mary Ellen McCormack redevelopment in South Boston starts with one building: 94 apartments, all-electric, heated and cooled by 22 geothermal wells drilled 800 feet down. It’s the first ground-source system either WinnCompanies or the Boston Housing Authority has installed. Building A was scheduled for occupancy this fall.

Behind it sits a much bigger plan. Over roughly two decades, Winn intends to replace all 1,016 public housing apartments on the 30-acre site and add 2,284 workforce and market-rate units, for 3,300 in total.

Project Scope

Mary Ellen McCormack opened in 1938 and is Boston’s first public housing development, with 35 buildings near Andrew Square. The housing authority keeps the land. Winn will own, manage and maintain the new buildings, and the tenant task force takes an ownership stake in the affordable units.

Building A is a 112,000-square-foot, U-shaped block at Logan Way and a new street, Veterans Way. It steps down from six stories to four and is designed to Passive House standards. The Architectural Team is the architect, CBT did the master plan and Copley Wolff handled site design. Lee Kennedy Company is general contractor in a joint venture with H.J. Russell & Company, under a project labor agreement.

The building costs $62 million. Another $8 million covers public infrastructure, including a new park, a separated two-way bike lane and reconfigured streets.

Phase one covers the northern 18 acres: eight buildings and 1,310 apartments over about ten years, with 529 replacement units among them, plus 33,000 square feet of ground-floor retail. Building B (300 units) and Building C (196 units, mostly for seniors) come next once financing is in place. Winn has said it expects to seek permits in 2026 for phase two, the remaining 2,000 or so apartments.

Why It Matters

Two things make this more than a large housing job.

One is water. The site sits close to Boston Harbor, so grades are being raised five to seven feet and every new building is set above the city’s 2070 flood projection. That’s a lot of fill and a lot of utility work on a site where people keep living through construction.

The other is sequencing. Nobody is supposed to move twice. Demolition is phased so households go straight from an old apartment into a new one, which is why the first building is all replacement housing and the mixed-income buildings follow.

Financing for Building A closed in March 2025 with Bank of America as construction lender and tax credit investor, MassHousing on the permanent debt, and subordinate loans from the state and the housing authority. The AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust is in as well.

That’s the stack for 94 units. There are 3,206 to go, and no total cost appears in the releases reviewed for this listing.

Project Team & Details