Blessed Sacrament - Coming Soon!

The Blessed Sacrament project is an adaptive reuse of the existing Blessed Sacrament Church building, a historic building in the Hyde Square neighborhood. Originally built in 1913, Blessed Sacrament has remained vacant since 2004. Pennrose, in partnership with Hyde Square Task Force (HSTF), a neighborhood non-profit community organization, will redevelop the former church into a vibrant, welcoming, mixed-use, mixed-income development. Most of the building’s exterior will be preserved and adapted for this new use, which includes preservation of the historic façade. Architect DiMella Shaffer’s design includes adapting the church’s main nave into a 200+ capacity multipurpose community space, operated by the HSTF, and the building’s cupula will be repurposed as the residents’ community room.

Hyde Square is an incredibly transit-oriented, resource-rich neighborhood that is experiencing significant market pressures and displacement of low- and moderate-income households. Not only does the community urgently need affordable housing, but the historic building needs investment and comprehensive renovations to survive. Since 2004, several developers considered adaptive reuse of the building; no development was pursued, and JPNDC sold the building to HSTF in 2014. In 2019, HSTF and the City of Boston completed a Latin Quarter District Plan that identified the local need for mixed-income housing and community space, and HSTF embarked on a community process to determine the redevelopment options for the Church to best meet local priorities. In mid2021, HSTF released a Request for Proposals and selected Pennrose as the designated developer after a comprehensive community process. We have been committed to ongoing stakeholder engagement throughout the design process.

Beyond the inherent complexity of building mixed-income housing in one of the country’s highest-cost cities, Blessed Sacrament is an especially complicated project due to the challenges of rehabilitating and adapting a 100+ year-old structure that has been vacant for over two decades. Repurposing the building will require a high level of structural and environmental work to address multiple issues including damage to the masonry, roof, and structure. The 71,000+ square foot building’s existing design poses an immense challenge to redeveloping it as affordable units; especially since the building’s historic design and potential landmark status requires creative and costly solutions. Beyond the already high costs of creating high-quality mixed-income housing, building important and much-needed community spaces and preserving a significant historic landmark add extraordinary costs and complications. For these reasons, the development will rely upon a creative mix of financing sources that will include Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, Historic Tax Credits, funding from Boston’s Mayor’s Office of Housing, and numerous other sources.