The Fenway Community Development Corporation (CDC) has officially closed on the acquisition of an affordable housing project that would add 15 new affordable units to Beacon Hill.

The project, located at 27-29 Hancock Street, will be converted into a total of 15 studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom affordable units available for homeownership. Half of those units will be listed at 80 percent area median income (AMI), meaning they will be open to households earning below 80 percent of Beacon Hill’s median income. The other half will be listed at 100 percent AMI.

Currently, there is only one such affordable housing unit in Beacon Hill.

The Fenway CDC is a community housing developer with multiple affordable and permanent supportive housing projects in the eastern half of the Fenway. It also provides services like food access programs, financial coaching and a local jobs board for neighborhood residents. 27-29 Hancock Street will be the organization’s first endeavor outside the Fenway.

Now that it owns the project, the CDC’s next steps will be getting all necessary approvals to begin construction. That includes the Historic Beacon Hill District and the city’s planning, zoning and Inspectional Services Departments.

“We are going through zoning,” said Suneeth P. John, the deputy director and head of Real Estate for the CDC. “We’re going to get zoning approvals in the next couple of months, and then we’re going forward into completing construction drawings and starting construction by the end of the year.”

Because the CDC plans to reconfigure the current layout of the buildings, the first steps of construction will be selective demolition to have a clean slate to work with.

27-29 Hancock Street has been a problem in the neighborhood for a long time. Homes on Hancock, a nonprofit formed last summer specifically because of these buildings, wrote on its website that, “27-29 Hancock Street has sat vacant for decades and is in need of major renovations.”

The building was initially purchased by real estate developer JDMD Owner, LLC, in 2018, to meet its affordable housing requirements under inclusionary zoning laws, after developing a luxury condominium complex just two blocks away.

Since then, however, progress had stalled.

One of the initial proposals by the Women’s Lunch Place, a local women’s shelter, had suggested developing the property for singleroom occupancy. But residents had concerns about this kind of housing.

The Homes on Hancock website, for example, pointed to a high number of reported incidents of crime at another singleroom occupancy project on Bowdoin Street.

The Beacon Hill Civic Association wrote a letter to the mayor’s office last summer stating that such a development would “pose safety and quality of life issues for residents of these properties and the surrounding neighborhood.”

State Representative Jay Livingstone instead put together a Request for Proposals (RFP) for alternate solutions to the 27-29 Hancock problem, and said he had reached out to the CDC early on to see if they’d be interested in redeveloping the properties.

“They said they were in, and in part, that gave me the confidence to push the RFP process,” he said in an interview in January.

“He’s been a big supporter of the project,” John said of Livingstone. “He’s continuing to be engaged to make sure that the project lives up to what we have proposed.”