Worcester Housing Authority buys former Reliant, Fallon Clinic campus on Plantation St.
Building Futures, Inc,. the nonprofit affiliate of the Worcester Housing Authority, has purchased the former Reliant Medical Group campus at 630 Plantation St., Worcester, for $3.9 million, according to public records on file with masslandrecords.com
Reliant left the longtime Fallon Clinic building for its new home on Neoponset Street, near the Greendale Mall, in September.
Building Futures Inc. is "a controlled 501(C)(3) affiliate of the Worcester Housing Authority. It aims to transform the lives of WHA residents with programs that provide educational, training and employment skills, necessary to achieve social and economic self-sufficiency," according to its website.
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It is not known if the property would be renovated for housing or other programs. However, according to Restated Articles of Incorporation on file with the Secretary of State's office, "The mission of the Corporation is to provide safe, affordable, and quality housing opportunities for low-income individuals and families."
The purchase comes less than a year after a Sept. 22, 2018 Telegram & Gazette article that reported the WHA, "has begun a project that could lead to its first meaningful expansion of public housing units in more than two decades."
The article noted that the Worcester Housing Authority was looking at all of its options, including building new public housing or using "a relatively new tool for housing authorities that converts public housing into privately managed Section 8 housing." That program is called Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD).
"Every rock is on the table, and we want to turn them all over so we clearly know what our options are,” WHA Executive Director Alex Corrales told the T&G at the time.
If, indeed, the Plantation Street property is used for housing, the need for expansion was clear. "The city’s waiting list for public housing units stands at around 6,000, Mr. Corrales said, while about 12,000 people are on its waiting list for Section 8 vouchers used to subsidize private apartment rentals," the T&G reported.
If the WHA's units were "converted through the RAD program, for instance, the ideal would be to have them managed by Building Futures so the authority could maintain control," the T&G noted.
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