Boston has embarked on new plan to build affordable housing on city-owned vacant lots.  Earlier this week, the city requested that builders submit their bids for building homes on 12 empty lots in Dorchester. Plans for the houses already have been designed, and neighbors have already had input in the process, the city says; all they need are developers.  “We’ve identified 250 sites that are appropriate for residential infill development,” said Shelia Dillon, the head of the city’s Department of Neighborhood Development. “These [lots] have been in our inventory for some time. The vast majority of them had homes on them that probably date back to the 1900s, but they’re all empty.”  The plan is to kill two birds with one stone: Help relieve the city’s shortage of affordable housing and start drawing revenue from formerly worthless land. Or even three stones, said Dillon: the contracts are meant for small developers who don’t have the resources to take on the kind of big projects that are reshaping Boston’s skyline. The city hired an architect to design several homes that would fit in to the neighborhoods, and it will try to fast-track the regulatory process.  “Selling the land at a profit is not our primary motivator,” she said. The process of soliciting bids for all 250 or so parcels is scheduled to take three years, and they will be developed in batches according to their proximity to one another.  One project, consisting of nine lots on Dyer, Thetford, and Capen streets in Dorchester, is meant to house 16 families. Three of the nine houses will be sold at the market rate, while the rest have price caps of $262,000 to $337,000. The other request the city posted earlier this week is for three homes on Trull and Ware streets, including one that requires a custom design and will be sold at the market rate.
The lots, some of which still have rubble from the original homes that stood on them, will be put out to bid over the next three years.