The redevelopment of the old Soldiers’ Home site on Powderhorn Hill has its money. In a March 30 letter to the council, the developer Pennrose reported that the state’s Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities had approved the full funding package for the first phases, including all 49 project-based Section 8 vouchers the developer asked for, and that construction was to begin in July 2026.
What is being built
Pennrose applied to the state on November 11, 2025 for low-income housing tax credits and state soft funding. The application included 49 project-based vouchers for veterans’ households at 30 and 50 percent of area median income. About 120 current residents of the old domiciliary buildings are to move into the new Phases I and II as they are completed. The letter’s schedule: construction start July 2026, Phase II financial closing in 2027, Phases I and II complete in 2029. The open space and later residential phases come after that.
Services on site will be run by Soldier On, the veterans’ housing nonprofit, and the letter lists what residents get: one fresh meal a day, transportation, and case management. The letter was the developer’s answer to two council orders from Councillor Leo Robinson asking exactly those questions, what happens to the current residents and when.
What we do not know
The letter says construction “is expected” to begin in July. It is now September, and neither the city nor Pennrose has announced a groundbreaking, and nothing in the record says whether the July closing happened. The letter also does not say what the veterans who do not move into Phases I and II will do between now and 2029, or whether the state’s operating subsidy for the domiciliary continues during construction.
The Soldiers’ Home has stood on the hill above Chelsea since 1882 and the current buildings, most of them from the 1940s and 1950s, have been slated for replacement since the pandemic deaths of 2020 made the old long-term care building a byword. The new veterans’ long-term care home opened in 2023. This project is the rest of the campus. The city’s interest is straightforward: the site is the largest developable parcel in a city with almost none, and the council has been asking for two years what it will look like.