Health care services, housing and retail could be coming to the campus that once housed Carney Hospital in Dorchester.

HYM Investment Group and My City at Peace, which are slated to develop the property, filed a letter of intent with the city’s planning department on May 20.

The $850 million proposal by the companies includes housing, retail and, perhaps most importantly, health care services in a community that has faced increased barriers to care since the Dorchester facility shut its doors in 2024.

“This filing reflects extensive community feedback and a shared commitment to restoring health care uses on campus, expanding local housing opportunities and enhancing connectivity on a site that has long been a cornerstone of the neighborhood,” Tom O’Brien, CEO of HYM, and Rev. Jeffrey Brown, a co-founder of My City at Peace, said in a statement.

The proposal comes after Apollo Global Management, the holding company that owns the 12.8-acre site, tapped HYM to develop the property in partnership with My City at Peace, an organization focused on reducing community violence including through development projects, in October 2025.

The duo was also previously slated to redevelop Parcel 3, the Roxbury site that had been designated as an economic development site decades after it was cleared in the 1970s during urban renewal. In January, the administration of Mayor Michelle Wu declined to renew the designation as the site’s developers, opting instead to build a new campus for Madison Park Technical Vocational High School.

According to an overview prepared by the development team, 60% of the built-up space would be dedicated to housing. That would include 500 new units of housing, 200 of which would be for senior residents and 100 multifamily units with potential homeownership opportunities. As required by city zoning codes, a portion of the units will be designated affordable. More than half of the new campus would be landscaped or open space.

One building, accounting for almost a third of the about 930,000 square feet of new construction, would be dedicated to health care, according to the letter of intent.

The redevelopment could provide health care services including imaging like X-ray, CT scans and MRIs; primary care; specialty care like oncology, orthopedics and dermatology; and emergency medicine, including a potential emergency room run by a major hospital group.

It won’t, however, be the full facility that Carney was.

“I think we’ve been very clear with people that it’s not going to be a hospital,” O’Brien said.

As the process moves forward, he said there needs to be a collective effort to find a health care partner to provide services at the site.

“Now the objective is … all of us work together with other community leaders to make sure that a health care system signs on and can be the operator of this building,” O’Brien said. “That’s our next goal.”

A separate building would include space to focus on health care education and workforce development, the overview said.

Carney Hospital closed at the end of August 2024 after the long-embattled Steward Health Care company declared bankruptcy and looked to sell its eight active hospital campuses in Massachusetts. Six of those hospitals were purchased by other health systems. The Dallas-based bankruptcy court that was overseeing the case, however, determined there were no qualified bids for Carney Hospital, nor Nashoba Valley Medical Center in Ayer, leading to their closures.

The proposal comes after months of community engagement. According to the overview, the developers conducted 35 meetings over the course of 2025 and early 2026. O’Brien said they heard a lot of emotion about the closure of the hospital when they first started meeting with residents and local civic groups. Brown also said that the loss of a health care anchor in the neighborhood was not the only one being experienced.

“What was really clear, as we were visiting the civic associations for the first time, is that there was a lot of grief and sorrow around the loss of the Carney and there was a loss of community in that,” Brown said.

Throughout the process, they said community members offered feedback focused on restoring healthcare services on the site, improving housing opportunities and creating green space and neighborhood connections.

Many of the same priorities were at the center of an April 2025 report released by a working group set up by the city and state. That 61-page document, which was designed to serve as a framework for rebuilding when the hospital closed, found that “given the size of the hospital campus, the site could accommodate multiple uses,” but emphasized a need for direct health care services as well as other uses to address health-related social needs and social determinants of health — the factors outside of medical care that impact health and well-being.

Brown pointed to the city’s ongoing efforts to address life expectancy gaps among communities of color, specifically through social determinants like economic mobility.

“The social determinants of health that hinder people of color from living and thriving in the way that they should need to be addressed,” Brown said. “That’s not lost on us.”

Since the hospital’s closure was announced, however, the Wu administration has said it would oppose any attempt to rezone the land for uses other than health care. It was a stance the city reiterated in a statement to the Banner last week.

“Any proposal must include a committed health care partner with the capacity to deliver and sustain these critical services in the long term, so that residents and families have the care they deserve and are not left without options again,” a city spokesperson said. “The city looks forward to reviewing proposals for this important site.”

The city spokesperson said the city would consider mixed-use development plans if they included health care services.

The spokesperson said that, as of May 22, the city hadn’t seen such a proposal filed; a copy of the letter of intent shared by the development team with the Banner shows a city stamp, however, dated May 20.

The city spokesperson also said that any plans to redevelop the site will be reviewed by the working group in addition to city officials and will submit their recommendations.

As the project moves forward, Brown said he hopes officials and community members will come together to support the effort.

“I think it’s really important that they understand, and that the community understands, that we need a united front here, that everybody is together, knowing that health is a critical part of the success of Dorchester,” Brown said.