The development team hired by the NY-based owners of the former Carney Hospital to plan a re-use of the shuttered 12-acre Dorchester Avenue campus continued to meet with civic associations and abutters this month as they work on a proposal to present to city planners in the new year.
Tom O’Brien of HYM Investment Group and Rev. Jeffrey Brown, a Dorchester pastor who leads his own development company, My City at Peace, appeared on the DotLife podcast this week to discuss their engagement efforts and the feedback they’ve heard to date.
O’Brien told DotLife podcast host Erin Caldwell that they continue to refer to the Carney Working Group’s report, published last May, as “a very good, important roadmap” for any re-use of the campus.
O’Brien and Brown have made more than two dozen appearances in recent weeks in front of Dorchester and Mattapan audiences, including the Lower Mills Civic Association, Codman Square Neighborhood Council, Cedar Grove Civic Association, and the Greater Mattapan Neighborhood Council. They’ve also organized their own meetings at St. Gregory’s auditorium with close-in abutters to the Carney site, including one scheduled for Thursday this week at 6 p.m.
The two men have been consistent in their public statements that their primary objective is to restore some form of health care facility on the site, with the likelihood of additional uses, including senior housing.
On Monday, O’Brien reiterated what The Reporter has heard in those other public settings in recent weeks.
Above, Tom O’Brien and Rev. Jeffrey Brown spoke before the Lower Mills Civic Association in St. Gregory’s auditorium on Oct. 21, 2025. Bill Forry photo
“You’ve clearly got a health care need and a community whose health care need is not met today,” O’Brien said. “So that produces a demand. And so our focus is… how do we take that healthcare need, take that demand and focus that into what physically can be created? That [existing] building itself probably is not the building in which you can do that, but the site could also produce some other pieces as well.”
O’Brien and Brown both indicated that most input they’ve received in their “listening tour” to date has emphasized the need to restore a hospital or health care use on the site.
“I think the key thing is to talk people through what the healthcare use can be,” O’Brien said. “Some people will look at us and say… ‘Why can’t you just reopen the doors and have it be a hospital again?’ And so you can remember what happened back then and all the hospital systems, as far as I know, looked at it and just said, physically, it’s not going to work. And so that’s why the report kind of says, kind of emphasizes a healthcare use. It doesn’t ever say it can reopen as a hospital.”
O’Brien reiterated that the buildings on the campus will likely need to be demolished, because they are antiquated and won’t attract an operator that would meet the community’s needs or the market’s expectations.
“I think the thinking on the part of most hospital executives is because of the inefficiency of that building and the inefficiency of that space, it doesn’t make sense to do that,” said O’Brien.
Later in the interview he said, “I do think one thing to think about for people is if the building itself is not usable, should it be [demolished] now? If you don’t demo it now, it could just sit there as it is for a long period of time.”
“Our objective is to try and produce something for the community,” O’Brien added. “So it may be that the building needs to come down. So the question is: Okay, what goes in its place? It probably is a new, more efficient healthcare building that would have, hopefully, emergency services, MRI machine, X-ray, day surgeries, that sort of thing.”
O’Brien, as he has on other occasions, said on Monday that a new building for a “health care use could be 180,000-ish, or maybe 200,000 square feet of space [with] probably, some retail associated with that, too.”
Brown added that some form of housing — ideally for senior residents— has also been a common theme in community meetings.
“The Carney was more than just a hospital. It was really one of the heartbeats of the community. I mean, people would get food there and fellowship with one another there,” Brown said.
“I think, really, the central concern for many of the residents, particularly ones who live close by, is can we recreate that sense of community that we lost when the Carney was closed? And so, we’ve been thinking a lot about how we can develop that property so it gives community a chance to flourish again.”
Both men have also referenced the potential of re-using part of the campus to house a training center for nurses, referring back to the former Labouré College, which was once housed on the Carney campus. It is now located in Milton.
State Sen. Nick Collins has urged UMass to consider whether the Carney site might be a location for part of its nursing program.
On Monday, O’Brien said that “Senator Collins filed in one of the bond bills from last year…a study provision which suggested, could there be some kind of nursing school, or extension of the nursing school to this campus again?
“And so the thinking there is if you put a healthcare use there, could we have something that would allow nurses to kind of begin the practice portion of their education on the campus? You know, could there be a facility for that, which would be great.”
Collins this week said he hopes that UMass and the Carney development team will further explore the concept of a university-sponsored nursing program in concert with a healthcare use on the Carney site. He said he also wants city and state officials to review the historic nature of the Dorchester Avenue property itself before any demolition permits are sought.
“The closing of Carney Hospital was a travesty and entirely preventable,” Collins said in a statement. “While the future story of the Carney campus is unwritten, its history should not be erased. As the first Catholic hospital in New England, the site of the former Labouré College alone is historic for what took place there. That is why I support…an historic review of the Carney campus.”
O’Brien said on Monday that he and Brown hope to have a plan ready for review in the new year.
“We think if we do this right, if we run this process well and follow the path laid out by the [working group] report, we think we can produce something that is approved in the Article 80 process that will be valuable to one of the healthcare systems to want to run it,” he said.
Above: Tom O’Brien, Rev. Jeffrey Brown, and DotLife podcast host Erin Caldwell.
Brown said that after the team completes its community engagement next month, “we’ll go back and we’ll start thinking through what could actually be there and sort of in line with what people are hoping to have there. And then we’ll come back probably after the holidays in January and make a presentation. And then it’s the filing of the Article 80,” a reference to the city Planning Department’s large project review process.
O’Brien, who ran the Boston Redevelopment Authority under the late Mayor Tom Menino, said the Article 80 process “takes probably between 12 and 24 months to finish.”
Watch the full segment on the DotLife podcast, which will be posted on Friday, Nov. 21. It is available via YouTube, Apple Music, Spotify, and online at dotlifepod.com.
