Comunilife operates affordable, comfortable and secure housing that provides residents with a range of on-site services. Tenants are a mix of very low-income community residents and people with special needs.
- Prospect Residence – a 60-unit, South Bronx-based “green residence” that opened in October 2011 with funding from the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) for low-income, older adults. Thirty-five of Prospect Residence’s tenants are special needs and 25 are seniors from the community. All residents live in studio apartments and have access to the building’s communal spaces – including a dining room, patio, balcony and planting garden.
- Three Bronx-based apartment houses provide 242 units – from studios to two-bedroom apartments – for very low-income individuals and families. One quarter of the apartments are set aside for people with special needs.
- With a total of 100 apartments, Comunilife’s two permanent supportive housing residences –Dona Rosita I, in the South Bronx, and Dona Rosita II, in Brooklyn – serve homeless people with HIV/AIDS and mental health or substance abuse. The program offers residents a combination of safe, secure housing; comprehensive, culturally-competent, on-site services; and a true feeling of community. As a result, a full 65% of these formerly homeless and acutely fragile adults have remained stably housed for more than ten years; 15% eventually leave the program to live independently in the community. In 2010, Dona Rosita II received the Supportive Housing Network of New York’s “Residence of the Year” award.
- El Rio Residence. Comunilife is currently developing a new 64-unit South Bronx residence. 35 for adults who are homeless and living with mental illness and 29 for low-income seniors from the community. The groundbreaking is scheduled for late 2012.
