THERE are times when Maurice Vaughn, the former major league baseball player universally called Mo, is treated like a businessman  usually when he is deep in talks to buy ratty apartment buildings and make them habitable again.

Then there are times when he is treated like catnip  usually by women, like the ones who spotted him strolling through the cleaned-up courtyard of one such apartment complex in Brownsville, Brooklyn, called the Plaza, that Mr. Vaughn and his partners bought in 2007.

“How ya doin’ Mo Vaughn,” they crooned in near-unison. “Mo Vaughn? Mo Vaaaauuuuugghnn.”

Mr. Vaughn, 42  and married with a 5-year-old daughter  cuts an unlikely figure in New York’s real estate world, not just because women are drawn to him, or because he is 6-foot-2 and 280 pounds under his custom-made suit, Donald Pliner loafers and diamond studs. Charismatic and massive, enduringly famous and comfortably rich, he brings a dose of glamour to the decidedly unsexy world of low-income housing.

This is where Mr. Vaughn, a star slugger for the Boston Red Sox who quit baseball in 2003 after a lackluster run with the Mets, decided to build what he called his “afterlife” from the ashes of his baseball career. His six-year-old company, Omni New York LLC, is on its way to becoming a major player in the low-income housing world. It has acquired 4,000 apartments, most of them in New York State’s scrappiest neighborhoods, housing the poorest of tenants (98 percent of them qualify for Section 8 rent subsidies).