Chelsea owns a parking lot at 212 Chestnut Street, under the Tobin Bridge approaches, and it wants to give the land away. Not to anyone: to a developer who will build affordable housing on it, preferably condominiums that Chelsea families can buy. City Manager Fidel Maltez told the City Council in a letter dated September 16 that the administration has spent “the past several months” talking to developers and will put out a request for proposals “over the next few months.” The draft RFP is in Monday’s council packet, and it tells you most of what the letter does not.
The land
There are two parcels. 212 Chestnut Street is 14,745 square feet; 208 Chestnut Street, next to it, is 2,378. Both are zoned R2 and both are municipal parking today. The draft calls the lot “much needed parking” for the neighborhood and, a sentence later, a property that “has presented significant challenges for the City to maintain and manage”: overgrown, and a magnet for “homeless encampments and other challenges associated with an underdeveloped and underutilized property.”
The price is zero. The RFP’s summary table lists “nominal consideration of $0,” and Section 11 explains that the city treats the write-down of the land’s appraised value as its public subsidy, “in recognition of the public benefit created.” An independent appraisal has been ordered so that the size of that subsidy can be reported. The appraisal, the site map, the environmental assessment and the submission deadline are all still marked “PLACEHOLDER / TO BE INSERTED.” A bidder may also ask the city for money on top of the land, from the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, Community Development Block Grant funds or Community Preservation Act funds, though the RFP says applicants are “expected to pursue all other available public and private funding sources” too.
What the city wants built
Either rentals or owner-occupied units, “evaluated on equal footing.” Rentals should generally serve households at or below 60 percent of area median income, with some at 30 to 50 percent. Ownership units should be affordable at 80 to 100 percent of area median income, with a deed rider “in perpetuity or the maximum term allowed.” Maltez’s letter makes clear which he prefers: “We are particularly interested in homeownership, allowing Chelsea families to build equity and establish a long-term connection to the community.”
The city also wants to keep the parking. The draft says it “will weigh favorably” proposals that preserve the public spaces now on the site, and that anyone proposing to eliminate them “must provide a written justification” and mitigation, such as replacement spaces off site. Reading the two aims together, the likely answer is housing over a parking deck, or a smaller building than the lot could hold.
Who can bid, and who cannot
Every proposal must include an “Equity and Inclusion Plan” under the city’s Development Compact with The Community Builders and the Civic Action Project, with “specific, measurable commitments (not aspirational statements only)” on minority- and women-owned business participation and local hiring. Proposals are scored on the plan, the design, the team’s track record in Gateway Cities, community engagement, sustainability and, for condos, “long-term manageability” of the association. Bidders who clear the minimum criteria present at a public meeting before the evaluation committee scores them.
The top-ranked bidder then faces a compliance review that can disqualify it for owing Chelsea property taxes or water bills, for unresolved code violations anywhere in its portfolio, for poor performance on a past city agreement, for an unresolved fair housing complaint, or because “the Applicant, or an immediate family member, is a current or recent (within 12 months) City employee, officer, or elected official.” The city reserves the right to reject every bid.
The precedent
Maltez’s model is 440 Broadway, the former Salvation Army building the city bought in 2017 and turned over to a developer. His letter credits Causeway Development with “28 homeownership condominiums” for households at 80 and 100 percent of area median income, and calls the result “a flagship project on Broadway and a model for publicly owned land that creates new housing opportunities for Chelsea residents.” Earlier city documents put the count at 29 and name Traggorth Companies as the developer; the building also holds the new Teen Center that the Boys & Girls Club of Boston will run.
The Chestnut Street lot is a fraction of the size, and unlike 440 Broadway it has no building on it to reuse. What it has is the same policy logic the council has been applying all year: buying a six-unit building at 55 Heard Street to keep it affordable, taking on the role of landlord and land bank, and now conveying its own parcel for a dollar to get the housing type its zoning has produced least.
What to watch
The letter promises the council will be “involved throughout the process.” The disposition of city land under Chapter 30B requires a declaration that the parcel is surplus and a vote to convey it, so the council will get at least one formal say. Before that, the numbers to look for when the RFP is finalized are the appraised value, which is the real price the city is paying, and how many of the parking spaces survive.