The six-unit apartment building at 55 Heard Street went into receivership in 2025, the way distressed buildings in Chelsea often do. What happened next is what the city says has never happened before: instead of waiting for a private buyer, Chelsea bought the building itself, sent its own public works crews in to fix it, ran a housing lottery, and on September 1 began moving families in. City officials cut a ribbon on it earlier this month and gave it a name, Chelsea 55.
“Rather than stand by while the cycle repeats itself, the city decided to be” part of the solution, City Solicitor Cheryl Watson Fisher said at the ceremony, according to the Chelsea Record. City Manager Fidel Maltez put it this way: “This is what it looks like when a city government” and its departments “come together and actually solve a large problem.”
How it worked
The building holds six three-bedroom apartments, the unit size that is hardest to find at any rent in a city where families double up. After the property landed in receivership, the city secured authorization from the Board of Assessors and the City Council to purchase it. The Department of Public Works, not an outside contractor, did the renovations needed to make the apartments habitable and comfortable.
While the work was under way the city ran its first affordable housing lottery. More than 300 households applied for six apartments. Preference went to current Chelsea residents, families, veterans, and people who had recently been displaced. The first family was scheduled to move in on September 1 and the rest through September.
Deputy City Manager Devon Fields said the city will track how the building performs over the coming year, financially and operationally, before deciding whether to buy more. The city has not published what it paid for the property or what the renovations cost, and the Record’s account of the ribbon cutting did not include those figures. Those numbers will matter when the council is asked whether to do this again.
Why the city is in the landlord business
Chelsea 55 arrived in the same year the city loosened the rules that were supposed to produce affordable housing through private development. In the spring, Maltez proposed and the council took up changes to the inclusionary zoning ordinance: raising the project size at which affordable units are required from 10 units to 50, after an initial proposal of 100, and cutting the penalty a developer pays for not complying from $400,000 to $200,000, after an initial proposal of $100,000.
The stated reason was money. New development had been throwing off about $4 million a year in new tax revenue at its peak in fiscal 2022. That fell to about $1 million this year. At the same time the school department faced a multimillion-dollar shortfall and planned to cut dozens of teaching and support positions, in part because enrollment dropped by about 350 students as federal immigration enforcement pushed families out of the city, and state aid follows the student. “We are doing the best we can to navigate through this perfect storm,” Maltez told The Boston Globe in April, “but ultimately what it means is that we need to make some really hard decisions.”
Not everyone accepted the trade. “Where are we going to redevelop and stuff all these new units?” Mónica Elias-Orellana of GreenRoots asked the Globe. “We need tax revenue to support social services but why on the backbone of housing?” Council President Roberto Jimenez-Rivera raised the concern that the city would lose affordable units in projects that would have been built anyway.
Against that backdrop, Chelsea 55 is a different bet: that the city can produce a handful of deeply needed family units directly, using the tools it already has, the receivership process, the DPW, and its own lottery, without waiting for a developer’s math to work.
The scale problem
Six apartments do not change a housing market. More than 300 applications for six units is the clearest measure of the gap. The city’s own lottery for the pilot drew so many people that it extended the deadline into May. What the building tests is whether a municipal government can acquire, rehabilitate and manage small distressed properties at a cost that makes sense, and whether the receivership pipeline can be a steady source of them.
That is the question Fields says the city will answer with a year of data. If the answer is yes, Chelsea would join a short list of Massachusetts cities that own and run their own housing outside the housing authority. If the answer is no, the city will still have six families in three-bedroom apartments on Heard Street who did not have them before.
Sources: Chelsea Record, September 3, 2026; City of Chelsea lottery notices, spring 2026; The Boston Globe, April 5, 2026. Photo: Chelsea from Malone Park, by Robbie Shade via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.