When the City Council rewrote Chelsea’s affordable housing rules on June 22, the final vote was 11 to 0. That is the number most people heard. The vote that decided what the rules actually say was 6 to 5, and until tonight there was no public record of it. The minutes of the June 22 meeting were never posted with the city’s other minutes. They appear for the first time in tonight’s council packet, where they are up for approval as a routine item.
What passed
The ordinance, section 34-156 of the zoning code, tells developers of ten or more units how many of them must be affordable and to whom. The version the council adopted keeps the ten-unit trigger citywide, with one exception: inside the new West Chelsea overlay district around the commuter rail, Market Basket and the community college site, the requirement kicks in only at 100 units. Rental projects in West Chelsea can satisfy it with 10 percent of units at 80 percent of area median income or 7 percent at 60 percent. Ownership projects everywhere owe 10 percent at 80 percent of area median income.
For rental projects elsewhere, the rules work in tiers, and the tiers are where the 6-to-5 vote happened. Councillor Deron Hines moved an amendment that did three things. It added definitions for households at 30 percent and 50 percent of area median income, which are far lower income levels than the 60 and 80 percent the base ordinance used. It rewrote the tier table so that a 15-to-24-unit building owes two affordable units, one of them at 50 percent of median, and a 35-unit building owes four, including either two at 50 percent or one at 30 percent; buildings of 50 or more owe 10 percent of units, rotating between 50 and 80 percent of median, or 5 percent at 30 percent. And it raised the price of not building them. The fee a developer pays the Affordable Housing Trust Fund in lieu of each required unit went from a minimum of $200,000 to $275,000.
The amendment carried 6 to 5. Voting yes: Giovanni Recupero, Roberto Jimenez-Rivera, Deron Hines, Tanairi Garcia, Kelly Garcia and Lisa Santagate. Voting no: Todd Taylor, Manuel Teshe, Norieliz DeJesus, Calvin Brown and Leo Robinson. Then all eleven voted for the ordinance as amended.
The fee is still not automatic. The ordinance says a developer may pay instead of building only “at the sole discretion and majority vote of the city council upon a recommendation of the city manager.” The council also kept a local preference: current Chelsea residents, former residents displaced within the past two years, families with children, people over 65 and people with disabilities go to the front of the line for the affordable units, to the extent the law allows.
How it got here
This is not the ordinance City Manager Fidel Maltez proposed in March. His first draft raised the trigger from 10 units to 100 citywide, set the requirement at a flat 10 percent at 80 percent of median income, dropped the deeper affordability tiers entirely, and cut the in-lieu fee from $400,000 to $100,000. His argument, laid out in a March 30 slide deck and repeated through the spring, was that the 2017 ordinance had backfired. His numbers: since the 2019 amendment, Chelsea permitted 1,197 units, of which 49, or 3.5 percent, were inclusionary affordable units. Another 656 were in fully subsidized buildings that would have been built with or without the ordinance. His slides said only 12 inclusionary units had actually been built: six at 157 Chestnut Street, four at 69 Spencer Avenue, two at 212 Cherry Street. The $400,000 fee had never once been paid. And a chart from MassINC in the same deck showed Chelsea as the only Gateway City in the state that lost housing units between 2022 and 2024, down 0.8 percent while Revere grew 5.4 percent and Everett 4.4 percent. He blamed “the current form of inclusionary zoning.”
The council did not buy the 100-unit version. It was voted down in March, reworked in April with a 50-unit threshold and a $200,000 fee, and sent to the Planning Board, which split 5 to 3 on it in June. By the time it came back for the June 22 hearing the trigger was back at 10 units with tiers, and a council working group had circulated a competing table with a $275,000 fee and 30 and 50 percent income tiers. That table is what Hines moved from the floor.
Why the split matters
The five who voted no were not voting against affordable housing; every one of them voted for the final ordinance minutes later. The disagreement was about how hard to push developers in a city whose own administration says it is losing housing and losing tax growth. Maltez’s forecast, delivered in February and printed sideways in the packet, projects deficits starting in fiscal 2028 and reaching $18.6 million by 2031, and the master plan headed to the Planning Board this month names new growth as the way out. The six who voted yes bet that deeper affordability and a stiffer fee will not scare off the projects the city needs. The five who voted no were less sure.
The hearing itself drew a dozen legible signatures on the sign-in sheet, most of them asking for deeper affordability, two against. Public speaking that night opened at 10:02 p.m. and closed at 10:02 p.m.
Whether the bet pays off will show up in the permit counts the ordinance now requires the city to review every two years. In the meantime the 6-to-5 roll call is the clearest map yet of where this council divides on housing, and it sat unpublished for twelve weeks. Profiles of each councillor, including how they have voted this year, are in our councillor series.