Chelsea’s new master plan divides the city into three kinds of place. What happens on your street over the next fifteen years depends a good deal on which of the three you live in.
The framework was presented to the Planning Board on September 22 by the two city staff members who have run the plan, and it is the part of a 200-page document a resident can actually use. The categories are transformative growth, catalytic growth and managed growth.
The three categories
Transformative growth is where the city wants what staff called “large-scale holistic transformation.” Four areas are named: West Chelsea, Creekside, the Forbes site and the waterfront at lower Broadway.
Every one of those is already in motion. West Chelsea has an adopted overlay allowing 12 stories. Mass Audubon bought the 17-acre Forbes property for $8.36 million this summer. The lower Broadway waterfront is the stretch the council has been arguing about all year.
Catalytic growth means building on what is already there to expand the uses, the character and the economic activity of an area. The entire Broadway corridor falls in this category, along with Carey Square, the entrance into Prattville and Washington Park.
Managed growth covers the denser residential neighbourhoods, including Charlotte and Bellingham and the Addison and Orange area. The stated aim there is different: to strengthen and preserve what exists.
A board member said the map is what makes the plan land for ordinary readers. “It really provides a framework to help people understand what our objectives are and really how it’s going to most directly impact them by looking at a map going, oh, I live there, that’s pink or that’s yellow.”
The argument underneath it
Staff were direct about why a plan for a city under pressure leads with growth, and they put a sentence around it that is worth quoting in full.
“Growth is not the end. We’re not doing growth for growth’s sake, but growth is a means to generate the resources we need to achieve and implement our vision.”
The framing behind that is what one planner called “the twin tasks of a gateway city.” Chelsea has residents in crisis whose needs are immediate, and it has to build toward long-term prosperity at the same time. “I think oftentimes these can be at odds,” he said, “but I think we need to sort of shift our mindset to how do we do both at the same time.”
The fiscal case is blunter. The analysis behind the plan found new growth revenue declining in recent years and putting a strain on the budget, which matches what the city’s own five-year forecast shows. And one line should be read alongside every argument Chelsea has about its industrial land: “Much of our tax base is propped up from our commercial and industrial uses.”
Staff said that is why balanced growth matters, meaning affordable housing and market-rate housing and commercial and industrial development together, and why maintaining industrial uses sits awkwardly beside the environmental justice commitments elsewhere in the same plan. “We’re trying to navigate very complex topics.”
Who actually showed up
The engagement numbers were presented for the first time in public at this meeting, and they are more substantial than the single speaker at the hearing itself would suggest.
- Over 813 survey respondents.
- More than 64 percent of the surveys were completed in Spanish.
- Over 100 people at public workshops.
- Almost 300 comment cards at Pa’Lante Fest.
- Over 80 participants in a Lego game used to make people rank priorities rather than suggest them.
- Eight community events, plus listening tours and further workshops.
- About 2,200 conversations and comments in total.
The Lego exercise is worth explaining, because it inverts how these things usually run. Staff said most comprehensive planning asks residents what should go in the plan. Chelsea put every strategy in the plan and asked residents which ones to do first. “We are striving to achieve all them, but which ones are the most important that we need to accomplish now?”
A board member noted the consultants had said Chelsea was among the highest rates of community engagement they had seen.
Another raised the obvious follow-on, and nobody had an answer for it. Those 2,200 people gave their time and have heard nothing since. “If we’re asking them for their input to help guide us and we’re putting in the work, it would be really cool to hear their feedback. Are we doing it the right way?”
When the floor opened, the one resident who spoke made the same point unprompted, saying she would have written a fuller comment had she known the agenda was coming. Her testimony is here.
The zoning code is from the 1980s
The single largest priority coming out of the plan is a complete rewrite of the zoning ordinance, and the reason given is simple arithmetic.
“The last time it was holistically updated was in the 80s,” a planner said. “So we have a zoning code that really is advancing a vision that maybe no longer exists.”
The other five-year priorities named were advancing affordable housing delivery and preservation programs, supporting the transformation of West Chelsea and the other growth areas, continuing to enhance downtown and its connections, advancing storm water management and environmental strategies, and investing in youth programs. Chelsea is, staff noted, one of the youngest cities in the Commonwealth.
One finding surprised the people who produced it. When residents talked about safety, they largely did not mean crime. They meant street safety and pedestrian safety. “I think that’s more of a traditional way to think about safety,” the planner said of the crime framing. “So thought that was pretty interesting coming out of the plan.”
What to do about it
Public comment closes at the end of September, through the form at the end of the plan at palante.chelseama.gov. The Planning Board votes on adoption on October 27. If it passes, the plan goes to the City Council for a public hearing and a vote there.
The board’s own caution about implementation still stands. One member counted 40 actions the Planning Board alone could take on zoning and said attempting all of them at once “is probably a fool’s errand.”