Three Chelsea building projects that won their permits under the city’s old affordable housing rules went back to the Zoning Board of Appeals on September 8 and asked to be held to the new ones instead. The board said yes to all three. Between them, the projects will now owe 15 income-restricted apartments instead of 23, and every unit set aside for the lowest-income households, those at 30 percent of area median income, is gone.
The board got there by classifying each change as a “minor modification,” which needs no public hearing. City planning staff had treated the requests as major and advertised them for a hearing for that reason. The board disagreed, and no member of the public spoke.
The three projects
- Park Street, Essex Street and Ellsworth Street. Approved in July of last year, according to the applicant’s representative, with 15 affordable units: five at 30 percent of area median income, five at 50 percent and five at 80 percent. Now ten: five at 50 percent and five at 80 percent. The total number of apartments does not change. Construction has not started, and the applicant’s representative said the owners are still looking for financing.
- Broadway, the 218 to 230 block. Six affordable units reduced to four. Construction has not started. Staff said the change, as in the first case, removes the 30 percent units.
- 926 Broadway. An 11-unit building, the one of the three already under construction. Two affordable units, one at 30 percent and one at 50 percent, become a single unit at 80 percent, which staff said is what the new ordinance requires of a building with 10 to 14 units. One board member recused, saying the owner is a client.
Nothing else about the buildings changes: same footprints, same number of homes. Only the share reserved for lower-income tenants, and how low the incomes go, is different.
Why the board called it minor
The chair’s reasoning was that the City Council had already decided the question. The council rewrote the inclusionary ordinance in June, and the part that set the new tiers passed 6 to 5. “I would consider it major if the city hadn’t made the changes already,” the chair said. Holding the projects to the old numbers, the chair said, would put the board “in place of the city council.”
The chair also framed the choice as fewer affordable units against none. For a building that has not started, “it’s not a case of 10 versus 15. It’s a case almost of zero versus 10,” because a developer who cannot finance the project will not build it. Staff added that 30 percent units are deeply subsidized and hard to operate, and that the rent on them may not cover the cost of running the unit.
Staff did not agree with the classification. The department looks at the scope of a change and its effect on community needs, a planner told the board, the department “feels that this is a major modification, which is why we advertised it,” one that “would likely warrant some public comment.” The department still recommended approving the requests themselves.
One member pressed the question further. Residents who accepted a project with a given number of affordable units now see fewer, the member said, “the impact is real in the community,” and perhaps the council should decide how already-approved projects are handled rather than leaving it to the board one case at a time. Another member noted how few affordable units the first project carried to begin with. Both agreed the change was minor. Another member predicted the board would see many more requests like these.
What the numbers mean in Chelsea
The city’s own count shows how scarce these units are. In March, City Manager Fidel Maltez’s case for rewriting the ordinance included a slide saying only 12 inclusionary units had actually been built in Chelsea. The eight units removed on September 8 were on paper, not on the ground, and the argument from the dais was that the paper units were keeping the buildings from being built at all. Whether these three now get built is the test of that argument. Two had not broken ground as of the hearing.