Chelsea’s planning department wants to stop requiring parking spaces in new housing, and plans to send the zoning change to the City Council in November. On Tuesday night it asked the Planning Board for feedback first. The board split.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather, who ran the meeting, said of the proposal, “I am all for this wholeheartedly.” Member Mimi Rancatore said the board should not support it until the city fixes its on-street parking sticker program. Others asked for a middle ground. There was no vote. The board’s formal public hearing and its recommendation to the council would come in December, said William Cecio, the city’s planning director.
What would change
Chelsea now requires two parking spaces per unit for one- and two-family homes, and 1.5 spaces per unit for apartment buildings, plus another half space for each bedroom over two in a unit. Under the draft Cecio and city planner Adam Roy presented:
- New residential development would have no minimum parking requirement. Commercial and industrial uses would still have one.
- Residents of new housing would not be eligible for on-street parking stickers. Most already are not: Roy said a project that needs relief from the parking requirement loses sticker eligibility.
- Major site plan review, which is now triggered by the number of parking spaces a project requires, would apply to residential projects over 20,000 square feet.
- Projects over 30,000 square feet would need a transportation demand management plan and a traffic study, the approach the city already uses in the West Chelsea overlay district.
- Parking next to homes would have to be screened by a solid fence or wall at least six feet tall, or by evergreen plantings at least two feet tall when planted that reach six feet within three years. Cecio said this part is still a draft.
- The zoning code’s shared-parking credit table would be removed. Cecio said that as far as staff knew it had never been used.
Cecio was clear about what the change would not do: it would not ban new parking, remove existing spaces or change current residents’ access to street parking.
The city’s case
Cecio said parking costs in the Boston area average about $75,000 a space underground, $50,000 in a parking garage and $20,000 on a surface lot, and that the cost can add $200 to $300 a month to rent. “Do we want more homes for cars or more homes for people?” Cecio asked.
Roy said the parking problem in Chelsea is real, but that new residential buildings are not causing it. Roy cited a study by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council of 30 recent Chelsea developments, 10 counted this year and 20 in 2019 and 2020. They provide about one space per unit on average, below the 1.5 the zoning requires, and around midnight, when demand peaks, about a quarter of their spaces sat empty, Roy said. Census survey data show nearly 75 percent of Chelsea households own one car or none, according to Roy. And over the last five years, Roy said, the Planning Board and Zoning Board together have approved about 0.62 spaces per unit.
Roy showed photos of recent buildings, including the Vero apartments on Everett Avenue, with a surface lot in front of underground parking, and lots on Chestnut Street and Spencer Avenue where parking took the space a yard or trees might have used. Cecio pointed to Everett, where a lot at 25 Garvey Street planned as a parking garage is now 125 affordable homes under construction after that city relaxed its rules. The staff presentation listed Cambridge, Salem, Seattle, Buffalo and the state of North Carolina among places that have dropped parking mandates.
Roy said the department held three community meetings in the past month, at La Colaborativa, GreenRoots and the Senior Center, and that most comments were about on-street parking, not the off-street rules. The city manager’s office has hired consultants to study the sticker program, Cecio said, including how many permits are issued and where tickets are written. On a map of permits, “one unit has seven parking permits,” Cecio said. Changing the sticker program is up to the City Council, not the zoning code.
Where the board stands
Mather said that if the city were starting from scratch, it would overhaul the sticker program at the same time, as Cambridge did, and would drop the blanket rule barring residents of new buildings from stickers. Mather said that view had been given to City Manager Fidel Maltez “in no uncertain terms.” But Mather said the zoning change should not wait: “I think it’s something that Chelsea desperately needs.”
Rancatore said the two can’t be separated. “I just can’t approve it without knowing what the parking is,” Rancatore said. Until the city settles on-street parking, Rancatore said, the board should keep the ability to tell a developer, as it did that night on Essex Street, to keep the parking. Rancatore said people want to park near their homes, with packages, children and winter weather, and that Chelsea is not comparable to Cambridge, Everett or larger cities.
Eric Czernizer called it “a pretty drastic decision” made on incomplete data and proposed a middle ground of half a space per unit. Czernizer also asked whether an owner could turn existing parking spaces into an accessory apartment once the rule is gone. Cecio said yes, and that the zoning could be written so the units the parking served lose sticker eligibility. Czernizer later suggested dropping the requirement only for buildings over 20 units.
Hamza Abdul said the city should find “our own balance” rather than following other cities, and asked whether the current rule could stay with developers seeking special permits case by case. Sara Haidar Escobar said that, from what had been presented, the change mostly removes “a bureaucratic step,” since the boards already grant relief, but worried about leaving every decision to a future board. Haidar Escobar urged thinking “10, 20, 30 years” ahead toward a more walkable city.
Another member called it “a little bit of a leap of faith” to remove the requirement before knowing what happens to on-street parking. One member backed the change with caveats, saying “the housing crisis is a more important priority than the parking crisis,” and suggested having building owners report surplus spaces each year so they could be rented to neighbors.
Cecio said half a space per unit would leave the city with “a blanket standard” again. “In areas that need parking, parking gets built,” Cecio said. “It’s not that parking doesn’t get built.”
Next steps
Cecio said the department will send the board the slides and more reading. The zoning amendment is expected to reach the City Council in November, with the Planning Board’s public hearing and vote on a recommendation in December. The board adopted the city’s new master plan, which lists parking reform as a housing strategy, earlier the same night. Our report on the rest of the meeting. The full debate is in the transcript.