The Chelsea Housing Authority wants to tear down 198 aging public housing units at Fitzpatrick and Prattville and replace them with a mix of affordable and market-rate apartments. To make that possible the city is writing a new smart growth zoning district, and the draft would allow buildings up to 90 feet almost everywhere in it, and up to 160 feet, roughly fifteen stories, along the boundary with Revere.
That last number is why this is a regional story and not only a Chelsea one. The tallest buildings the district would permit are the ones closest to another city’s neighborhoods.
What is there now
Fitzpatrick and Prattville is state family public housing off Burma and Exeter Streets, listed at 198 units in the city’s own housing inventory. City Manager Fidel Maltez described the buildings to the council in February as “outdated and costly to maintain.” The Housing Authority has selected a private development partner to redevelop the Prattville site, and the proposal is to replace the units with “modern, affordable and market-rate housing units.”
Replacing distressed public housing through a partnership with a private developer is now the standard model in Massachusetts, because the state has not funded large-scale public housing construction directly in decades. The trade is density: the developer builds more units than were there before, the additional market-rate units pay for the replacement of the subsidized ones, and the public agency keeps a stake.
What the zoning would allow
The mechanism is a Smart Growth Overlay District under Chapter 40R, the state law that lets a city zone for dense housing near transit and jobs in exchange for cash from the state. Maltez told the council the proposed district is “based on the overlay districts established in the Box District and at the former Innes site on Central Avenue,” both of which Chelsea has used before.
The draft sets a general height limit of 90 feet, with a higher limit of 160 feet for buildings bordering the municipal line. It requires 20 percent of units to be affordable, the 40R statutory minimum. The state pays for the zoning: a one-time incentive payment of $600,000, plus $3,000 for every unit built inside the district.
The district covers roughly 23 acres. A build-out table in the state application breaks the land down parcel by parcel along Garfield Avenue, Clyde, Wesley, Fenno and Highland Road, with acreage and unit capacity for each. The totals row in the city’s scanned copy is not fully legible, so we are not publishing unit-capacity figures we cannot read cleanly.
The parking contradiction
One drafting problem is worth flagging because it has survived several readings. The draft text contains an internal conflict in its parking requirements, with one provision indicating 1.15 spaces per unit and another setting 0.75 as a maximum. Those cannot both govern. In a district planned around transit access, the difference between a 1.15 minimum and a 0.75 maximum is the difference between a garage-heavy project and a deliberately car-light one, and it changes what can physically be built on the site.
Where it stands
The council referred the amendment to the Planning Board for the public hearing that state zoning law requires. The item was postponed on April 27 pending the state’s response. It came back on June 22, and the council adopted section 34-189 on a roll call of 11 to 0, with every member present: Taylor, Recupero, Jimenez-Rivera, Hines, Tanairi Garcia, Teshe, Kelly Garcia, Santagate, DeJesus, Brown and Robinson.
The unanimity is consistent with how this council handles zoning. Of roughly 48 roll calls this year, all but three were unanimous among the members present, as our record of every councillor’s votes shows. The exception this year was housing policy, where a 6-to-5 amendment raised the developer buyout fee to $275,000 per unit.
The questions still open
Three things are not in the council’s record. The first is the state’s decision: the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities has to approve a 40R district before the incentive payments follow, and the packets do not record that approval.
The second is relocation. Replacing 198 occupied public housing units means moving the households living in them, twice in many cases, out and back. The Housing Authority’s relocation plan is not in any council packet this year. For comparison, the Soldiers’ Home redevelopment, a separate project, came with a developer letter stating that about 120 current residents would move into the first two phases and that the state had approved all 49 project-based vouchers. Nothing equivalent appears for Fitzpatrick-Prattville.
The third is Revere. Nothing in the record indicates the city consulted its neighbor about 160-foot buildings on the line, and Revere’s own residents have had no obvious forum in which to say anything about it. The units will be in Chelsea. Some of the shadows will not be.