This is an opinion column. It reflects the view of this publication and not the reporting in our news coverage, which is linked throughout.
Over the past nine months, without any single moment that looked like a decision, Chelsea has gone into the property business. The city bought a six-unit apartment building and now collects rent on it. It bought a bank branch and leased it back to the bank. It took easements at a marina. It is holding land for a flood barrier it has no money to build. And it has written itself a rule saying that if the apartment building turns a profit, the profit can be used to buy the next one.
Each of those transactions has a reasonable explanation. We have reported all of them straight, and the explanations hold up on their own terms. Taken together, they amount to something nobody put to the voters: Chelsea is becoming a landlord and a land bank at the same time, and it is doing it through mechanisms specifically designed to avoid the ordinary appropriation process.
That is a bad idea in any city. In this one, it is a bad idea with a history.
What the city actually did
Start with 55 Heard Street. The city spent $2 million on a six-unit building. The money came from the overlay reserve, the account cities keep to cover property tax abatements. When there is more in it than needed, the Board of Assessors can release the surplus. The board approved the transfer on December 16, 2025. No new taxes, no borrowing, no debt exclusion, no ballot question.
Then the council created a revolving fund under Section 53E½ of Chapter 44, assigned it to the Law Department, and capped spending at $400,000 a year. Rent goes in. Management, maintenance and capital costs come out. And the City Manager’s letter says surplus revenue may be used “to assist the City in acquiring additional properties that may further advance Chelsea’s affordable housing goals.”
Read that plainly. The city has built a vehicle that can acquire real estate using money the council does not appropriate, in a fund administered by the Law Department, reporting through a City Manager whose annual evaluation is written by the same council that would otherwise be the check.
Then there is 357 Beacham Street, where the city bought an M&T Bank branch for $1.65 million with expiring state grant money and leased it straight back to the bank. The rent is an amount equal to the property tax the bank was already paying. The authorizing order contemplates a lease of up to forty years. The federal grant that was supposed to fund the flood barrier the land is being assembled for is gone.
So the city is now the landlord of a national bank, on a forty-year horizon, collecting rent that nets it approximately nothing, for a project with no construction money.
Why Chelsea in particular should be careful
Every city that starts buying buildings acquires the same governance problems: who picks the tenants, who awards the management contract, who decides which building to buy next, who sets the rent, who decides which repair is urgent. Those are discretionary decisions about valuable things, made by a small number of people, and reviewed by almost nobody.
Chelsea has been here. Twice.
In 1991 the city collapsed financially, the state put it in receivership, the Board of Aldermen was abolished, and four former mayors and a police captain were arrested or jailed. That is the founding fact of the modern city government. The council is marking its thirty-fifth anniversary this month, and the Charter Review Committee is currently considering whether to delete the receivership provisions from the charter entirely.
The second time is more recent and more directly on point, because it involved housing. Michael McLaughlin, the executive director of the Chelsea Housing Authority, resigned in 2011 after a newspaper reported he was paid about $360,000 a year while telling state officials he made $160,000. The facts are not in dispute; they are set out in a published opinion of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
On his way out, according to that opinion, McLaughlin “wrote himself checks from CHA’s account for $200,000, supposedly for unused leave.” The salary scandal triggered a criminal investigation that reached the housing authority’s finance director, who admitted helping with the salary scheme and, under immunity, told investigators that he and others had rigged the federal inspections of Chelsea’s public housing. A grand jury indicted McLaughlin, the authority’s director of modernization and a paid consultant for conspiring to defraud the United States.
The inspections mattered because scoring 90 or above made the authority a “high performer,” which meant fewer inspections, less oversight and more capital funding. Chelsea was designated a high performer three times, in 2007, 2009 and 2011. McLaughlin pleaded guilty and received 36 months for the salary offense and another 12 months for the inspection conspiracy.
Two things have to be said clearly. The Chelsea Housing Authority is a separate public body, not part of city government, and nothing about that case implicates anyone serving in City Hall today. And no one in the current administration or on the current council has been accused of anything. This column alleges no wrongdoing by any living official, because there is none to allege.
The point is narrower and, I think, harder to argue with. The last time public money, housing and weak outside scrutiny came together in this city, it went badly for years before anyone noticed, and it was a newspaper that noticed rather than any of the boards that were supposed to.
The safeguards are the problem
If Chelsea is going to own real estate, the question is what would catch a problem early. Right now the honest answer is: not much.
The council’s votes are not published for months. As we reported this week, the minutes recording what the council actually decided appear buried inside a later meeting’s packet, sometimes a quarter of a year later. The June 22 votes became readable in September. Nobody outside the room can follow a property decision in anything like real time.
The city has also shown, this year, that it makes real estate and preservation decisions without written policy. When a homeowner applied for Community Preservation money for a facade, the City Manager asked the council to zero the award out and apologized, explaining that the city has no framework for evaluating that kind of investment. In the same round the city funded a $200,000 statue proposed by the City Manager’s own office. Whatever one thinks of either decision, a government that discovers mid-application that it has no policy is not a government ready to run a property portfolio.
The fire station proposal makes the same point from another angle. The city has a $6.08 million construction estimate, a floor plan and a willing private landowner, and the terms of the land deal have never been disclosed publicly. That is the single most important number in the transaction and it is the one the record does not contain.
And the council itself has moved the other way on scrutiny. This year it cut public comment from four minutes to three. A councillor has proposed striking the rule requiring two readings at two meetings before the City Manager’s appointees are confirmed, a rule whose only function is to create a window in which someone can object.
The fair case on the other side
The case for the city acting is genuinely strong, and it deserves stating properly rather than as a straw man.
55 Heard Street was in receivership and heading to auction. Six three-bedroom apartments, the scarcest thing in this housing market, would have gone to the highest bidder. The city stepped in and will rent them by lottery with priority for families, veterans and residents with disabilities. That is a good outcome that the private market was not going to produce, and the council was right to want it.
The Beacham Street purchase was the only way to hold land the flood barrier physically requires before the state money expired on June 30. Losing the grant would have cost more than the building. The easements at the marina were negotiated with a supportive owner.
Waiting for perfect process would have meant losing all of it. Governments that never move opportunistically do not accomplish anything, and Chelsea’s housing crisis will not wait for a policy manual.
Receivership was a lesson about the tax base, and the council has stopped reciting it
It is worth remembering what actually happened in 1991, because the city is about to commemorate it and the commemoration tends to flatten the story into a morality tale about corrupt officials.
Corruption was part of it. The larger part was arithmetic. Chelsea had lost its industry, lost its commercial base, burned down a good deal of its housing stock in 1908 and again in 1973, and kept spending as though none of that had happened. When the money ran out, the state took the city away from its voters, abolished the Board of Aldermen, and ran Chelsea through a receiver. The city did not get itself back by being virtuous. It got itself back by rebuilding a tax base, which took twenty years and a great deal of development that people at the time complained about.
Everyone in Chelsea government says they know this. The City Manager says it constantly, in almost those words. His stated mantra for the fiscal 2027 budget was “Spend Less AND Grow More,” and his budget letter argues that “long-term financial stability cannot be achieved through cost containment alone” and that the city “must continue to focus on economic development, housing production, business growth, and strategic investments that expand our tax base.”
The council votes the other way, and it has the numbers to prove it.
The record on housing production
These figures come from the administration’s own presentation to the council, not from any advocacy group.
Since the inclusionary ordinance was amended in 2019, Chelsea permitted 1,197 housing units. Forty-nine of them, 3.5 percent, were inclusionary affordable units. Of those, twelve were actually built: six at 157 Chestnut Street, four at 69 Spencer Avenue, two at 212 Cherry Street. The $400,000 buyout fee that was supposed to be the alternative had never once been paid in the nine years the ordinance had been on the books.
And a chart from MassINC in the same deck showed Chelsea as the only Gateway City in Massachusetts that lost housing units between 2022 and 2024, down 0.8 percent, while Revere grew 5.4 percent and Everett grew 4.4 percent.
Read those two paragraphs together. An ordinance meant to produce affordable housing produced twelve units in seven years, collected nothing from anyone who declined to build them, and sat over a period in which Chelsea was the only city of its class in the state where the housing supply shrank while its immediate neighbors added thousands.
Presented with that record, the council’s response in June was to raise the buyout fee from $200,000 to $275,000 per unit. That is a 37.5 percent increase in the cost of not building, imposed on a market that had already stopped building. It passed 6 to 5, on an amendment moved from the floor, and the minutes recording it were not public for nearly three months.
In April the same council killed the one proposal on the table that would have let ordinary Chelsea homeowners add housing. Councillor Giovanni Recupero’s zoning petition would have allowed three-family homes by special permit in the single-family districts and cut the minimum lot size. It lost 2 to 6. Whatever its drafting flaws, and it had them, it was the only thing anyone proposed all year that would have let a family in Prattville build an apartment for a grown child.
Who this council actually is
It is tempting to call this a young council, and the description is half right in a way worth getting exactly right.
This is not a new body. Ten of its eleven members were returning when they were sworn in for this term. Leo Robinson has served for decades. Giovanni Recupero has been there since 2012, Todd Taylor since 2020. Four of the eight district seats drew no challenger at all in 2025, and the only seat that changed hands was District 2.
What did change, and it changed around 2021, is who holds the levers. Roberto Jimenez-Rivera is council president. Norieliz DeJesus is vice president and chairs Ways and Means, which means every dollar the city moves is introduced under her name. Manuel Teshe, elected at twenty-three, chairs Planning, Development and Transportation. Tanairi Garcia and Kelly Garcia file the housing orders. On the 6-to-5 vote that raised the buyout fee, that group plus Recupero and Santagate was the six.
Their backgrounds are a matter of public record and they are not shy about them. DeJesus is director of youth programs at La Colaborativa, the city’s largest community organization, and previously its director of policy and organizing. Tanairi Garcia runs La Colaborativa’s food pantry. Teshe works as a paralegal and law clerk on immigration cases. These are people who came to the council out of tenant and immigrant advocacy, and they legislate like it.
That is not a scandal and it is not a disqualification. About three quarters of Chelsea households rent, roughly 74 percent against a national figure near 35, and this is among the most cost-burdened cities in the state. A council drawn from that constituency is a council doing representative democracy correctly.
But it produces a consistent tilt, and the tilt has a cost that nobody on the winning side of these votes has been asked to account for. This is a governing majority that treats housing as something to be allocated rather than something to be produced, and that treats the people who own the housing as the party to be regulated rather than the party whose behavior determines whether anything gets built.
The part that is genuinely unfair
Here is where the argument sharpens, because this is not a difference of philosophy. It is a contradiction inside the same year’s votes.
In April the council took up the fiscal 2027 rate package and approved an 8 percent increase in the trash fee. Look at who pays it. An owner-occupied unit is charged nothing. A residential property of up to eight units is charged $51.57 per month, $618.85 a year. In other words, the increase falls on rental housing and exempts owner-occupancy by design.
Trash collection is an operating cost. Operating costs go into rent. They always have, in every market, and no council vote repeals that. The same is true of the water and sewer increase, of the buyout fee that raises the cost of every new project, and of every inspection and enforcement regime the council adds.
Then look at what the council files. An order demanding a comprehensive list of every landlord receiving a tax abatement or exemption. An order for stricter enforcement against large property owners who are repeat snow-removal violators. An order for an anti-displacement plan identifying elderly and disabled residents at risk from “rising rents, redevelopment, property sales and condominium conversions.” An order asking nonprofits to survey residents on “credit eligibility, rent costs and homeownership.”
Every one of those is a reasonable thing for a councillor to want. Put them next to the rate vote and a pattern emerges that a property owner in this city would be forgiven for finding galling. The council raises the cost of owning and renting out housing, and then treats the resulting rent as evidence of the landlord’s character.
Both things cannot be true. Either the cost of operating a building affects the rent, in which case the council is a participant in rent increases and should say so when it votes, or the cost does not affect the rent, in which case the council should stop claiming its affordability requirements will produce affordable units. The council has spent this year asserting both, on different nights, in the same chamber.
And the one measure on this year’s agenda that would have given actual relief to actual small property owners, Recupero’s home rule petition to freeze property tax increases for income-eligible senior homeowners, died in subcommittee on a 1-1-1 tie in June.
The landlord Chelsea now is
Which brings the argument back where it started. The city that has spent the year raising costs on people who own rental housing has just become an owner of rental housing itself.
Notice the terms it gave itself. At 55 Heard Street the city holds the property free of the trash fee it charges other owners of multi-unit buildings, because it is not a private landlord paying a municipal charge. It pays no property tax to itself. Its operating costs are covered by a revolving fund that keeps its surpluses instead of returning them to the general fund. It selects its tenants by a lottery whose rules the council has not published. And it is not subject to the inclusionary requirement it just raised by 37.5 percent, because it is the city.
A private owner who wanted to do exactly what Chelsea is doing at 55 Heard Street, buy a six-unit building and rent it affordably to families, would face the tax bill, the trash fee, the water and sewer increase, the inspection regime, and a council that files orders about people like him. The city exempted itself from all of it and called the result a pilot.
If the model works, the honest conclusion is not that government is a better landlord. It is that Chelsea has made private ownership of rental housing expensive enough that the city can outcompete it using advantages no private owner can obtain.
What should happen now
I am not arguing the city should sell 55 Heard Street. I am arguing that Chelsea should stop acquiring property until it builds the machinery that makes public ownership safe, and that the council should say so out loud.
That machinery is not exotic. A written acquisition policy stating what the city will buy and why. A rule that any purchase using the revolving fund’s surplus requires a separate, publicly noticed council vote, rather than flowing from a general authorization granted in January. An annual public report on every city-owned property: what it cost, what it earns, what it spends, who manages it and under what contract. Competitive procurement for property management, published. Tenant selection rules written down before the lottery, not after. And an outside audit of the portfolio, reporting to the council rather than to the administration.
Most of that is ordinary practice in cities that own real estate. None of it implies distrust of anybody currently in office. It is the same logic as a fire code: you write it before the fire, and you write it precisely because you cannot know in advance who will be careless.
Chelsea already learned this lesson at enormous cost, twice, within the memory of people still living here. The city is about to hold a public event commemorating the second one. The commemoration would mean more if the city were not, in the same month, quietly building a property portfolio with fewer controls on it than the last one had.
And there is a second thing the council could do that costs nothing at all. When it votes to raise a fee that lands on rental housing, it could say plainly, in the chamber, that the vote will show up in somebody’s rent. Not as an argument against the vote. Sometimes the vote is right. Just as an acknowledgment that the council is one of the parties setting the price of housing in Chelsea, and not merely a bystander entitled to be disappointed in the people who send out the bills.