This is a lightly edited transcript of the Chelsea Planning Board meeting of Tuesday, October 27, 2026, made from the Chelsea Community Cable recording. Speech recognition software produced the text and separated the voices; we then labeled speakers from context, from the roll call and from names used during the meeting, corrected names and misheard words from the agenda and earlier filings, and removed filler and repeated words. Otherwise the words are as spoken. Chair Regina Taylor and member Audrey Jones were absent, and Vice Chair Jordana Mather presided. Two members, Sarah Ritch and Geneliz Herrera, could not be told apart reliably, so both are labeled “Board member,” and short remarks we could not attribute are marked “Unidentified speaker.” Names of members of the public are as heard. Home addresses have been removed, and words we could not make out are marked [unclear]. Timestamps count from the start of the livestream; the meeting begins about ten minutes in. For anything you plan to quote or rely on, check the video.
Our reports on this meeting: master plan adopted, 320 Revere Beach Parkway approved, Walmart moved to November 17; 15 apartments on Essex Street recommended with visitor parking; and the debate over ending parking minimums.
Agenda: Call to order and roll call · Approval of minutes · Chelsea Pa'Lante, Onward comprehensive master plan: vote to adopt · 2026-14: 121 Webster Avenue (Walmart), continued to November 17 · 2026-22: 139-141-143 Essex Street (15 units) · 2026-20: 320 Revere Beach Parkway (60 units) · 2026-23: 471 Washington Avenue (two-family to three-family) · Recess · Discussion: eliminating minimum parking requirements for new housing · Adjournment
Call to order and roll call
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:10:25] Okay, we’re going to go ahead and call our meeting to order. If anyone is in need of interpretation services, we have our translator available in the back. We will start with a roll call. So we have Hamza, Eric, Sarah Ritch.
Board member [0:10:44] Here.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:10:45] Mimi. Here. Sara Haidar Escobar. And then Regina is absent, Audrey is absent, and Geneliz has let us know she will be late. So she should be here shortly.
Approval of minutes
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:10:45] Start with approval of the minutes. We have our August 25, 2026, September 22, 2026 regular meetings and also our September 19, 2026 planning board retreat minutes available for approval. Does anybody have any corrections or updates to be made for those minutes?
Board member Mimi Rancatore [0:11:19] No.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:11:20] Excellent.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [0:11:20] I recommend that we approve them.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:11:24] All right, so we have a motion.
Board member [0:11:25] I’ll second that.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:11:26] And a second. All in favor? Okay, so all of our minutes are approved.
Chelsea Pa'Lante, Onward comprehensive master plan: vote to adopt
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:11:26] So we’ll move on to our next agenda item. We have our Chelsea Pa’Lante, Onward Comprehensive Master Plan. So this is for a vote to adopt the Chelsea Pa’Lante, Onward Comprehensive Master Plan. Since 2024, the City of Chelsea has engaged in a comprehensive planning process to produce an updated master plan for the first time in over 55 years. Through extensive community engagement and data analysis, the new comprehensive master plan has created a unified vision to help steer Chelsea’s future for the next 15 years. To achieve this vision, long and short term goals have been identified along with planning principles and key strategies to advance these goals. This framework will drive Chelsea’s growth and development. To ensure immediate needs are met, long term prosperity is built and everyone can thrive in Chelsea. This plan will help inform policies as they relate to land use and zoning, economic and community development, housing, community safety, environmental resilience and culture. And so do we have. Carlos. Yeah. Anything you would like to add before we vote? Any last minute words?
Board member [0:12:40] Okay.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:12:41] Nothing there. So Board, any comments from anyone else?
Board member Eric Czernizer [0:12:47] Nope.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:12:48] All right, moving right on. Will, anything the department would like to add at this time?
William Cecio, planning director [0:12:53] Yeah, I mean I’ll just briefly thank the steering committee for the comprehensive plan and all the work and hours that they put in helping review the plan and the findings. Want to thank Carlos and [unclear], our consultants, for really pushing this project forward. It was a pleasure to work with you all and just emphasize how momentous this is for the city of Chelsea. We haven’t had a comprehensive plan in over 50 years and so now that we have a unified vision, you know, we have a clear path forward for how to. Yeah, basically move forward and bring Chelsea into prosperity while addressing our residents current needs. So really exciting. And yeah, Just great job, everyone.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:13:35] Okay. And then we have a large audience. Anyone in the audience have any comments or anything that they would like to add on the master? Okay. In that case, we will look for a motion.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [0:13:54] I’ll put out a motion to recommend. Yeah.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:13:59] Are we recommending or we’re actually voting?
William Cecio, planning director [0:14:02] Yeah, you are voting to adopt the.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [0:14:05] So confusing. I’m sorry, my apologies. I’m voting. I recommend we vote to move it forward. Do it.
Board member [0:14:15] Thank you.
Board member Eric Czernizer [0:14:16] I’ll second it.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:14:17] Okay, so a motion and a second. All in favor?
Board member [0:14:24] Okay.
Board member Eric Czernizer [0:14:25] All right.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:14:26] We have a master.
William Cecio, planning director [0:14:27] Congratulations.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [0:14:39] But not where we need to.
2026-14: 121 Webster Avenue (Walmart), continued to November 17
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:14:44] Okay, so moving on in our agenda onto our cases. So we’re going to start with 2026-14, 121 Webster Avenue. Walmart Real Estate Business Trust, Jesse Fryer. And so this is our major site plan review. However, the ZBA has continued the case until after a community meeting that is happening on Thursday at the library at 6pm if anyone would like to join. And so the department’s recommendation is that we continue this case to our November 17th meeting to have given opportunity for the public to comment before we make a final decision on the site plan. Would anybody like to make a motion regarding that?
Board member Hamza Abdul [0:15:37] I just have a question. I know there’s a flyer that currently exists that Walmart put together. What do we know what kind of efforts they put together to outreach to the community or is it posted anywhere that our residents and community can.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:15:52] I definitely saw it posted on Facebook. Will, I don’t know if you have any other details.
William Cecio, planning director [0:15:56] Yes, it’s been posted to city social media channels and I know the property owner has been doing like door knocking around the area to, you know.
Board member [0:16:05] Yeah.
William Cecio, planning director [0:16:05] Current residents to let them know about the project, talk to them, to hear their concerns. So there’s like that effort. But the flyer for the community meeting on Thursday has been posted to city social media channels.
Board member Hamza Abdul [0:16:16] Okay, in that case, I’ll go ahead and continue to make a motion to continue to November 17th meeting.
Board member [0:16:25] I’ll second that motion.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:16:26] All in favor?
Board member [0:16:27] Aye.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:16:29] Okay. All right. So that is continued to November 17th.
2026-22: 139-141-143 Essex Street (15 units)
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:17:44] I’m not sure if that’s extreme.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:17:48] I’m sorry, could you just repeat that now that the mic’s on?
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:17:51] Philip Raccuia, 139-141-143 Essex Street. Good evening, board members. So what I’m proposing here is 15 transit oriented development units. It’s the project that we originally started 33 years ago. We got a special permit here, I believe you can show it on the screen. We were granted a special permit to operate out of the facility. And the property is becoming underutilized, more or less, in a sense. And what we’re proposing is that the city is in desperate need of housing. The town manager was on TV last evening in which he was praying for affordable housing. And we have 15 units here. Is it easier if I speak up here?
William Cecio, planning director [0:18:55] I think whatever you feel comfortable with, as long as it’s into a mic and people can hear it.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:19:04] Okay, sounds a little better. Okay, so the project, 15 transit oriented units, we sized it at one and a half spaces per. For parking, we have adequate parking. Could I get the other page on the screen, Mr. Cecio? Thank you. This is what the project currently looks like. That’s the left side. The left side is encompassed by three families. The right side also has three family. You can see the height of the structure next door. And that is what it’s being utilized for right now. Parking and storage of materials and other various items. We’re proposing that that would be parking, it’s existing parking. Now we would also like to utilize it as part of the project in which we have 11 parking spaces outside and 12 inside. On the next frame, you can see what the neighborhood looks like. So the building who would be built three floors above the existing commercial masonry that exists there now, this is looking up the street and you can see that it’s encompassed by three families on both sides. This is also looking across the street, all three families. There are a lot of empty driveways, parking spaces that people just store trucks in, they work out of their backyards and stuff. This is looking across the street where you can see that it’s just empty spaces, empty lots, the rear of yards. There’s really nothing There, this is the structure. You can see the steel columns, the piers, the headers, the framing system as it was originally built. This is the concrete piers that the steel frames lay upon. And the building would be constructed above this. It was inspected by a structural engineer and it meets code. This picture is across the street. You can see the garages and you can see the roll up gates. You can see the empty spaces. That’s what the neighborhood consists of. This is looking at the project and you can see the width of the gate. You can see there’s already an existing curb cut which is a 28 foot space which is more than adequate for our entrance and exit of the parking area. Our building is directly behind those trees. And you could see behind us what there is just an empty space there. An empty lot which is a separate lot that’s owned by that tan house there, which is owned by the people that own the salt mines. Again, this is behind us to the left. You can see they put dumpsters in there’s a parking area, a pa. This is across the street. There’s a small little structure at the intersection. And the picture on the right is Suffolk street and it has just been approved to build a home. A little further up the street. This is the next street over. This is bordering the waterfront district. The right picture is our street looking down at the industrial district which is that blue building. This is a site aerial view. You can see in location to where we are, which we’re in tangent to the Silver Line bus station there are a couple of bus stops there that you could see. And it’s just mostly open space. The waterfront district and the industrial district on both side. This is an overhead view looking at the width of the parking coming in. And we have spaces all to the left side there. And you can see how underutilized it is. Close proximity as a transit oriented project should be. The Silver Line is around the corner. They built a new station. There are adequate bus stops. Here’s a sketch that shows the time that it would take to go to the bus stop which is on Highland Ave., at the bottom of our street. Same thing. Time frame, walking distance sketched out in purple. That’ll take you to the Silver Line bus stop. Same as well. This is a sketch that if they want to come down and visit the park, that’s the new waterfront park that was designed on Marginal Street. This is also going in the other direction from our property. That would take you to the bike stations that have recently been built. This is the actual building that I am proposing this, that has been built another project that we have the pleasure of working on. That’s in Boston. That’s the project there. It has the spaces below. It has the roof space. The garden area has the native plants. It has a white roof, balconies. It has all the materials. The height is. We’re going to keep it down to 40ft. This is a left side project elevation, which will be built above the existing masonry, which will have two exit fire doors there it has an elevator, skylights. All the rooftop equipment is above in that front area where it’s going to be screened. This is another side view of it, of the project elevation and the first story. Once again, that’s the building. We’re going to cut some windows into it, some brick. You can see the style, the finishes, the fireproof materials. This is the backing. You can see with the parking, that it has larger spaces and smaller spaces. It has parking on the exterior, it has parking underneath. It has a large size bike room, a trash room, sprinkler room, fire and electric rooms in the front, the elevator and the handicap parking accessibility there. And you can see the width of the parking from the entrance with the arrows going in and out. All parking for the project will be as it was designed, at 1 and a half spaces on the actual property itself.
Board member [0:26:37] What are the dimensions of the smaller lots that you’re showing there?
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:26:43] The smaller spaces are for smaller vehicles.
Board member [0:26:47] The smaller parking spot. What are the dimensions of those two different sizes?
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:27:00] So, thank you, Mr. Cecio. so the smallest one is eight by 15. We have six of those. We also have three. Eight and a half by 18. As per the zoning code, everything was sized at one and a half. Currently there are a lot of projects even in our area that are being sized at one per one. So 15 units would require one space each, which would be 15 units. Also, I read some paperwork from previous minutes and I guess some of the projects are being sized at 63. So at 6, 15 units would be 9 units. We could have 9 units inside or we could have 9 units outside. But getting back to this, the biggest spaces which you see on the top right corner are. There’s five of those. They’re bigger spaces which you could put a smaller car in and make it easier for turning and accessibility.
Board member [0:28:09] Well, do you. Can you tell us what is the allowable size of a compact spot in Chelsea? I don’t have it memorized.
William Cecio, planning director [0:28:19] No. Yeah, I can pull it up. Our standard size is 9 by 18, but we do allow.
Board member [0:28:28] Okay. And then the second part of My question is, what’s the aisle width? Is that to code the.
William Cecio, planning director [0:28:35] The aisle width.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:28:36] Does the aisle width is 28?
William Cecio, planning director [0:28:38] Okay, yeah, 28ft. Our standard requirement is 24. 24ft for aisle width.
Board member [0:28:43] Okay.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:28:44] The zoning requirements vary. They allow you to use different spaces accordingly because some people may have smaller cars, other people may have larger cars.
Unidentified speaker [0:28:54] Yeah.
William Cecio, planning director [0:28:54] For lots with 10 or more spaces, we do allow that 25% of the spaces may be compact at a size of 8 by 15. So that is the relief that is sought here. It’s not only for the number, but also for the size of the parking spaces.
Board member [0:29:13] Okay. I don’t personally object to it. I just wanted to make sure that the minimum size that you’re basing your calculations on is. Meets our minimum size. For compact.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:29:27] Yes, they have minimum sizes and they alter based on the percentages that we met with the criteria. And as you can see, the sizes. There are more quantity of the bigger sizes that really aren’t required because the units are 400 to 600 square foot units and they’re being sized at one and a half. Where if we were to do one, we would have 15 units, 15 spaces. There’s 11 outside. We could put four inside, no problem. Or if we were to do 0.63 as some of the projects were going out at nine spaces, we would be okay outside here and we could get rid of a couple.
Board member [0:30:14] I don’t object to what you’ve proposed there. Do we have some piers? I just want to make sure we’re not creating a situation where someone could back into one of the piers supporting the building. Do we have, you know, signage or something? I don’t know, bollards. Something to protect those piers from someone backing into it.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:30:41] We would be glad to. The piers are on the interior of the building, so they’re surrounded by masonry. If you want to go back to that front picture, Mr. Cecio, It was the one showing the steel on the inside of the building. One more right here. The steel is above the concrete pier and they’re 24 by 24. Commonly, the piers today are 16 by 16. We have 24 by 24, which is existing from when the building was built.
Board member [0:31:25] Well, I personally, I would recommend some bollards to just protect your structure from getting.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:31:32] I’m not disagreeing. If you would like that, we would gladly place them.
Board member [0:31:35] I think it’s just for one minute.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:32:12] Absolutely, yes. Sorry, continue.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:32:17] Okay, once again, so we. I would have no problem putting the bollards there.
William Cecio, planning director [0:32:28] Also, just because we Were talking about parking, just to clarify. So since the petitioner is providing 15 units and our requirement is one and a half spaces per unit, he’s required to provide 23 parking spaces. He’s providing 21 and as he’s gone over, add a bunch of different size requirements. So just to clarify
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:32:51] and just to add to that, the board has wide latitude too, in its own discretion where they could adjust the parking. I would ask that you could adjust the parking to 1 per unit. As other projects in our area, Ward 6, are being done at 1 per unit.
William Cecio, planning director [0:33:16] And maybe just food for thought, like one of the comments or questions from the department is basically potentially making the outdoor spaces all regular sized parking spaces. You know, I don’t know how many, how that would influence or impact the number of spaces, you know, but that’s the department sort of question or comment that we’d rather see more regular sized spaces than the compact. But of course, more food for thought for the board to think about.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:33:50] And if you were to reduce the parking, what would you do with the space instead?
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:33:57] Madam Chair, I would reduce the parking, however the board would deem it to be that these spaces could be reduced. Actually, these are a little bigger. So just imagine there’s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. There will probably be one more space because these are so big and reducing them on paper would shrink them to this size, which is a standard size. Standard as if you were to go to Market Basket or anywhere else.
Board member Sara Haidar Escobar [0:34:25] So I just have a question about the parking. Say we were to reduce the number of parking spots and just have regular size parking. How many would that be on the outside?
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:34:37] Okay. So if we were to reduce 1 per unit, 15 units, for example, we could have say 7 outside and 8 inside or 10 outside and 5 inside.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:34:49] So would you get the same amount of space? We wouldn’t have additional green space or any other.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:34:55] Well, you could have additional green space here where we have more than adequate it up on the roof.
Board member [0:35:03] Yeah.
Board member Sara Haidar Escobar [0:35:03] Personally I think it. I would prefer for there to be more regular sized box and less compact box. And I would be fine doing the one to one ratio.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:35:13] That would.
Board member Sara Haidar Escobar [0:35:14] I would be more comfortable with that.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:35:16] Okay, sure. And we could. What I could do is have it redesigned so we could possibly maybe put seven or eight outside and then we could have like a circular with trees and plantings for green space here and maybe on this area as well and some additional space as required.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [0:35:37] Unfortunately, I have the other view as. Because people have visitors or they have roommates. If you go to one to One we’re also discussing because I live in a building where it’s one to one and it’s very challenging if anybody has a roommate or visitors over the weekend. I realized that the extra couple spaces.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:35:58] Visitor space, sure, not a problem.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [0:36:01] If you live in the building and this is a rental building. So it’ll be decided by you. If you decide that they are visitor spaces or first come, first serve. I don’t know how you would monitor it. Monitoring a parking lot is very challenging because people come and go all different hours. But I see both sides of the coin. But my first instinct is to not go to one to one because just, because I just think people are going to have visitors and maybe not an extra car or they could have a roommate situation or something. Having extra parking off the street is kind of helpful, but I’m not.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:36:44] We could put, okay, we could add a visitor space, one or two outside as well. Or we could even add one inside the building here where it’s existing. Two visitor spaces wouldn’t be a problem. Once again, keep in mind that the units are 400 to 600 square feet and most of the people that would be there, mostly maybe older people that might not even have a motor vehicle.
Board member [0:37:16] Okay. Well, I don’t have any objection to how it’s been designed and looking at it. And it makes perfect sense to give priority to the handicap spot or spots. And you can’t get the full length where the stairwell is. So that makes a logical place for the compact spots. Personally, I understand the logic of behind how you laid it out as you did, and I don’t object.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:37:43] The concept was with the handicap, we gave it a little wider spacing on both sides. A little more that’s required. And it is in front of the elevator. And it also is a little wider to accommodate where the staircases are. This would be an exit passageway on both sides of the staircases.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [0:38:03] The other.
Board member Eric Czernizer [0:38:03] Yeah, I’m kind of afraid our communication as a plank board isn’t totally clear. Are we asking for additional green space and sacrifices? Parking spots. Is everything okay? As is saving the parking spots. Is there like a compromise? So like scrap like three parking spots and add some green space?
William Cecio, planning director [0:38:34] I don’t think that’s.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:38:36] Yeah, I agree. I don’t think we have consensus as
Board member Mimi Rancatore [0:38:39] a board at the moment.
Board member [0:38:40] Yeah, let me just point out that it’s not. If we have the 24ft of aisle
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:38:46] or what is it, 28.
Board member [0:38:47] They have 28ft at the top. Or we have the longer parking space we can add more green space to the front of the compact spots if you want more green spots without losing a parking spot. Right. But the way it’s designed is giving a little more wiggle room to the maneuvering of those compact spots, which is not a bad idea.
Board member Sara Haidar Escobar [0:39:18] I think my biggest concern is just with the amount of compact speed spaces, just one not being able to determine how residents will be given certain priorities for like the big space versus a small space. You know how you don’t know how many people are going to have SUVs or a smaller sedan. So that’s why I’m leaning towards having maybe not one to one, but maybe fewer spaces if that’s taking one or two out or even three and having more regular size. Just because I can see that this compact thoughts are very tiny. And I just, I would rather err on the side of caution in case there are too many people that have bigger sized cars.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:39:55] And I think what I’m failing to fully understand is if we change the number of spaces are like are there with the compact spaces merely get wider. I. It’s presumably they’re not going to get longer. So I feel like that’s part of what’s making it difficult for us to say make it this. There’s no too many variables.
Board member [0:40:20] There’s no reason why they can’t be the full 19ft. Right. See if they just align with the ones above. It’s just, it’s the width that is the challenge here.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:40:32] So if I can clear up a little confusion, now that I’m looking at the legend here, it says we have five nine by 18. So those are oversized. So those would be these up here. These are way oversized. So you could park a van or a large mini bus, a sprinter van in this parking space, which there probably won’t be, but it was just placed, it was placed on the corner up here as well to assist people which they really don’t need. Because if you visualize the car that would be in the space, it will be just a small little comma in the middle, which that’s an oversized space. We could size everything at the same thing, which I believe. D Can you scoot this over a touch? D is D is a standard space, 8 by 16.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:41:27] Okay. So the actual compact spaces are the ones that are inside by the stand staircases, Is that what we’re saying?
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:41:33] Yes, these are all compacts in here which they don’t even need to be.
William Cecio, planning director [0:41:38] And again, while I may agree with you that our zoning requirements for A standard size space may be a little bit large. Our standard size space is 9 by 18.
Unidentified speaker [0:41:49] Okay.
William Cecio, planning director [0:41:50] So do like I just again, clarity for the board members. But that was also a helpful clarification. That D8 by 16 spaces right here are a bit more of the standard sized space you see in other areas.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:42:07] Yeah.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [0:42:07] Because they.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:42:08] Visually they look very small, but it’s because to your point, the other ones are larger.
Board member [0:42:14] So.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:42:14] Okay, so as a board, where have we landed? Leave it as is or request a change.
Board member [0:42:21] I vote to leave the parking as is. I’m interested in hearing the community’s input on other things, but personally.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:42:30] Okay, so we don’t. We’re not out of the seat, but just think about that. Okay, sorry. Please continue. Let’s get to the housing part of this.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:42:38] So the spaces could be the same as you would see this D line here, straight up. And if you would like us to omit one or two, we could, depending on the quantity that we would need. So then we go. To keep in mind, it’s a transit oriented project where there’s a large bicycle room there, which would be. It was on that same plan there’s a large bike room right here. There’s a large bike. And that could be larger. Even more. If we were to eliminate some spaces, there could be like a faculty lounge where people could go and sit and watch tv. We could expand the spaces or combine the spaces. There’s a million different avenues. The units are identical. This is a handicap unit, accessible unit here that they can spin a wheelchair here. When they enter. They can go into the kitchen, bathroom, wherever, into the bedroom. They’re all sized. They’re all done accordingly. There are five on each floor. Wide corridors, elevator, double emergency staircases. These are. This is a 652, 487, 524. They’re all various sizes. And this is the zoning analysis that we did in which we sized them at one and a half per unit. And you can see where we do meet the criteria and where we don’t meet the criteria on the variances. We could meet the criteria by. It would be costly to destroy the building and rebuild it. That’s a mix of what the unit would look like. Handicapped accessible, same building, actual storage room. We could even make it larger if we need to. Bicycle racks. We’re trying to get people to move over. LEED certified building design, interior design, white roof. We also have, like I said, large bicycle room. Drought tolerant native plantings on the roof in the green areas. Pest management the systems are all energy efficient. HVAC, the light meets the International Dark Sky Association. Everything is insulated. Electrical sub meter. We would be harvesting the rainwater from the gutters as we already have a system in place that takes the water with the two basins that we have in the parking area. Dedicated area for recycling materials. Private pickup on the trash. Have to excuse my voice. I think I’m coming down with something.
William Cecio, planning director [0:45:59] It’s that time of the year.
Board member Eric Czernizer [0:46:01] Quick question. I’m looking at the plan in front of us and it’s showing a total of 14 apartments. And one and 12 are. And 12 are one bedroom and two are two. But that plan looks a little different. Or am I?
William Cecio, planning director [0:46:26] Yes, our apologies. When the plan was submitted, there was just a mistake. And so it is a 15 unit building. One bedroom.
Adam Roy, city planner [0:46:36] Yeah.
Unidentified speaker [0:46:36] Okay.
William Cecio, planning director [0:46:37] And so this is the correct floor layout. That then is, you know, each floor is this layout.
Board member Eric Czernizer [0:46:45] Okay.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:46:48] They’re all identical. Five floors, same plan, All handicapped like I stated. All state of the art equipment, facilities. As you see the unit Here, this is 500 square feet. Here you can see the design. It has balconies, balcony in each apartment. This is unit one here. Two would be this green one. Three would be this blue. Four would be the bigger one here, which is closer to the elevator. And five would be this end unit.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:47:31] So are all five of that top unit ADA compliant in each floor or just the one?
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:47:38] No, each unit is designed accordingly to ADA rules and regulations. And the way you see this here, it’s the same all the way up. Third floor, second floor, first and various sizes. Like I said, this Unit here is 524 square feet.
Unidentified speaker [0:48:01] Unit one.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:48:02] Unit two is 710. Three is 487. Four is 652 and five is 524.
Board member Eric Czernizer [0:48:14] And per Chelsea’s current inclusionary policy, one is going to be at 80% AMI. Is that accurate?
William Cecio, planning director [0:48:23] With the updated inclusionary zoning policy, two units are inclusionary. One at 50% AMI and one at 80% AMI.
Board member [0:48:30] Okay,
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:48:33] yes, I’m aware of that. The only question I had was that some of the meeting minutes that I read online where they had two, the reason we’re two is because we’re over 14. We have one additional unit, so that’s where it became two. Otherwise, most people requesting if it could be brought down to one at 80, we’d be happy with that as well.
Board member Eric Czernizer [0:49:01] Yeah, and that’s also something to think about because if an apartment got scrapped, we’re also dropping an affordable apartment. So I’m kind of glad with this current setup because it’s creating.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:49:20] That’s fine. As the owner, I have no problem with that.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:49:28] The. Is that the end of your presentation there?
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:49:33] I would just also like to say that this project fits in. It’s an R2 district. R2 is an apartment district. It’s an underutilized parcel. As you can see. There’s nothing else that’ll fit there. Nothing else that we could do. Nothing else that will go there. So I pray on the board’s judgment. Thank you.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:49:54] Thank you. There’s a very thorough presentation. Appreciate all of the context. And I will now officially open it up to the board to ask question. Sorry, we have any. My only question I just want to confirm. So the footprint remains the same as the existing garage structure that’s there?
Board member Eric Czernizer [0:50:18] Correct.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:50:19] Everything is going to stay the same. Yes. The doors will be removed and it will be open so the cars can enter inside.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:50:27] Okay. So all of the dimensional.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:50:29] Yes. Nothing. There will be no new foundations, no new structure other than decorative applications apply to the X area.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:50:37] Perfect.
Board member Sara Haidar Escobar [0:50:39] I guess my one question is the height of the building. Does it power significantly over the existing buildings?
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:50:47] I’m sorry, can you repeat that?
Board member Sara Haidar Escobar [0:50:49] Yeah. So the building as it is, the height as it has it now, is it significantly higher than the other existing buildings of residential buildings?
Unidentified speaker [0:50:58] No.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:50:58] If you go back to one of the pitches, Mr. Cecio. If we go back to the height structure right here, it’s 40ft.
Board member [0:51:08] Okay.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:51:09] To the top. And the other buildings there, they’re the old framing style, so they’re probably like 33, 34.
Board member Sara Haidar Escobar [0:51:17] Okay.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:51:18] So if anything, it’ll be. Is maybe a little taller than me.
Board member Sara Haidar Escobar [0:51:22] Okay, thank you.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:51:36] Okay.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:51:36] Any other questions? Not a problem.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:51:39] We’re good. Is there anyone from the public here who would like to comment on this? Just state your name and address and speak into the microphone.
Jeffrey Bowen, real estate broker (name as heard) [0:51:57] Jeffrey Bowen. I’m no longer a resident of Chelsea, but I’m a real estate broker in town. I like what Chelsea’s doing with the Zoning and Planning Board. I don’t know if I’m allowed to speak, but I think that this is a good move for development to provide housing and utilize these lots that are empty and vacant around the city. So my hat’s off to Chelsea for finally, you know, bringing it forward with the new zoning initiatives and providing housing and helping tax income come in on this underutilized property. So for development everywhere, as long as it makes sense. And that’s a great looking building with garage parking. I mean, who doesn’t Love garage parking. And there’s a roof deck on this. Is that right? I mean, those are beautiful. So, you know, I’m all for condo development and apartment development and thank you very much for your time. I just appreciate it.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:52:50] Thank you for your perspective.
William Cecio, planning director [0:53:04] Adam, do you mind checking outside to see if Councillor Recupero is available to come in and say his piece?
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:53:12] I have one quick question while we’re waiting on that. I couldn’t quite tell from the renderings. Are the balconies, are they real balconies? For lack of a better term, are they more like the Juliet balconies?
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:53:24] They’re fabric. They’re fabricated. They’re fabricated. They’re one piece and they’re bolted internally into the building structure.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:53:33] Okay, is it. But there’s space for someone to physically go out.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:53:37] I believe there’s a foot and a half.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [0:53:39] Okay, good enough.
Board member [0:53:40] All right.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:53:40] And then we public comments. So Mr. Recupero, please.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [0:53:44] Good evening, councillor.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:53:46] State your name and address and see your microphone.
City Councillor Giovanni Recupero [0:53:48] Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Giovanni Recupero and I live at [address removed] and I’m also the district councillor for that area. Last time we went, all the abutters, the people that live in that street do not want it. They think it’s too big of a building to many people. There’s many things you have to consider. After all the parking spots, you have the people that you’re going to bring in every day on that street, which is most place to park. As it is, you got to consider when the people come to visit, they’re going to come with cars and they can leave their cars until 12 o’ clock at night. So you’re going to congest that area. For one for another, this building doesn’t meet any requirements. None whatsoever. The people that are there, they’re not against wanting to build at least a six family house. That seems reasonable. You know, this lot is about 8,000 square feet. That’s all it is. And he says behind there, the gentleman behind there, now the dumpster that you’ve seen, he’s fixing his house for the people. Everybody there lives. The front is the backyard is the garages of people that live there, you know, and all the people that are there, all of them, they had a paper which I don’t know if he gave it to you. But all the abutters don’t agree with him. They don’t agree with the way it’s being that is proposing it. They’re not actually against him wanting to build at least a Six family house. So that’s not saying we’re not. The lot is just too much to put into that area because you have to consider the people that have been there all these years. And not only he’s talking about all these parking spots and all these things. Go in there and see what that actual thing looks like. I’ve been there 47 years. I know what it looks like. I know what was there before he came. There used to be a laundromat, then it was a barn shop. There’s three garages. And then the people that are right next to him, all around him, he doesn’t meet no requirements. The thing that bothers me as an abutter and the rest of us is the congestion that you will break even if you have your parking spots like he says he has. What happens when they get their visitors. And besides that, he says it takes four minutes to go to the Silver line. It doesn’t take four minutes. Like someone my age doesn’t take four minutes. Maybe someone his age is 20 years old, he can run down there. But the other ones, somebody that’s 70 or more, is not going to walk there in two minutes or four minutes like he says, because it’s way down the street. And as far as anything else, all of those backyards are the people that live there, they’ve always lived here. There’s always been someone living all around it. And there’s always been, how you say, a neighborhood. It’s a neighborhood there. The neighborhoods, they have all those people. Yes, you say, well, change comes, change does come. But that’s why most of the people don’t disagree with him putting a six family unit, you know, even though he doesn’t meet none of the standards. Because if I understand any, he can tell you himself, you need 5,000 square feet and an additional 3,000 square feet just to build a single family house. He has 8,000. That’s what you need. That’s the standard. What it is, I can see with bending the rules. I’m not against trying to bend the rules. I’m not against him wanting to build. I’m in favor of building a [unclear] six-family. That’s more than you really could build. You know, I can understand everything he’s talking about. It’s an empty spot. It’s not really empty. He’s used it all his life, 30 years that he’s been there. He used to run his business out of there before. So it’s not an empty spot like he says. It’s still being utilized now. And the People that are there, all the backyards they use that you have to consider when he comes in, it’s not the parking spot you have, it’s the people that come in. They’re going to visit you there, they’re going to park and where you going to put it, you know, and even if he doesn’t, the city has a. I know we forwarded it in that any new building you build cannot get a park. A residential parking sticker that’s. You can’t do that. But you gotta consider, okay, from 5:00 in the morning until 12:00 clock at night they can park.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:58:15] I’ll just ask you to wrap up your point, Mr. councillor.
City Councillor Giovanni Recupero [0:58:19] Okay, my point is simple. That building does not meet the standard of the size that’s there to go back to. People don’t care if he builds a three or six family house. They are in favor of that. They’re against building such a big building with all those people coming in, with all those cars that are going to come in and the size of the lot is too small. It doesn’t meet no requirements and that’s it.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:58:47] Thank you so much for your perspective, councillor. Anyone else from the public who would like to speaker comment? Just state your name and address.
Unidentified speaker [0:59:04] Hi everyone. Good evening everyone.
Resident Sylvia (surname not given) [0:59:16] My name is Sylvia and I’m a Chelsea resident.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [0:59:18] Could we get your address?
Resident Sylvia (surname not given) [0:59:37] I was seeing actually this type of construction they’ve been doing lately. It’s very good idea. It’s going to be more taxes for the city, actually. I understand that. I mean this agreement actually for the availability parking is going to be enough for the people going to be living on the premises, just for the people going to come to visit. It’s very hard actually with all the traffic and everything. For me on a daily living. Things that you need to do for. Exactly taking my kids to the school and all that. But it’s affecting and impacting all this parking and all these constructions that’s going on right now. Sometimes very hard for me when I have to take my kids to the [unclear] school actually I cannot walk all the way through. Sometimes I need to wait for the public transportation to take my kids to the school. And this is going to be affecting actually the parking and the conjecture actually on the city pretty much. I wouldn’t mind, I don’t mind actually at all for him to try to make his project up. But I think it’s going to be affected and the conjecture is going to be even harder. Yeah, we need more parking availability here in Chelsea actually [unclear]. It’s very hard actually to send my kids 10 years old actually on the bus just because of congestion and everything that maneuver around is kind of hot. Children safety is an issue, actually. And like I’m saying, pretty much dealing actually with all this traffic and all that is very hard. Too much. Even if they respect the construction codes, actually, we need more parking. Thank you so much.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:03:23] Thank you so much. Anyone else wishing to speak? Hello, Jose.
Resident Jose (surname not given) [1:03:42] [Address removed.] I feel a little bad for y’.
Board member Eric Czernizer [1:03:48] All.
Resident Jose (surname not given) [1:03:49] You just adopted a plan that calls for parking minimum requirement as one of the policies to explore. And you’re hearing community concerns from folks that are concerned about parking. But I do think that there’s a difference between the current parking policy and how people are moving with the policy that is being suggested with parking minimum requirement, which I know that you all are going to be speaking later on. But these are, as you heard from the community members, these are real concerns of people. But for example, this new development and proposed developments going forward that ask for variances, they do not need parking, they do not meet the, they’re not going to be able to apply for the on-street parking requirements. Right. But as [name unclear] mentioned, there’s also a challenge of during the time that it’s not overnight. So I think that as you’re exploring parking minimum requirement policies, this project, I think there’s a larger conversation that needs to have that may the City Council may need to have around the park on-street parking requirements and how to better improve that so that the burden isn’t filled by the people that currently live here, not existing developments. Right. So that’s what I wanted to say. The Chelsea Pa’Lante plan calls for plans that would encourage developments like this. Right. And there was a whole community process around that and there were many folks that we’re trying to encourage that. But when it comes to the actual implementation, you’re also hearing from folks that live in the neighborhoods as well. So how to implement that? So neither for or against, just encouraging the conversation around the process.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:05:36] Thank you so much.
James Testa, real estate broker (name as heard) [1:05:46] Hi, how are you? My name is James Testa. I live at [address removed], Lynnfield. I’m a local real estate broker as well. Grew up in East Boston, went to Chelsea schools growing up as well. I think that an important thing to take note of this project, and I have this conversation all the time is putting to solve affordability in Chelsea. It’s not going to be building a three unit when you have lots this big. We’re doing in East Boston, for example, much more units. We’re doing 12 to 15 units on less square footage than this. And that’s why East Boston’s been able to grow, develop, and also in turn, the condo market has leveled out a lot now too. And it’s actually made it more affordable than a couple years ago. And I think something really important to take note of is these are all one bedroom units. You’re not building these. It’s actually going to solve directly the affordability crisis. I would rather a new project like this with more units with less square footage and you already know they’re going to be at price points and rental price points that are actually going to serve and help solve affordability. That’s the biggest thing. So as opposed to proposing 15 units where it’s two bedrooms and three bedrooms and they’re 1500 square feet, that’s not really solving the issue at hand. I think that more projects like these are going to help Chelsea compete with affordability and serve that community. You’re going to be serving older demographics. There’s not going to be the parking problems. I believe, like you had some people saying there’s not going to be 25 cars visiting some old woman in a one bedroom apartment. So I think that’s important stuff to take note of. So the more units you can build, the better. We’re already seeing it in other local markets. It’s helping affordability and I think that we need to definitely loosen up inside allowing more stuff like this in Chelsea. Thank you.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:07:14] Thank you so much. Looks like everyone. So any other questions from the board?
Board member Eric Czernizer [1:07:26] Yeah. So circling back to an earlier conversation, we were talking about taking parking spots out and adding green space. We got some input from the community that parking is a concern if visitors come. So after getting community input, I think I would personally prefer keeping the parking spots. But I feel everything else with this project is totally appropriate. It’s the correct area for it is transit oriented construction. There’s ample parking spots. I understand that there’s concerns with construction sucks. Construction is a part of growth. So yeah, I’m totally for it in its current form.
Board member [1:08:29] What I would like to suggest is that not only would the residents not be eligible for street parking, but they also would not. I’d like to propose that they would also not be eligible for guest parking.
Board member Eric Czernizer [1:08:44] Is that possible?
William Cecio, planning director [1:08:47] I don’t think that would be possible to impose as a condition as this. That sort of relates to the larger on-street parking program. What could be recommended is that some of the spaces Be deemed visitor parking like on the site, like the off-street parking that’s being provided. You could recommend that a couple of those spaces just be deemed visitor parking because as other folks have mentioned, these are 15 one-bedrooms. It’s likely the parking demand that would come with a project like this is likely lower than other projects that have more family sized units. So that would be like my recommendation. But I don’t think you could strip the ability to get a visitor parking pass.
Board member [1:09:38] Okay, well, I think we need to take every measure possible to make it more doable to live in this community for the people who already live here. And that’s one small measure in that. But if it’s not legal to deny them that, then I can’t propose it.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [1:10:00] I think having someone have a home is more important than somebody having a parking space. I agree that that is, I understand parking’s a nightmare, but so is not having a home. And that is my number one priority to be on this board. So that’s why I actually say we should see if we can keep all the parking spaces there. Because like I said, I. Contrary to what [name unclear] said about older people not getting visitors, that is untrue. I do get visitors and I do get visitors. So you know, there are grandchildren. So. But you know, owning a, owning, having a place to live is very important. Having a place to park, owning a car is just sort of an option. So I am told. I understand this is a big project. It will change things, the dynamic of the neighborhood. But I think it changes the dynamic of the city in a really good way. So I’m totally for this project and I’m totally for keeping the parking. The only thing that I think we should do is we should review the size of the parking spots and make sure that they’re uniform. Because if you have a really big spot, I don’t want somebody to feel people are incredibly clever about parking. They’ll try to put, they’ll do tandem parking. I’ve had people park in the handicap zones on the sides. You know, it’s people anyway. So yeah, I’m totally for this project.
Board member Sara Haidar Escobar [1:11:33] I know that previously I was in favor of having less parking and well, sorry, bigger parking spaces. So less numbers of parking spots. But I think after hearing from the community, I would be fine with keeping it as is. Especially knowing how like visitor parking seems to be the biggest concern. You know, if you have 15 one bedroom units, assuming that they would. It’s one person per unit, they each would have one car that would Leave about six spaces for visitor parking. And that’s assuming that someone has a car because again, it is very transit oriented. Four minute walk to the local bus stop, 12 to 14 minutes to the Silver Line. And I mean these are people who are going to realistically commute into the city if it’s a one bedroom apartment. It’s younger professionals. I don’t think that they’ll add to the morning congestion when it comes to car traffic. And now I know that’s a huge concern. And I like completely am like, I see it every day. I take the bus every day, I walk every day. I do think attracting this type of demographic will not add to car congestion on the street, which I know might be like child safety, just adding more like people driving in and out. I do think they’ll be utilizing the Silver Line and the local buses. I did on Google Maps myself see like what the commute would be into downtown and could easily take the 116. I saw the Silver Line if you want to chance it with that bridge and it would take you like under 40 minutes. So it’s not a crazy commute. And again, Chelsea is really leaning towards building more housing. I understand like it’s. There’s always a bit of nervousness with the unknown and change. But it is a residential building and a residential neighborhood. But again, like I do think that the visitor parking. It should be stressed that there are six designated visitor parking spots or that has to be enforced. I think that is like the most important thing to alleviate concerns of the community. That’s my piece.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [1:13:34] I have a question. What’s the timetable on this project?
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [1:13:46] Timetable would be as soon as we get approvals and permitting. It will be a self finance project. Depending on the weather by the end of the year if it’s a mild winter. If not, we’ll start in the spring.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:14:05] And how long do you expect construction to take?
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [1:14:08] Probably about 10 months. I apologize about the comment. Can I also comment on some of the things that I heard or is it unnecessary? Okay, thank you.
Board member [1:14:30] I was just gonna say I’m in agreement with making sure there’s like clear visible guest parking. I think I am for this project primarily because I know it’s something that we talk about a lot in the master plan is come with affordable units. And like we said, housing is housing. But I do hear the community on like parking is an issue right now. And I also think there’s a larger issue that is more of a city conversation. I think right now if we can assign some guest Parking and then do the parking we have with the residents. It should be enough.
Board member Hamza Abdul [1:15:00] I agree with you on that. I feel like there’s two different conversations that’s currently happening regarding people serving the community that Jose was talking about, which is our current residents. Like, we are not even offering to help our current residents on having guests. So unless you have a driveway or garage, it’s like leaving at midnight or any kind of holiday. Like, we’re actually taking a lot of that away. And with a lot of the condos and apartments that we’ve been building a lot, I’ve noticed that, you know, a lot of the family get togethers, a lot of the cookouts, a lot of the things that usually happen or whatever, just we’ve lost that part of the identity. So one of the conversations that’s currently happening is like, this is our community. We live here. We love having people over, but they have nowhere to stay or nowhere to leave their vehicle when they come to visit us. It’s like, similar to what you said, like having grandchildren that visit you if they wanted to stay over. Imagine them not having a place to stay over. And that’s one of the things that’s currently happening right now where it’s like, hey, we can’t rely on that. And the other part of the conversation that’s currently happening is, I think, like, coming up with more affordable housing. But the thing that I’m kind of trying to wrap my head around is I know we mentioned this is 400 to 500 square footage. One bedroom.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [1:16:28] Yes, sir.
Board member Hamza Abdul [1:16:28] Yes, one bedroom. And then we said, yes, there’s five floors. Each floor has a handicap room, correct? Or handicap apartment.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [1:16:36] Four floors.
Board member Hamza Abdul [1:16:37] Four floors. And then it says that each floor has one.
Unidentified speaker [1:16:40] Is it.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [1:16:42] Everyone is handicapped accessible, so whichever they would choose to pick would all be handicapped accessible.
Board member Hamza Abdul [1:16:48] Okay.
Unidentified speaker [1:16:49] Yeah. And then now it kind of gets into the question of, like, when it comes to the parking, right. How would you decide on how many handicapped or senior citizens or, you know, older demographic that would be qualified to live in these spaces?
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [1:17:07] If I could go back to the map, please. Yeah, I was thinking about this as people were commenting. And if we go to the parking page. So the one and a half is an overabundance. Actually, we don’t need one and a half because they would have one vehicle. So half of these spaces would be designated as visitor. So we only need 15 spaces. There are 11 here and there are 12 in here. So we can alternate and make one a visitor space. So half of what you see here is not going to be utilized. It was only for the purpose of meeting the code requirement. So. And you’re suggesting that we keep this. Which is fine. We could keep this could be a space for a tenant. This could be a visitor space. Handicapped. Has abundant space here on both sides. We can even make an outdoor handicapped space. There are plenty of ways that we can maneuver this and leaving it the way that it is so that if people do come, they would have a space in the property here. You might visit someone on the third floor. You could park in the visitor space here. There would be another one here, maybe another one at the end.
Board member Eric Czernizer [1:18:28] Okay.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [1:18:29] As half these spaces are just to meet the code, but are not required.
Board member Hamza Abdul [1:18:33] No, I get it. Thank you for explaining that as well. I was thinking more. So, like, how do you. When it comes to, let’s say, residents trying to live there, how would that application process really go to kind of verify is there, like, a cutoff at some point? And then, like, are you going to be looking for, like, a specific age or, like, things that you’re going to put into the application to see if they fit that criteria? That’s one of the things that I’m thinking about. Now, the other portion as well, because this is going to be outdoor. Correct. Or the whole parking lot.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [1:19:05] The whole parking lot. This area here that you see is outdoor. Green space in front of it and on the side. Green space we have on this side of the building as well. And we also have additional rooftop space.
Board member Hamza Abdul [1:19:18] Correct.
Board member Eric Czernizer [1:19:18] Okay.
Board member Hamza Abdul [1:19:19] So now I was going to say if we’re kind of. It almost sounds like we’re. We’re tailoring this towards, like, an older group but living in New England when it snows, who is going to be shuttling a lot of that stuff that
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [1:19:33] we’re going to take care of. The snow, where we would load it and take it out if it’s excessive, or we would plow it, sand it, salt it.
Board member Eric Czernizer [1:19:39] Okay.
Board member Hamza Abdul [1:19:40] And then. Now brings me to the last point, Sarah, that you were mentioning. When it comes to, let’s say, the demographic we’re going to have because of one bedroom and people are going to be living here, but working elsewhere, it sounds like we’re still. So we already have enough condos. We already have, like, enough apartment complexes where we keep saying this is part of the plan, this is part of the vision. But I feel like we should just get on the same page of what is the priority, because it almost sounds like every time there’s a new opportunity to come up with some kind of construction that’s coming in. We say it’s great for taxes, it’s great for taxes. Then we almost like disregard other parts of the plan that we’re supposed to keep a vision on. So I think like when it comes to this conversation, I think looking into it a little bit deeper of if this is a one bedroom, how many older families are really going to be living in there and how many of them are really going to have one car? And I know we said the 116 and the 112 is a four minute walk, but Silver Line is going to be different. It’s going to be further away. In an area like that. We know there’s an elementary school down the street, there’s a boys and girls club down the street, there’s a park. So it’s almost figuring out what group is this really good for? And then it’s also trying to figure out like how are we going to cater to the community that currently lives there if we’re already having them say like, you can’t park here, you don’t qualify here and you have to leave or you can’t park here by this amount of time, you have to leave by this time. There’s almost like three different parts of the conversation that we really need to figure out. But for right now it’s private prioritizing what’s currently there instead of just kind of jumping into another, hey, let’s approve even more construction because of taxes.
Board member Eric Czernizer [1:21:27] I am afraid that that could be like over complicating this situation. Like we obviously can’t control the demographic. We aren’t sure if it’s going to be people our age or an older crowd. I think the things we could control are saying that six parking spots are parking spots. That makes it flexible. It’s an area for students know and it addresses community concerns about visitors coming in and taking in and taking us to parking spots. I think like any conversation about like prioritizing parking spots is just like micromanaging and like as a planning board, I don’t think we should be micromanaging projects.
Board member Hamza Abdul [1:22:34] I agree with you when you said we can’t control demographics, but I feel like we’re hearing about demographics and then we’re deciding based off of that as well. And then kind of disregarding, I would say other components of the plan that we currently have. I’d say you’re right. Like it’s not. Instead of micromanaging the amount of parking spaces that they would be building, it’s more so what’s currently there, how’s it being used? Especially hearing a lot of the community members as well. Is this, what are we putting into consideration based off of what they said, how are their words, like how does it fit part of the plan? So for me, yes, I take the bus and drink, but I’m also thinking about people that have cars. I’m also thinking about people that have families. It’s more so, not just putting it into my own shoes, but like when we’re here, we’re speaking on behalf of those that currently live here as well. So like putting ourselves in other people’s perspective. And how are we putting that into consideration when we’re making decisions like this instead of just the future?
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:23:36] I think we’re starting to get a little beyond the scope of discussing this project and so I’d like to refocus us a little bit. These are good conversations and I’m glad we’re having them, but perhaps not at this exact moment. So do we have any more comments specifically about this unit or any other questions that we would like the petitioner to address? Okay. Will, does the department want to speak to this?
William Cecio, planning director [1:24:06] Yeah, sure. So the department’s perspective is we recommend that the board recommend approval of this project. We acknowledge and definitely understand, like, hear the concerns around like congestion in the area. As mentioned, there’s like the whole on-street curb management, you know, parking program that needs to be looked at. But we feel that this project is providing 21 parking spaces and usually smaller one bedroom apartments tend to bring folks that don’t always own a car. So parking demand can, you can sort of estimate that it will likely be less for a project like this. So we feel there is enough parking off-street. And as board members are sort of mentioning, you know, designating a certain number of spaces for visitor can hopefully alleviate some of the pressure that could come for on-street parking by visitors of these tenants. This is producing 15 housing units. It is transit oriented and it is, you know, transforming and underutilized and you know, kind of dilapidated, like garage into a new housing project. And while it looks to be like about a story or so taller than surrounding structures, it is meeting our zoning height requirement, which is 40ft. They don’t need a variance for that. And it would lead to an increase in tax revenue that we could, you know, reinvest into our neighborhoods to support the various programs and services that we provide. Real quick, is there an existing drainage system on the site or would this result in a new drainage system being implemented?
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [1:25:49] There is an existing drainage system that I installed when we renovated the building. You see one basin here and there’s another basin back here. And this building has roof drains, which I believe you could see on one of the previous pictures of the interior. The roof drains come. There are three roof drains and they connect into this. It leaches water in the ground in the event that there’s an overflow situation. There’s an 8 inch SDR line connected.
Adam Roy, city planner [1:26:20] Okay, great.
William Cecio, planning director [1:26:21] Thank you for the clarification there. And I’ll just add that I do think this kind of like infill development, the sort of, you know, 10 unit, 15, unit, 20 unit buildings, is the kind of development that we want to see in more of our denser residential neighborhoods. So the department is very supportive of this project and, you know, recommends the board recommend approval with conditions. I’ll just flag that. We did have a condition on here. If you look at your proposed condition sheet that recommended the outdoor parking spaces be 9×18, it sounds like the board doesn’t feel that way. So I think scratch that. And you could replace that with a condition that X amount of spaces be the visitor parking.
Adam Roy, city planner [1:27:07] But yeah.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:27:10] Would anyone like to make a motion on the special permit?
Board member Eric Czernizer [1:27:14] Yeah, I will put forward a motion to recommend a special permit with the standard conditions as applicable. Any occupants are ineligible for city’s on-street parking ssticker program. And please also include a sale or lease agreement illustrating that provision. Please also submit a drainage plan and a landscaping plan. I’m gonna scrap one after that. Please don’t put any grills or umbrellas on the roof deck. And the project must participate in design review. And I think we’re all on the same page about adding a condition that six of the outdoor parking spots are going to be visitor parking spots and designated as such. And that is a motion.
Board member [1:28:31] I’ll second that.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:28:31] Okay, so we have a motion and a second. All in favor?
Board member [1:28:34] Aye.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:28:35] Aye. Okay, so that.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [1:28:41] Oh, all those opposed?
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:28:42] Sorry.
Board member Eric Czernizer [1:28:43] Hi.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [1:28:44] Thank you.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:28:45] Wait, was that.
Board member [1:28:48] Okay. All right.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:28:49] I didn’t realize. Thank you. Okay, so that. So passes to recommend approval to the zoning board. And so the zoning board hearing will be Tuesday, November 10th.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [1:29:01] Thank you.
2026-20: 320 Revere Beach Parkway (60 units)
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:29:06] All right, so we will go back in our agenda to case 2026-20. 320 Revere Beach Parkway. 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC. And this is for a special permit recommendation and a major site plan review to construct a 60 residential dwelling unit structure which does not meet the requirements for a minimum lot size off-street parking spaces, minimum side yard setback maximum density, maximum height, maximum number of stories, minimum rear yard setback and minimum usable open space.
Petitioner Philip Raccuia [1:29:41] Excuse me, I had letters of support. Would you like them?
William Cecio, planning director [1:29:47] Yeah, you can submit them up here.
Adam Roy, city planner [1:29:53] Thank you.
Board member Sara Haidar Escobar [1:29:55] Okay.
Board member Eric Czernizer [1:29:55] Good night.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:29:57] All right. And if you’d like to introduce yourself and get us to our presentation.
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:30:02] Sure. Good evening. My name is Peter Piantidosi. I’m one of the owners of 320 Revere Beach Parkway appearing today. Unfortunately, attorney Rossi could not be here tonight due to a family matter. And I do have engineer who’s here on a zoom call. So we’re kind of juggling tonight. This project had been seen once before this board and we’ve made some what we believe to be significant changes to answer some of the questions that came about and if I could go through them quickly, I’d appreciate. This one.
Unidentified speaker [1:30:47] Yeah.
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:30:49] So this site is the old [unclear] site. As you probably know, historically, it’s a very well traveled road, very unconducive space, almost pie shaped, pizza shaped. When we came before the board once before, there was a condition and some of the neighbors were complaining about height. They were complaining about street access on the backside. Things that we’ve taken care of. We’ve reduced the building size from 67 units to 60 units. There are 60 one bedroom units. We’ve taken it down by a floor. As we look at the rear of the building, one of the initial concerns was trash disposal. We’ve put a trash door and a direct trash outlet to the rear level of the building. As we go on, we’re, you know, based on the amount of space that we have here, there’s a lot of greenery we’re putting in here. We’re putting in like a little [unclear] garden with pavers over here. And we’re also creating a rooftop green space on the top floor. If we continue on to some civil drawings, those are plants. This is the ground floor level. When we initially came in, we had a total of 17 spaces. It’s been reduced by one space to meet some of the needs of what this board had concerns with the reduction of that one space. Picked up 20 bike storage spaces. We picked up a USPS package room, an office for management, a maintenance and supply office, and a mechanical room on the first floor. There were some concerns about having tenants have the ability to, you know, somebody on site on a building of the size to be able to deal with tenant needs. We also increase the size of the trash room, providing direct access out onto the back of Adams Street as we go on. If we could go this is basically unit layouts at the stack floor to floor. If we go to the civil drawings which show the back neighborhood.
William Cecio, planning director [1:33:35] Are these what you just sent Rick?
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:33:37] Okay, let me just pull it up.
Unidentified speaker [1:33:39] Great.
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:34:06] So as you may know, obviously it’s a very congested area. You know, according to the trips run by traffic studies, you know going to a residential from what once was, what once was [unclear] would produce probably half amount of trips based on the residential component here. The major concern was Adams Street. It’s a two way street on the backside of this parcel. Abutting neighbors which is [a restaurant] and or the corner brick building which is a six unit building. Really had concerns about traffic safety and things of that nature. We’ve worked with the city and the city is in agreement to make this a one way street. And along the street we’re gonna work together to be able to put parking needed parking on both sides of the street. So it’s gonna be one way. Coming from Garfield dumping out onto the parkway. Currently right now it’s used almost as a cut through traffic when it comes off the parkway. Since the last meeting you have a couple, I believe only two letters of opposition. Both were from [the restaurant owner] and [names unclear], who happen to be [the restaurant owner’s] cousins, who actually own the multifamily on the corner. We’ve agreed to do concessions for them that would actually put up a security gate to their parking lot so that you know, nobody would be illegally parking on their property. And [the restaurant owner] is in agreement and we’ve had extensive talks with the city to be able to put what would be metered 30 minute or 45 minute parking allow the street. Those additional parking spaces after 8 or 9 o’ clock would be used for whoever wants to park there overnight. We also feel that those timed parking spots and metered parking spots will work for Uber and Lyft which will be a majority of a transportation spot. Source. There is a bus stop up on the corner up here of Garfield and Adams on that top corner currently there at this point. And I know that MassDOT has significant amount of plans in redoing this whole intersection. So you know obviously this building is a thoroughfare at the Chelsea. Currently right now it, you know, because of the fire it’s just an empty lot. We’re hoping to beautify it and actually make something beautiful there.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:36:59] Thank you so much. We really appreciate taking into account all of the feedback and comments that we made. I know that there were some fairly significant changes that we requested. Also really appreciate you working so closely with the abutters and the neighbors to make sure that you could maintain good relationships with them. So well done there for any comments or questions.
Board member Hamza Abdul [1:37:28] Honestly, I was just curious about what kind of windows you’re going to use because I know there’s going to be a lot of beeping when people don’t see that light when it’s time to turn.
Unidentified speaker [1:37:38] So.
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:37:38] We currently own and operate a 50 unit building, as I had told the board Once before on McGrath highway in Somerville, which is a similar traffic. Upwards of 40,000 cars a day traffic flow. We use paradigm triple panes. What we find is as much as the windows are very important, it’s also the siding and the layers of the siding that actually deflect the sound. I personally live in that building works very well. That building happens to be brick, so the brick actually definitely helps. But you know, as we get to that point, you know, we want to make sure that our tenants are protected and obviously, you know, that they’re not encountering noise problems.
Board member Hamza Abdul [1:38:30] I appreciate that.
Unidentified speaker [1:38:31] That’s.
Board member Hamza Abdul [1:38:32] That’s literally the only thing I was looking for. No, I actually think this is an incredible idea, especially with what you said behind that street as well. Because right now there is two different ways. Because right now it’s almost that street where you said there would be metered parking is currently being used. Guilty. If there’s traffic on the other side and you just want to make a right, that’s literally all. But with what you’re planning to bring to the table. Absolutely. I think it’s. It’s okay to kind of wait a few minutes on the other side. And I know you mentioned there’s a bus stop over there.
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:39:04] There.
Board member Hamza Abdul [1:39:04] There’s also, I believe, a barber shop like right next to, like right next to the building as well. So there’s a few areas over there that would find a lot of value when it comes to building something like this over there.
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:39:19] Thank you.
Board member [1:39:22] Let me go to a site plan. I just want to look at the greenery because it’s such a concrete jungle over there. I might. Biggest concern is that there isn’t enough greenery for it to feel human.
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:39:39] So I think that was concerned last time. And if we could go to the landscaping plan. Perfect. You know, again, it’s a tough space because it’s a thoroughfare not only from the street aspect, but also from the sidewalk aspect there is a lot of flow on that trap that side there. Trying. And again. And I’m going to reflect Back to my Somerville property. Trying to keep things alive there is very hard. So, and I’ll give you an example. As the plows and people probably don’t think about this, but as the plows come down Revere Beach Parkway, they push all of the snow onto the sidewalk. So they’re going to push four lanes of snow onto these bushes. So we really worked with our landscape engineer to make sure that we had very hardy bushes and things that can survive the environment. And based on the circumstance, this corner and kind of space that we have is kind of like a sitting area. Garden and pavers was very important to us.
Board member [1:40:46] So yeah, it looks like you’ve done as much as you can with the footprint. Have you considered a living wall or you know, greenery that grows up the facade?
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:41:02] So you know what, that’s definitely something I could talk to the landscape engineer with. Actually that might be a great idea. Will, if you could bring up the shot that kind of shoots to the side of the building here.
Unidentified speaker [1:41:25] Yeah, it would be right across.
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:41:26] So yeah, I mean that might be an option or this face might be an option of some sort of, but again, it’s, it’s a very, it’s a hard urban environment and it’s, and I will tell you from experience, we hydrangeas are awesome. They’re like, they live in that environment and then you know, obviously just again, the winter environment is so harsh.
Board member [1:41:55] Personally, I would advocate for the vertical as opposed to, you know, plantings on the ground which are likely to, you know, get, you know, have salt and so forth on it.
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:42:09] Right.
Board member [1:42:10] And they may not survive. But the other facade that could use some help is the Adams Street. So it shows a couple trees in your landscape plan. You know, I, it’s just a kind of plain blank facade. So anything you can do to make that look a little more palatable to the restaurant across the street, it would help. So adding as much greenery as possible.
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:42:41] Okay. Yeah, definitely. I mean we could definitely look at it again. Sometimes it’s tough irrigating the side plants and they will grow, but I understand where you’re coming from.
Board member [1:42:53] Okay. There are some buildings in the area that have done it successfully and ideally it takes very little maintenance.
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:43:01] Okay.
Board member [1:43:02] Just curiously, what is the property on McGrath highway that you are referring to?
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:43:07] So the property that we own is that at the top of the bridge coming from Medford on the right hand side, it’s an all brick kind of classic looking 50 unit building with ground floor Commercial. I built that building in 2017. We completed it in 20.
Unidentified speaker [1:43:27] 20.
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:43:28] It’s much larger than this building. It’s about 110,000 square feet. And I personally live in it. And we have a. We have mixed use tenants downstairs. We have Kumon, we have a Montessori and we have a comedy club called Goofs. So we have a. We have a wide range of things there. But, you know, to the previous Circumstances, we have 11 retail parking spaces. We do have parking underground, but, you know, all of our commercial attendance people are showing up on bicycles and people are. So, you know, I’m not saying Chelsea is the exact same, but I do now, as a kid that grew up on the North Shore, understand the concept. So it’s. Not everybody is parking a car. But yeah, it’s, you know, it’s. It’s similar. [Unclear], MassDOT. These are not easy sites to complete. They take a lot of effort with the state and this is. Obviously that will be the next challenge.
Board member [1:44:34] Okay, one more question. Is the parking spots, are they all 9 by 18 or do you have some compact ones?
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:44:43] If we. They’re all nine by 18? Yeah, I think we did have one more compact somewhere in this vicinity over here. And we shifted some things around to be able to make this inner space work better because there was some rightful concerns in regards to packages. It’s a nightmare. My building in Somerville. It’s packages get dropped everywhere, they get thrown everywhere. I’m constantly picking them up. And you know, there was always the need for supplies and cleaning products and things of that nature. So unfortunately, architects don’t necessarily clean buildings. So, you know, it takes somebody who, you know, and we have the experience having the other building knowing that, you know, these are the things we do need. So
Board member Mimi Rancatore [1:45:35] my question is, you only have one elevator in this building?
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:45:39] We do only have one elevator in this building.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [1:45:42] It’s an awful lot of work for one elevator. 60 units. I live in a building, two elevators with 32 units. And it’s already challenged. I. One elevator. I understand elevators are expensive to build and they take up a lot of space, but that is a timing issue. On if you live on the third or fourth floor and somebody’s on the second. I appreciate all the other changes, but one elevator in a 60 unit building? Not sure if I plus handicap. I’m not sure about that’s my biggest concern. And yeah, and also the Uber, if the address is one thing and you want the Uber driver to pick you up on Adams Street, they’re Never going to find you. They’re never going to. You might. Or you. Yes, or you might not what I would do. So I’m just letting you know, the
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:46:36] second time everybody gets an Uber, they’ll figure it out. Even if they don’t.
Board member [1:46:39] Eric, you have a question?
Board member Mimi Rancatore [1:46:42] Yeah.
Board member Eric Czernizer [1:46:43] Just to confirm, this is going to be subject to the current inclusion zoning policy as opposed to our older inclusionary policy.
William Cecio, planning director [1:46:53] That is correct. And the, that would mean six units or the petitioner has the option to choose to do six units, three at 50% and three at 80% or choose to provide three units at 30%. Ami.
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:47:10] Okay, I have discussed that with my partner and actually we are strongly considering that we are going to do the three at 30% because we feel as though that, you know, there’s a lot of the 50 and 80 out there’s probably not as much 30 people out there. And we were, you know, again, passionate towards that circumstance. And as we brought this plan forward in the past, you know, like I said, we were, you know, we were trying to maximize density to be able to create housing. So that’s, that’s what we’re, you know, I just, I don’t know how many 3rd 30% projects there are out there, but we just felt as though, and we do feel as though 30% is obviously a significant amount of people that need those. So that’s the direction we’re leaning.
Board member Eric Czernizer [1:48:00] Yeah, And I think that my, like biggest like practical concern with this project is like the strategy for dropping off packages. So like picturing kind of like an Amazon truck coming in. Like, where’s the truck gonna come in? Like where’s the person actually gonna.
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:48:20] So Will, if we go back to the civil. You’re not seeing here because it is not part of our plans, but what you’re gonna see is you’re gonna have an entrance here and then this is all gonna be metered parking or 50 minute parking on both sides of this street.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [1:48:41] So.
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:48:42] And as it is too, we’ve also talked about delineating these four parking spaces here are potentially, they’re part of our circumstance. We may designate them as 15 minute parking or Uber drop off. We haven’t quite figured out the exact science to it yet, but that’s the thought process, you know, so, you know, I think you’ll definitely find that FedEx and Amazon and everybody’s going to be dropping off that back street and the fact that it’s going to be a one way street I think will dramatically help that circumstance.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:49:27] I would like just like to state that my concern is that I think the units are a little bit small. But I appreciate that that’s the way that these projects end up these days, especially given that you reduce the height at our request, which reduced your number of units. So totally get it.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [1:49:45] So just.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:49:46] Just putting it out there for the record. Thank you for the [unclear]. Any other comments or anything from the board?
Board member Mimi Rancatore [1:49:55] Nope.
Unidentified speaker [1:49:55] Okay.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:49:56] All right, so I would like to. This is a public hearing, so I would like to open the meeting to the public. Just ask that everyone state their name and address into the mic. I did not say before that it was a three minute time, although I was keeping an eye on it. Believe anybody? That’s a thing we have. Anybody from the public who would like their three minutes? No. All right, I will close the public hearing portion of the meeting.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [1:50:24] That was quick.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:50:25] Will, would the department like to make a recommendation on this?
William Cecio, planning director [1:50:29] Yes. So, you know, I think the department really appreciates the workability of the petitioner working with, you know, abutters working with the board and their comments. So I think the department definitely wants to just acknowledge and appreciate making changes to your proposal a couple times. We also acknowledge that there are challenges to this site that we think kind of any development would. Any project would combat or have to navigate. You know, there is limited transit access in the area. Pedestrian safety and accessibility are of course concerns being right up on Revere Beach Parkway and there are existing traffic issues. But I think first hearing that you are, you know, kind of working with the city and DPW and the Traffic and Parking Commission to talk about changing Adams Street to a one way. I do think we can’t condition approval based on the Traffic and Parking Commission approving this, but I think we can make a condition that you go to the Traffic and Parking Commission and request that Adams Street be transformed into a one way. So we acknowledge those challenges. But as many of the board members spoke to, you know, I think this does align with the vision of the city that’s been adopted by the comprehensive plan. It is producing 60 new housing units. It’s actually really great to hear that you’re thinking about doing the three units at 30 percent AMI. But regardless, it would produce, you know, a certain amount of affordable units, which is really helpful. It is to dive a bit deeper. And board members who are at the retreat will remember this. You know, this is in an area of catalytic growth. This is a mixed use node. So I think this is the kind of project that we would like to see to like really activate this under utilized mixed use area. This is a BR2 district, meant to be a more neighborhood business district. So like Hamza, you spoke of how there are businesses that in the area that would really benefit from having a significant amount of density in the area of like new residents and potentially frequent those businesses. So it can definitely. It’s meeting our housing goal and advancing our goal of growing our local economy. And we just feel that the benefits do outweigh any of the detriments of this project and the conditions before you guys that you will read out, I think kind of mitigate any potential concerns. So the department is supportive and recommends approval.
Board member Eric Czernizer [1:53:05] Yeah.
Board member Hamza Abdul [1:53:06] Well, I was just going to add this. Okay. I believe Adams Street is currently one way.
William Cecio, planning director [1:53:13] Okay.
Board member Hamza Abdul [1:53:14] So because I know Garfield is definitely closed off in a way where nobody can. Let’s say if you’re coming out this way, you can’t really make that turn into it. But a lot of people usually exit going out that way. I believe it right now. It’s. It is one way.
Adam Roy, city planner [1:53:30] Okay. Yeah. All right.
William Cecio, planning director [1:53:32] My confusion. I thought you had mentioned speaking to the city about this, so. Or was it just about the metered parking?
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:53:39] So I don’t know the answer to that question.
William Cecio, planning director [1:53:42] Yeah. So maybe just get clarity on that.
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:53:46] It’s not signed that way. I have seen cars go both ways many times. I will tell you that. I think this deal with what I’ve expressed to the neighbors and what we’ve spoke about with, you know, local city councilors is really contingent upon it being a, you know, from Garfield to the Parkway, one way that we can, that we can have two lanes or two side parkings with metered parking. Because other than that it’s, it’s a war zone over there. I mean, you don’t want to stand there, you know, in early morning traffic because people are flying down there. So I think we’ll take that on with zoning and it’ll be part of the conditions. But I’m prepared for that and I think the neighborhood support is going to be there to be able to support that.
Board member Eric Czernizer [1:54:44] Yeah. I can personally say I’ve accessed Adams Street from either end. So I think it’s a two way street. But it’s possible that I.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:54:54] Or you’re incriminating yourself.
Board member Eric Czernizer [1:54:56] I could be incriminating myself on the public record right now.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:54:59] You definitely can’t take a left into it. But I do think it’s two way once you’re on it.
Board member Eric Czernizer [1:55:04] And like, I totally agree. It should be one way street because it is, like, far too narrow. So I hope that the traffic commission changes that. And I agree that we should totally add in a condition about asking the traffic commission for that change. So, I mean, we’re all talking about creating housing, and this is, like, aggressive construction of housing, so it’s cool.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:55:41] Any other comments, questions, deliberations?
Board member [1:55:44] Minor aesthetic recommendation is that I’d prefer to see a monolithic color, like all one color rather than three tone. I just think it’s so busy and. Well, I’m going to put it out there anyway because we get design review.
William Cecio, planning director [1:56:04] Yeah, we can take that comment into account.
Board member [1:56:06] I think it’ll just disappear if it’s clad in all the same colored material.
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:56:15] Okay.
William Cecio, planning director [1:56:16] Yeah, thanks.
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:56:19] Monolithic color. And maybe some more green space. Like, green face is possible.
Board member [1:56:27] Very prominent building. It gets a lot of visibility. And I agree. It’ll really set it apart if you have, you know, a lot of vertical green space.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:56:37] It’s such an eyesore right now. You can only make it better, though. Yeah.
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:56:40] Thank you.
Board member [1:56:41] On the other end, I do like the color.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [1:56:43] You want to have more color? You can have more color.
Board member [1:56:47] Actually, I think it should be art. Yes.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [1:56:49] I think there should be a mural I’m building, not a vine that is going to penetrate and in 10 years add mold and other things like that and make it a nightmare. Personally, I’m all about public art, so I get a treat, a vine going up. A building is, in my mind, is not really green space. But we’re talking about design here, and that’s not what we’re using.
Board member Eric Czernizer [1:57:15] And like all of our architects, [aesthetic] differences or opinions are so different that, like, this is why we shouldn’t talk about colors. And that because we all have such
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:57:26] different opinions and why we haven’t designed.
Board member Eric Czernizer [1:57:28] Totally be up to the people.
Board member [1:57:31] No, I was just gonna. I wanted to say I really appreciate the amount of effort you put in. I know last time you came here about two months ago, we had. We threw a lot at you. It was a lot of, you know, bullets and points and not enough to take back. But I see you’ve really to phenomenal job, honestly, going through every note and making sure when you came in that you presented each of it to us and went over that review. So thank you.
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [1:57:49] Thank you. I really appreciate that.
Board member [1:57:52] Okay.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:57:54] All right, Any motion then?
William Cecio, planning director [1:57:57] And the board has to do two votes. Recommendation on the special permit and then major site plan review.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:58:03] So motion on the special permit from anyone?
Board member Hamza Abdul [1:58:11] I’ll make a motion to vote to send recommendation on special permit to zoning
Board member Mimi Rancatore [1:58:16] Board, would you like to add any
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:58:18] conditions to that hamza?
Unidentified speaker [1:58:20] Oh, these conditions.
Board member Hamza Abdul [1:58:21] Standard conditions as applicable. Consult with the city’s tree warden and the department on the submitted landscaping plan to receive comments and feedback. Native species are encouraged. The occupants of the building would not would be ineligible to participate in the city’s on-street parking sticker park program. Submit at least sale agreement to the department illustrating this provision and the address of each unit. Gas grills and umbrellas are prohibited on the roof deck. Install clear sign signage of for the drop off pickup delivery spaces. Submitted drainage plan and lighting plan to the department. Lighting must be compliant with Dark Sky International standards and the project must participate in design review for the department
Board member Eric Czernizer [1:59:06] also add the traffic.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:59:09] Consult with the traffic and then also
Board member Hamza Abdul [1:59:13] consult with the traffic people.
Board member Eric Czernizer [1:59:19] I’ll second it.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:59:20] All right, motion made and seconded. All in favor?
Board member Sara Haidar Escobar [1:59:23] Aye.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:59:23] Any opposed? Oh, aye for me too. Any opposed? Okay, so we have voted to recommend approval to the zoning board. And so that hearing will be Tuesday, November 10th.
William Cecio, planning director [1:59:39] I still need to do a vote
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:59:40] for the major site plan. So can I get a motion on the major site planning review?
Board member [1:59:47] I’ll vote to approve the major site plan review with the proposed conditions that we talked about.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:59:54] Do we need those conditions?
William Cecio, planning director [1:59:56] That’s, that’s perfect.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [1:59:57] Okay, perfect.
Board member Eric Czernizer [1:59:59] I’ll second it.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [2:00:00] All right, so motion being second. All in favor?
Board member [2:00:04] Aye.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [2:00:05] Any opposed? Nope.
Board member [2:00:06] Okay.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [2:00:10] That doesn’t go to. That’s just.
Board member [2:00:13] Yeah.
William Cecio, planning director [2:00:13] I mean they will still have to go to the zoning board for the special permit but. And variances.
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [2:00:18] But.
Board member [2:00:19] Awesome.
Peter Piantidosi, owner, 320 Revere Beach Realty LLC [2:00:20] Thank you everyone. Thank you for your consideration and thank you for all your time on this.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [2:00:23] Thank you so much.
Adam Roy, city planner [2:00:24] Bye.
2026-23: 471 Washington Avenue (two-family to three-family)
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [2:00:26] Okay, moving on. So our next case is 2026-23. 471 Washington Avenue. 469 Washington Avenue LLC for a special permit recommendation to convert a ZBA approved residential project from a two family structure to a three family structure which does not meet the minimum requirements for lot area and off-street parking. If you’d like to introduce yourself and give us your presentation.
Petitioner Hector Prieto [2:01:00] Good evening board members. My name is Hector Prieto. I reside at [address removed]. I am actually the owner and the petitioner for this project over at 469 Washington Ave. This particular project was actually approved by the board previously. So it’s a two phase project. We did complete phase one of the project and we’re on to phase two which is actually in construction now. We have our active building permits. I’m actually just going to go through the slides and Present the project. So what you’re seeing here now is actually phase one of the project. But if we go down to the site plan, I’ll explain where we’re at now. So this is completed. We’re on phase two of this project, which is a currently an existing three story, two unit building. So the first floor is connected with the basement, and then the second floor is connected with the third level. And if you could scroll down, please just do the floor plans. Thank you. All right, thank you. So here’s the first floor. It’s two bedrooms. It’s connected to the basement. You have a family room. You have storage and mechanical in the back. And then if we go over to the side, second floor. This was originally connected to the third floor and this part of the second floor. So what we’re proposing to do is just put up a wall and add a kitchen to make it its own independent third unit. We’re not changing the bedroom count, we’re not changing the height of the building. No changes to parking, no changes to open space. Everything is staying as is. As a matter of fact, we were actually able to add a little bit more open space during construction. We ended up putting some retaining walls up. There was asphalt in the back originally. Like I said, this was approved before through the zoning board of appeals. So we ended up just putting more green space in the back. It actually worked out very well. There are some images of what the building currently looks like now. We can show them, please.
William Cecio, planning director [2:03:28] Did you send those?
Petitioner Hector Prieto [2:03:30] Yes. Yeah, just like recently like that. Yes. And it was part. Yeah, it was also part of the previous presentation. Okay, thank you. So this is what it looks like now. The siding is actually going up. It’s like 50% done. So again, you have the first floor that’s connected with the basement. Second floor that was connected with third floor. But now we’re proposing to make it an independent unit. No changes to anything on the exterior. And there’s actually a rendering if. I believe. If you scroll down.
Unidentified speaker [2:04:09] Yeah, there you go.
Petitioner Hector Prieto [2:04:10] That’s what it’s. That’s actually the color of the siding we have going up now. But this is what it’s going to look like. There will be. In the original proposal, there’s two driveways, the 11ft wide with two spots on each side. This building that we finished has a similar type of driveway for both of the units out of there. And then all the trash storage will be in the back. There’s going to be a drywall system in the back as well for storm water retention.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [2:04:44] Are these rentals or condos?
Petitioner Hector Prieto [2:04:46] These are just rentals.
Unidentified speaker [2:04:48] Okay.
Petitioner Hector Prieto [2:04:54] Yes, that’s pretty much it.
Board member [2:04:57] Okay.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [2:04:57] Cora, do we have questions and comments?
Board member Mimi Rancatore [2:05:02] I think this is a great idea. I don’t see much interest. You’re actually adding another apartment, so. Looks handsome to me and I’m all for this.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [2:05:33] Sarah, did you have.
Board member [2:05:35] I’m just wondering about the paving material that you’re proposing.
Petitioner Hector Prieto [2:05:39] Yeah, so what we were approved originally was just asphalt and the back is just going to be, well, not going to be all grass.
Board member [2:05:47] Okay, so how does the permeability from before and after?
Petitioner Hector Prieto [2:05:54] Yeah, so in the original proposal we had two dry wells. So when we ran the calculations, that was more than sufficient. They’re both 500 gallons. But now we actually have more grass in the back, so we have a prettier surface.
Board member [2:06:06] Thank you.
Petitioner Hector Prieto [2:06:07] You’re welcome.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [2:06:11] All right. Anyone from the public? No? Okay, that was quick. Will, does the department have a recommendation to make?
William Cecio, planning director [2:06:25] Yeah, the department recommends approval of this project. As Hector mentioned, the project was originally approved, I think about two years ago. Yeah, 2024. And since the project isn’t expanding the footprint at all, it’s just kind of recognizing that they can add a third unit. I will just say, just for context for the board members, this is a somewhat of a unique case because this is up in our in Prattville, up in our R1 district where we only allow sing single and two family homes. But with the recent changes to the state zoning act, there is now a pathway for residential use variances so petitioners can come before boards and be heard. So, you know, technically three families aren’t allowed, but Hector is seeking a use variance for this project. There are of course, three families in Prattville and in other areas of our R1 district. So the department feels that this, you know, still aligns with the vision for this area. But just wanting to let you guys know that it’s relatively unique and the special permit that you guys are recommending on is for parking. Whereas in two years ago you admit the parking two spaces per unit, but now that it’s a three unit building, it turns to one and a half spaces per unit. So Hector still only providing 4, but is required 5. But with that, just to kind of give board members some context, the zoning board will have an interesting decision to make. But the department recommends approval.
Board member Eric Czernizer [2:08:03] Yep, I appreciate that, as is a probably quick and easy conversation. So I will put forward a motion to recommend approval for a special permit with the standard conditions as applicable. And the occupants aren’t eligible for the on-street parking sticker program, is it
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [2:08:32] all of the residents or just the third unit?
William Cecio, planning director [2:08:35] It would be all of the residents.
Unidentified speaker [2:08:40] Both.
Board member [2:08:40] Second. All right.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [2:08:42] Motion being seconded. All in favor.
Board member [2:08:46] Okay.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [2:08:49] All right. So that we recommended approval. So you also will go to the zoning board meeting on Tuesday, November 10th.
Petitioner Hector Prieto [2:08:56] All right, thank you. Board members show you night.
Board member [2:08:59] Okay.
Board member Eric Czernizer [2:09:03] Favorite holiday?
Board member Sara Haidar Escobar [2:09:04] Is it your favorite holiday?
Board member Eric Czernizer [2:09:05] You’re talking a lot about Holiday.
William Cecio, planning director [2:09:08] Before we move on, does anyone need interpretation services? Okay. If not, Adam can sign you out. And because you mentioned Halloween, I realized that we stocked up on chocolate and candy and did not bring up the chocolate. So, Adam, if you want to maybe run down. Can we take a five minute recess to get the candy?
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [2:09:27] Sure.
Recess
Board member Eric Czernizer [2:09:28] Okay.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [2:09:29] Five minute recess. We’re in recess, so don’t. All right, I’ll be right here.
Discussion: eliminating minimum parking requirements for new housing
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [2:14:37] Okay, fine. All right, so we will reopen the meeting. We have finished our cases. We’re going to move on to other business. We’re going to have a discussion on eliminating minimum parking requirements. And so this is a discussion on the city’s effort to eliminate minimum parking requirements for all new residential developments in Chelsea. This is an opportunity for the planning board members to give feedback on the proposal and the zoning amendment before it is officially submitted to City Council. We’ll turn it over to Will and Adam for some more information.
William Cecio, planning director [2:15:11] All right, thank you. Now that everyone has some chocolate and sugar, everyone’s awake now we can dive into the meat of the meeting here. Also want to clarify that we have not submitted any policy to city council yet. This is not the formal public hearing. This is just us bringing the sort of motivation for this potential policy and some of the proposed zoning changes to the board now to get some feedback before we end up submitting something, some zoning amendment to City Council, but we’ll dive into that a little bit more. So just quickly, like, what are parking mandates? They are a policy choice that requires new developments to construct a specified minimum number of parking spaces on their lot. And really, in the 1950s, many municipalities started to adopt these kinds of policies for minimum parking requirements to really offload the cost of parking onto new development and new residents. And then, you know, these numbers, these guides are based on the average peak parking demand for each use from various locations across the United States. So basically, traffic engineers in the 40s and 50s went to suburbs, shopping centers, and other areas across the country and, you know, counted the amount of parking spaces that were available, the amount of cars utilizing those parking spaces to come up with a guide of Minimum parking requirements per use. And many municipalities started to take that as standards. You know, it’s not as scientific as we would maybe like it to be. It really was just people going and counting and kind of taking it from there. And so in Chelsea, as we kind of had a discussion about parking earlier, for one of the projects, we require two spaces per unit for single and single and two family homes, and then one half spaces per unit for all multifamily development, with an additional half space required for each bedroom over to any unit. So a, in a four unit building, if there was a three bedroom unit, you would have to provide two spaces for that unit. And so there are a lot of costs related to these kinds of requirements. So there’s sort of three buckets, housing costs, environmental costs, and opportunity costs. So really, these minimum parking requirements can increase the price of homes. So one space in the greater Boston area on average can cost about $75,000 to build in an underground parking structure, can cost around $50,000 in a structured parking garage, and can cost around $20,000 on a surface parking lot. And what often happens is parking is, you know, of course, costly to build, and those costs end up getting transferred onto the tenants of the new building. And it can add on average 2 to $300 per month in rent, or 60,000 to $100,000 in the sale price of a home or condo. And so what this ends up doing is that it can actually decrease the total housing supply. Apply both in the sense of, you know, there are minimum parking requirements. Projects come in trying to meet those requirements and may choose to provide parking instead of more housing units. But also the fact that we require a certain kind of arbitrary number can raise construction costs and just make projects much harder to fine financing, you know, make them sort of pencil out and it can just be increasingly difficult. And so some projects don’t even get to the point of coming before a board once they sort of see parking requirements along with other kind of, you know, zoning regulations. There are also environmental costs associated with parking. So parking requirements can exacerbate urban sprawl and the associated environmental impacts of that. So basically it can create further commutes, which means more traffic and can lead to more pollution. It also can worsen the urban heat island effect as well as stormwater drainage. Cars are parked on pavement generally. And so if you require more and more parking, that means more and more paved surface area, which can just continue to add to urban heat impacts as well as take away permeable surface. You know, I know one of the conditions that the board often makes is can you, if you’re putting parking, can you put it on a permeable pavement, which is trying to address the sort of stormwater issue? And then also mandating parking can really create a dull, uninteresting, and really inefficient urban form. And so, you know, you have to put, if you’re required to build parking, you have to put parking somewhere on your site. So that means you’re either putting parking in your front yard or you’re putting parking in the back. Those areas could have been green space or something else. Also in some of our more business oriented or commercial oriented areas, it can create, you know, commercial space parking, then commercial space parking. And it can really break up the experience a pedestrian may have walking along the sidewalk oftentimes. And we actually have some pictures Adam did of couple a great job finding some photos that sort of show how these parking requirements can just create a pretty challenging urban form which just like reduces the enjoyability and walkability of an area. And then there are just opportunity costs. Every unused parking space is wasted potential. It could have been something else. It could have been a housing unit. It could have been an amenity space. It like a community room or a gym. It could also have been more green space as we were sort of talking about with some of the other projects before us. And the kind of question that we’re always sort of thinking about is, do we want more homes for cars or more homes for people? And so those are sort of the opportunity costs that we see. And we’ll dive into a bit more how that relates to the Chelsea context. And so this is just a good photo. Two parking spaces with a 12 foot aisle width that allows for a car to back out and, you know, move around out of the space is equivalent to an average or standard two bedroom unit. So I think this is like a helpful kind of size comparison, you know, where like again, parking is a need that our residents have, but it can come with certain trade offs.
Adam Roy, city planner [2:21:57] Thank you, Will, for that description of minimum parking requirements and the cost. But what about parking in Chelsea? As we all know, and as we heard tonight, it sucks. But through our research in this process, we’ve. We’ve kind of discovered that new residential development is not the culprit of why parking in Chelsea is so difficult. So as a result, if will, if you want to move to the next slide, like I said, through this process, we hired MAPC as our consultants for this project and they conducted a study of 10 sites this year. And this is in addition to 20 sites that they conduct that they studied back in 2019 and 2020. And the key sort of takeaways from this study is that they found that the parking supply within Chelsea for new residential developments already did not meet the minimum parking requirements. So again, as we’ll mention, we require one and a half spaces per unit. These 30 projects in Chelsea only provide parking at one space per unit on average. So we’re already not meeting our requirement. We’re already recognizing that a requirement is arbitrarily too high. But then another key takeaway from this study is that they found that at peak demand, they went around at roughly midnight and counted the parking spaces that were in use when they would expect the most amount of cars to be there. And they still found that roughly 25% of the spaces at these residential developments still sat empty. So we had these projects.
Unidentified speaker [2:23:37] They didn’t.
Adam Roy, city planner [2:23:38] They built to one space per unit, which is below our parking requirement. And parking was still being used at a rate lower than the rate that was actually supplied. And I found that these were very illuminating. And one of the concerns that a lot of residents that we spoke to had were that people would just be parking on the street. But as you guys are aware, most new residential developments are not eligible for on-street parking stickers because if you have to apply for a special permit to seek relief for the number of off-street spaces, you are not eligible for on-street parking stickers. So these residents are not just parking on the street, they’re just not using parking at rates that we previously thought that they would have. And another key note that the MAPC found was that nearly 75% of Chelsea households own one or fewer cars. So we currently require one and a half spaces per unit. That’s more cars, that’s more parking than most Chelsea residents own in cars. And as will mentioned, every parking space costs a lot of money. So if we’re requiring more parking to be built for residents who only own one or fewer cars, then they’re just paying for additional parking that they don’t need and won’t use.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [2:25:00] Okay, except you’re assuming that they’re registered. The cars are registered in Chelsea. So I owned a car for many years. My car was not registered because it was a business. It was registered in Cambridge. So how many cars are parked in residence and how many tickets are issued for overnight illegal parking?
Adam Roy, city planner [2:25:21] That data, I don’t have the top of my head, but this data is from the census and the community Survey. So once you say how many cars you have in a household, it doesn’t really matter where it’s registered, long as you fill out the survey. That’s where this data is from. If you’re.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [2:25:44] I still want to know how many tickets are issued at night. Yeah, that’s an important, you know, off-street parking.
Adam Roy, city planner [2:25:52] Yeah, we, I was going to discuss it a little bit later, but we are analyzing the on-street parking management as part of this effort and the city manager’s office is leading that effort up in hiring consultants to determine how we can best manage the on-street parking program. But that’s not a zoning amendment that will be passed through city councils to the city manager’s offices leading that. But as will kind of touch on I wanted to sort of see what parking, what the parking requirements in Chelsea have produced and whether or not they’re meeting the goals of our city. And we can see on that first picture on the left, that is one Webster so relatively new residential development in Chelsea. It’s providing a lot of new units, but in addition to those units it’s providing a lot of parking. As we can see, the surface lot accompanying this development is roughly the same size as the development itself. And that’s in addition to the parking that’s located underneath the park, underneath a residential.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [2:26:53] Is this the one across from the high school?
Adam Roy, city planner [2:26:54] Yeah, right across from the elementary school.
William Cecio, planning director [2:26:58] The one on the right is across.
Adam Roy, city planner [2:26:59] Oh yeah, the one on the right is the one right across from the high school. But so as we can see like this parking, a lot of it is being utilized in my Google site image and again roughly 75% of it was being used at the time of the MAPC study. But again that’s 25% of the parking area which is a large area that is not being used currently. That is wasted potential. That could be open space that could be more housing in the city of Chelsea. As we can see, one Webster does not provide much open space. It does not have many trees on this lot. But our parking requirements sort of shape this urban form that created this sea of parking without regard for any other considerations. Moving on to the next photo. That’s the again recently constructed Vero apartments located along Everett Avenue which again through our master plan, through our West Chelsea effort is highlighted to be a new like mixed use corridor that connects the transit node to our downtown corridor. And we really want to create this like walkable and vibrant public space. And these large residential projects can provide new residents that can support the businesses along that corridor. But of course this project was built in our in the time of parking requirements. So we needed to always think about where parking could be located. And as a result we have put a parking lot in front of the underground parking and therefore we do not have that nice like walkable environment that we so desire with the buildings right up against the sidewalk. We have a tree lined boulevard and it really creates a more unengaging and less business friendly environment for anyone that seeks to go into those commercial spaces that are located further along down Everett Avenue.
Board member Sara Haidar Escobar [2:29:00] Just one note about that area because I think the new UPS store is there.
Unidentified speaker [2:29:04] Yes.
Board member Sara Haidar Escobar [2:29:04] I utilize that so frequently. I will note that. And it is always pack when I go park for UPS. Yeah. Is that where [unclear] is? Yeah.
Board member [2:29:14] Yeah. I feel like every time I go it’s always packed the drop off the kids at Chelsea High. It’s always packed with parents.
Board member Sara Haidar Escobar [2:29:20] Maybe could have been designed better for the green space. But I do think like putting that in front especially like a store like UPS which I was so happy that they brought it to Chelsea because the one we knew spin is disgusting with that intersection. So like 1000%. But like I think when it comes to certain types of businesses it’s like
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [2:29:36] maybe I think this is also where the difference between mandated parking and available parking makes a difference. Like you have to imagine that the UPS store, they know that people are in and out and in and out and they’re going to provide parking because otherwise they’re not going to have a viable business model. That’s not the same as the city telling them the minimum amount of parking that they have to have.
Adam Roy, city planner [2:29:56] Yeah, that’s a good point. And again all of this is about trade offs. Like again we’re not against parking is a benefit to the city. It obviously addresses a lot of the concerns of the community and it’s something that we need to be able to store cars. But again it’s thinking about what it could be if we weren’t requiring a certain amount that we see is being overbuilt as is. So moving on, just wanted to highlight a couple of new developments in Chelsea. So that first one’s that 157 Chestnut. It’s located in our downtown district. Meant to be this walkable dense environment. Again we see the parking requirement rear its head because we have this surface parking lot kind of interrupting the building form in the neighborhood character all along that street. I was walking it this morning and buildings right up against each other. It’s this nice like tight knit urban neighborhood. But then there’s this gap in housing right here next to the church where there’s a parking lot and it kind of breaks up the building massing and is, doesn’t necessarily fit in with the neighborhood character. And again, not necessarily saying that this parking wasn’t being used. It was when I walked by this morning. But it’s all about thinking about what trade offs we want to have in our city. Again, looking at this property on the right, these are two new residential projects in a more residential area also along Spencer Avenue. And we see that since they were recently constructed, they provide the housing units obviously on the site. But then the rest of the site is taken up by the parking lot that had to accompany these developments. And again that left little room for any green space. So we see the neighboring houses have trees in yards, but these developments have no trees on them, no yards, no open space to serve the residents of those units whatsoever. Because of our parking requirements, we mandated the rest of the lot be parking and that limited any other opportunity for. So moving into parking reform, again we’ve touched on this. We’re looking to eliminate the requirement for parking in the city of Chelsea. But again, communities of all types have removed these costly requirements to address these issues that we’ve talked about tonight. So we want to unlock housing production, we want to improve land use patterns and offer greater flexibility and choice to new and to current and future Chelsea residents. Communities like Salem, Mass., Cambridge, Mass. Seattle, Washington, Buffalo, N.Y. as you can see on this map, the communities of all types of transit accessibility sizes have eliminated parking requirements. And even the entire state of North Carolina has recently just voted to eliminate parking requirements. All like this is a growing trend. We are not the only community talking about this and this is prevailing best practices going forward. And that is highlighted by the fact that out of all of these communities that have eliminated parking requirements, none have reversed their decisions so far. So diving deeper into some of this other some of this national level data, Seattle and Buffalo are two cities that were analyzed closely in the research. So in Seattle what they found was that 59% of the new homes built less parking than was previously required. And ultimately this boosted housing production throughout the city and saved an estimated $537 million in construction costs based on again like Will said, parking is costly to build. So if you’re not requiring those high numbers of parking, then you’re being, then you’re able to pass those savings on to future residents of your city and ultimately lowering housing costs while also boosting housing production. In Buffalo, they found that 68% of new homes would not have met the old mandate. So again, it unlocks a ton of new potential. And in Buffalo in particular, it unlocked mixed use, transit oriented development in particular. But one thing to note that these researchers found was that while it really did unlock mixed use development in both Buffalo and Seattle and those sorts of developments that had access to transit and were in walkable environments, they were able to provide a lot less parking than what previously would have been required. But a lot of the other residential uses that we see where the site doesn’t necessarily make sense for transit accessibility or isn’t as transit accessible or is providing more like single family homes or duplex style construction, we still see that the parking provided, which is that blue bar, still exceeds the previous requirement, which is that gold bar. So developers, even when they don’t have the requirement to build parking, will still build parking because it is a valuable amenity. Literally the only bar where we saw the reduction in parking in Buffalo and Seattle was for mixed use development, which is really highlights that offering that site specific flexibility just means that we see more contextual parking rather than just like parking chaos, for example.
William Cecio, planning director [2:36:02] Yes, and you’ve heard us mention the word trade offs a lot of times. And I think, to kind of clarify and I think and Jordana, you kind of mentioned this, we’re not anti parking is a valuable amenity and our residents need parking. And as that research kind of showed, in areas that need parking gets built. And in areas that need less parking gets built. But what we’re against is kind of the requirement like this arbitrary number that we’re just like, yeah, you know, one and a half space per unit and we can look toward to our neighbors. Everett, this is like a really, I think just a very like interesting and like in your face example where a site, 25 Garvey Street in Everett, Massachusetts was previously planned to be a parking garage to meet the city’s parking mandate for some of the adjacent developments. And because Everett relaxed their parking requirements and made them more flexible rather than a parking garage, it’s now 125 affordable homes that are under construction. And so I think again it sort of shows or puts in our face a little bit like the question do we want homes for cars or homes for people? And so I think that’s a very like unique and interesting situation right there where making your parking requirements a bit more flexible, relaxing them a Little bit actually allowed for the creation of 125 of four affordable homes. Now what does this kind of mean in Chelsea? So Jose, actually you mentioned this earlier, but the master plan the board just adopted does highlight reducing, reforming, eliminating parking requirements as a key housing and place making strategy. And I think some of the pictures Adam was trying to show was not necessarily to say that these aren’t being used, but look at how this shapes the building form and how it shapes how home builders developers can utilize their site. And so reducing or eliminating the parking requirement would unlock new housing opportunities, as we said, which can support the construction of affordable housing and it can attract new developments that can increase tax revenue and that tax revenue can be earmarked to fund the program services that our residents need. And then I think just something that was really resonating for me is that right now we have a blanket standard that’s just like 1s face per unit for multifamily or 2 spaces per single and duplex units. What that does is it actually removes the ability for home builders, developers, you know, property owners to produce or supply the amount of parking that they feel is right for their site, that they feel will actually meet the needs of the potential tenants that may move there. And that they feel, you know, kind of fits in with the numbers that they’re thinking about in terms of like, you know, their costs and their financing. And so this really just allows for flexibility, allows for context specific project development. And as we’ve been saying, it offers the opportunity to transform some of the wasted space into public benefits like more housing or more green space, active storefronts, more amenity spaces as well. Now just to be clear, like what removing parking mandates will not do is they won’t ban the construction of new parking, they won’t remove any existing parking. We are not telling people to dig up your parking spaces. You cannot park there anymore. This also doesn’t change current residents access to parking. As mentioned, the city is like looking into the on-street parking program and trying to analyze how can we improve this, how can we make, you know, changes to this that would actually meet the needs of our residents and quell some of the concerns around on-street parking congestion. That was something that came up at all the community meetings we’ve done, not necessarily about the policy itself, but that on-street parking sucks and we need
Adam Roy, city planner [2:40:10] to figure that out.
William Cecio, planning director [2:40:12] And then also, this will not allow residents of new developments to park on the street. So part of this proposal is to not allow any tenants or occupants of new Residential development to participate in the on-street parking program. And just to go over more of some of the proposed zoning changes. So we remove the parking requirement for all new residential developments. Commercial and industrial uses still will be required to provide parking. This will restrict new developments from receiving on-street parking stickers. Also something for the planning board here. Our major cycle and review threshold is tied to the amount of parking spaces that are required. So we had to sort of adjust our site plan thresholds. And we landed on for residential projects, the trigger be any project that is greater than 20,000 square feet. And we looked at past projects and we’re trying to see, okay, which ones triggered major site plan, which ones didn’t. Which do we feel should trigger site plan review? And most of the projects were around this site size. And if you think about it, 25 parking spaces. With our one and a half space per unit requirement, you need about 17 units to, you know, require about 25 parking spaces. So if you sort of estimate here, about a thousand square feet per unit. If you take into account stairwells, lobby spaces, other amenity spaces, you can get around the 20,000 square feet. So we felt like while we’re removing the parking space element of this trigger, the size requirement actually, you know, matches the size of projects that would produce the need for 25 parking spaces. Also for larger projects greater than 30,000 square feet, we would require a transportation demand management plan, which I think is a good backstop. It really does require larger projects to think about. How are people moving to and from your site? How are you encourage encouraging other forms of mobility? And those projects would be assessed an impact score based on their size. And there would be a traffic study required that they would have to submit that would estimate or analyze, assess how many trips would be generated from this site. So an impact score would be created based on the size and the amount of trips that are estimated. And then there are strategies that these larger developments would have to choose from to sort of offset their impact score. We instituted this in the West Chelsea overlay district. We felt that this made sense for the city overall as well. Also replacing the location of off-street parking requirements with a proper screening requirement. We felt like this was an opportunity just to sort of continue to improve our parking requirements. Not just the number, but also the location, oftentimes the board’s condition, placing an opaque fence around the parking that’s being provided to ensure that there’s no light shining onto abutting properties, et cetera. So we just felt that it makes sense to just codify that into our zoning, have a proper screening requirement height.
Board member [2:43:32] Are we talking about the airport?
William Cecio, planning director [2:43:33] So right now, and this is still in review, so this is like a draft not solidified yet. We’re thinking about establish if you’re parking abuts a residentially zoned property or an existing residential use, then your spaces need to be properly screened by either a fence, wall or vegetative buffer. For the fence and wall, it has to be 100% open, opaque and at minimum 6ft tall. For the vegetative buffer, it would be quite costly to require a six foot fully opaque, you know, planting, landscaping. So we do have some requirements around at the time of planting. They need to be like evergreen shrubs or you know, some sort of plants and they have to be at minimum two feet tall and then within three years has to reach up to six feet minimum. So trying to allow for some flexibility there because I think we all would like to see more landscaping buffers around our parking. So try to make some opportunity where it’s not so costly but can still meet the goals of the screening requirement. And then finally we have a shared parking credit system within our zoning code. We are eliminating that. We’re not anti shared parking. But from the time that I started working here, from the time Adam started working here, I don’t think we’ve ever used the shared parking credit system. So I don’t really think it’s being used or being applied. So we felt we should just remove this and rather than having like this credit system, just encourage shared parking where it makes sense. Can you talk the shared parking requirement? I mean it is a convoluted table. I can probably pull up, but
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [2:45:30] it’s, it’s [unclear]. It’s a notion that residents will use it at night and commercially use it during the day.
Board member [2:45:34] Yeah.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [2:45:34] Is that.
Adam Roy, city planner [2:45:35] Yeah, you have to like earn the amount of credits you have. The amount of credits you have are based on your current parking requirement. And then like it has like each time of day and then it’s like this is what this parking allocation will be like. It’s, it’s not the most.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [2:45:55] This is the details. If we’re getting rid of it.
William Cecio, planning director [2:45:57] Yeah, for sure.
Board member [2:45:57] But I’m saying we should get rid of it. If someone’s put time into thinking how this is going to benefit.
Adam Roy, city planner [2:46:05] It requires a set number of parking. It requires a parking requirement to determine how many credits you need to offset based on like when parking is going to be available at what time of day.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [2:46:20] But the concept of saying that those UPS who are employees. But I meant customers could have just pulled into the parking garage for that, you know, giant building and use the spaces that all the people that drove to work that morning would, you know, otherwise be in. I think that the concept exists. The math goes away.
Unidentified speaker [2:46:39] Yeah.
William Cecio, planning director [2:46:40] Again, we’re not anti shared parking.
Board member Eric Czernizer [2:46:42] This.
William Cecio, planning director [2:46:42] I just looking at this table gives me a headache. And I like, yes, like let’s remove something that we don’t utilize.
Adam Roy, city planner [2:46:49] Yeah. And then one thing I wanted to note on the location of parking requirements, like obviously they exist because we don’t want parking abutting directly abutting neighboring properties. But it’s like obviously on the small lots in Chelsea, like that’s bound to happen. And what we don’t want to see happen is if we remove the number of parking lot, number of off-street parking space requirements, but keep the location of off-street parking requirements, then that’s just unintentionally disincentivizing any parking from being built on the site. So we still want to again, provide for that flexibility. And it’s like, what is the logic behind the off-street parking requirement so that your cars aren’t directly abutting neighboring property? So we thought, okay, right, let’s just institute a screening requirement and not unintentionally disincentivize parking from being provided on these smaller lots.
William Cecio, planning director [2:47:43] Thank you.
Adam Roy, city planner [2:47:45] Yeah. So again, just wanted to briefly summarize the process that we’ve kind of undertaken so far. Some of the ongoing initiatives and what the steps, the next steps will be going forward. So in the past month we’ve had three community meetings and we’ve really tried to meet residents where they’re at. So we’ve had a community meeting at La Collaborativa, we’ve had one at GreenRoots, and we had one at the Senior Center. And again, we’ll kind of touch on this. But a lot of the comments were mostly focused around the on-street parking management side of things. And no one was expressing too much concern about the off-street parking requirement, which is what we’re really focused on here with the zoning. Again, I touched on this earlier, but we have looked at the existing conditions for residential development in Chelsea. We had MAPC do their Right Sizing parking study which examined the usage rate for new residential development. And again saw that parking supply, it doesn’t currently meet the demand and the current usage doesn’t even meet the supply that is currently provided. So we’re setting these arbitrary requirements and none of them are being hit. And we’re still Wasting a lot of storage space and a lot of potential that we have here in Chelsea. Again, as part of this effort, we reviewed the amount of parking that we’ve been permitting as a planning board and as a zoning board. And I think Phil Raccuia kind of touched on this a little bit, but he saw that we’ve, over the past five years, we’ve permitted roughly 0.62 spaces per unit. So again, well below the requirement that we have at one and a half spaces per unit. And it’s really just emphasizing the fact that this requirement like.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [2:49:32] And I don’t think we have a ton of units going unrented because people can’t get parking space.
Adam Roy, city planner [2:49:37] Exactly. Vacancy rates, demand for housing is certainly still quite low. So again, like this requirement is something that we’re not even following as a board. And we’re just. We’re offering this flexibility without the benefit of offering predictability. And that’s kind of a misalignment between our zoning and what we actually offer. But alongside this zoning process, we are also looking at regulations to address the on-street parking management concerns. Again, that is being headed up by the city manager’s office. They have hired consultants to look at the amount of parking permits that have been distributed throughout the city. They are looking at the number of tickets and where the tickets are being located, like being given out on a nightly basis. And they are looking at the total number of on-street parking spots available and finding the way that both can address the parking concerns. But it also meets the needs of the community members going forward. There will be more opportunities to discuss that, especially at city council meetings where they’re discussing those regulations.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [2:50:54] Do you know when that is going to be done? Finished.
Adam Roy, city planner [2:50:57] When that’s going to be finished? Soon. Again, we are looking to submit this zoning amendment in November.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [2:51:06] When is the on-street, when is the parking that.
Adam Roy, city planner [2:51:09] That will accompany this proposal?
Board member Mimi Rancatore [2:51:10] And when do we get to see.
William Cecio, planning director [2:51:12] No. The eliminating off-street parking requirements is a separate zoning amendment. Looking at the on-street parking program will have to be taken up by city council separately. Like not a zoning amendment. We just started looking at that. Given that at all these community meetings, no one really even talked about the policy they were talking about on-street
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [2:51:32] park because that’s not a zoning amendment. That’s something that we as Chelsea citizens have.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [2:51:38] How can we possibly make an intelligent decision when the on-street parking program is idiotic? It might be on idiotic. It is the number one complaint. So now what you’re so if there’s off-street, how can I know what off-street parking is doing? This is a, this is a real estate developer’s wet dream. They love the idea of not getting eliminate parking. They love it worldwide. They love it in San Francisco. They love it is the freaking [unclear]. To be crude. That’s what they want because it’s so expensive. We’re here, we just, we’re here to give. That’s what we do. That’s what real estate developers. How can I make a decision without knowing if they’re just reviewing that process now, off-street parking is, you know, people want to park near their house, they want to pull up in front of their house. That’s. So if you say, okay, you live over here, well, we have a great parking space for you over here. They don’t want to hear that’s not what, you know, they have packages, they have children, they have, you know, snow, winter weather. People want to literally park in front of their house. So, And I understand that that’s an unrealistic expectation. It’s hard to get people to reconcile. But I can’t, I can’t make a
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [2:52:52] decision if they’re not eligible for the program anyway.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [2:52:55] I know the program. That’s the program. They’re, they’re together, they’re, they’re.
William Cecio, planning director [2:53:01] I definitely agree with you that these
Board member Mimi Rancatore [2:53:02] are connected conversations here, and I hate that word. This is a synergy. You wanted me to make. You want me to say, sure, we’ll just eliminate parking. And then six, five months down the line, the, this parking program, which I was totally against six years ago, and I even spoke about it to, is, it’s unfriendly to people who want to spend money. Here it is impeded the city’s parking in dramatic ways. How can we make a decision on this without knowing what they’re going to, what the city council is going to do? I just don’t see how we can.
Board member [2:53:37] It’s like jumping the gun. I see that you’re pointing.
Board member Eric Czernizer [2:53:39] Yeah, I agree. But we’re also like, right at the end of this presentation, so can we just like, finish the recommendation before hopping
Adam Roy, city planner [2:53:50] we have one more slide. But it’s just, it’s just reiterating the benefits and why, again, this proposal is right for Chelsea. So if you want to go to the next slide again, this removing of parking mandates allows for new homes for current and future Chelsea residents. And all of that will support all our effort for balanced Growth that we can then reinvest back into services for our residents. Again, this promotes better urban design. It offers more opportunities for green space, it supports active commercial storefronts, it reduces the urban heat island effect. And it can incentivize development on vacant infill lots that we want to see more of by allowing for that site flexibility and not require requiring a certain amount of parking to be put on those smaller lots. And lastly, it formalizes the flexibility that we already offer for new housing developments. Like we already don’t require one and a half spaces per unit. This just formalizes that and really advances our city’s goals to kind of create a zoning ordinance that is both, that is both predictable and flexible. We want to provide the flexibility to make the, to make the best use of the site that we think meets the context and goals for the city. But we also want to make sure that our requirements are predictable so that we see the types of development that we want throughout the city of Chelsea. And lastly, again, just want to hammer this point home, but we truly believe that parking, we do need parking, but we think that the parking should meet the needs of the site and it should also meet the needs of the residents who wish to live at that facility. It should not have to meet some arbitrary requirement that we’re setting. And again, like it’s all about the trade offs as Will and I have been talking about where it’s we want parking, but we also want housing, we want open space. And it’s really about finding the best balance for each site. And just implementing a blanket requirement doesn’t allow for us to really create that site specific considerations that produce the best outcomes. Like you guys kind of did tonight with Essex Street. Really working through what the community members have talked about and then working through your own desires and the goals of the city to come to a conclusion that we think best meets the needs of the city going forward. End with that and then we can address some of the comments and questions that you guys have.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [2:56:29] So I will say, and I think it will surprise absolutely no one that I am all for this wholeheartedly, almost unreservedly, I would like to recommend to the entire board that if you would like more information on this, there are two books that I would recommend, Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar and Life After Cars, which also likewise has authors whose names I cannot remember. Life After Cars I think is particularly readable and approachable. I think I read in like, we won’t get into that. I’m a giant nerd, but I Think it will give more perspective. Not that we don’t trust Will and Adam, but just, you know, some additional information, you know, from another source that I think is really compelling. I will also say that to some extent, like I do agree with you, Mimi. I think that if I were doing this from scratch, I would do it hand in hand with an overhaul of the on-street parking, which is what Cambridge did and which is exactly what happened. I would eliminate the blanket restriction on parking stickers for new units. I’ve been trying to think of a word that does not sound as like ridiculously hyperbolic as second class citizens. But I really feel that it creates something that is not second class citizen just based on, you know, when you move to the city, based on when your unit was built, which is something that you have no control over whatsoever. I really do not like that said, I have expressed that to Fidel in no uncertain terms and I will happily bring it up with the city council as well. And so I don’t want to hold this up to say we have to wait for the parking program to change. I think that that is going to happen. I think that the city manager and the city council heard loud and clear that that is the thing that needs to happen. And so I have no doubt that even if there is a delay between this and that happening, that it will happen. Will it be exactly what I want? I don’t know. Probably not. But it, the fact that I think changes are needed there does not in any way change my opinions on this, which is that I think it’s something that Chelsea desperately needs. Any other comments from the board?
Board member Eric Czernizer [2:58:57] Yeah, I actually agree with Mimi’s feedback earlier, this is like a pretty drastic decision. And not getting any insight on our current on-street parking situation. It just like seems kind of like we’re operating on incomplete data. And like as a scientist I like don’t look like operating with incomplete data. Also this feels like such a drastic action. Is the city like considering instead requiring like 0.5 parking spots per unit? It’s like why are we taking such drastic action? Is it because it’s trendy or is it actually blocking projects? I personally prefer a middle ground. I think our current parking requirements are like super over restrictive. Your average household single car and that’s probably just gonna increase and increases. Car prices are up and up and public transportation is improving. But I mean like I would personally prefer like 0.5 parking spots for each unit. And a slight clarifying question on slide 13. So a couple up. So say own a building with a couple parking spots. After any potential changes, can I take those parking spots out and construct an ADU?
William Cecio, planning director [3:01:01] I think so, yes. Yeah.
Board member Eric Czernizer [3:01:02] Oh, I like that.
William Cecio, planning director [3:01:04] You what?
Board member Eric Czernizer [3:01:05] Yeah, I don’t like that because I feel like any intention intelligent property owner is going to be like, I can turn that into an apartment and what are my tenants gonna do? What’s going to happen?
William Cecio, planning director [3:01:20] This is, that’s a, it’s a good point. And I think we can ensure, I mean I think the, we can write zoning in a way that would ensure that the new unit or the units that that parking was for would now not be eligible for on-street parking stickers. So the property owner would have to choose to destroy their current tenants access to on-street parking.
Board member Hamza Abdul [3:01:45] And I feel like that just contradicts everything we talked about tonight about are we building homes for people or building homes or car spaces. I think right now too, I think you use the perfect word, balance. Right? We need to find a balance for Chelsea. And I don’t think taking the whole thing out because it worked for other cities that are not Chelsea, it’s kind of wild. I feel like we have our own identity. So when it comes to seeing what is currently working well, what exists, what is currently working well, what are things that we need to improve and then from there find our own balance. So if it’s like, all right, one and a half is crazy. Okay, so one, if it’s like, if it’s working, we are in control to put it on X amount of time to see what’s coming or like on. Based off the changes we make, we can see what impact it’s going to have. Like if it’s positive, that’s how we’re able to find our balance. But to kind of just say let’s get rid of all of that, but it’s going to bring all the other stuff that we already make a requirement for people to build this. It was like, wait, like we’re getting rid of a major thing while it’s still a problem for current residents and then just kind of, it’s.
Adam Roy, city planner [3:03:01] I would agree with you that we do need balance, but I think the requirement is actually restricting the balance. Right? Like you guys currently issue flexibility to parking for parking all the time. You don’t meet this one and a half space requirement. We’re just codifying that flexibility to new residential development and offering site specific context and balanced context for like how we Want to provide parking going forward.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [3:03:31] If we reduce, if we eliminate the minimums. And so we’re saying it’s project by project. If it comes before us, can we still put that as a condition and say, you know, for this project, with this number of units, you need to provide six parking spaces?
Adam Roy, city planner [3:03:48] Yeah, you could.
Board member Hamza Abdul [3:03:50] I was gonna say. Oh, sorry. I was just gonna add. Is there a way to keep what we currently have and then just have developers request a special partner? So depending on like the space and a lot of the stuff that they want to build, we can decide off of that going forward. Because getting rid of it with what Eric just mentioned, people care more about money. And then we’ll use. Oh, we’re bringing this income. Oh, it’s going to be residential. They’re going to use that type of language. But it’s more income for them. But it’s going to ruin families that currently live there.
Board member Sara Haidar Escobar [3:04:23] I just like against my first meeting. So this is just my insight as a first meeting member. From what I’ve heard and what I’ve seen and what’s been presented, it seems as this is already like, in place in the sense that it’s not even like the planning board is always like, okay, yes, we’ll be flexible with this and with that. So it seems like it’s getting rid of a bureaucratic step. And I feel like developers in this day and age, like you said, they’re obviously, their minds are on a profit. I think they know that they should provide some parking and probably charge X amount of money for that parking spot to the tenants. I don’t think any developer will be like, no, zero parking spots. Again, we can’t dictate that. But I also don’t feel comfortable being like, oh, well, the board, like, leave it up to the board in every single situation because who knows what the board in five years will look like. So that’s like my only concern. Again, if this is already kind of effectively happening, isn’t it just being like, okay, but we’re moving this step to attract more developers. And.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [3:05:26] But isn’t it. Is. Isn’t part of our job to protect.
Board member Sara Haidar Escobar [3:05:31] But they would still. And they would still come up.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [3:05:33] I agree that it’s a step and you know, but I think it’s unnecessary and it’s an important step. And it. And like I reiterated, until we know what that parking mandate is going to be, I don’t see how we can. If they say we’re going to get rid of the residential parking, that anybody can apply. You live in Chelsea and you can get a parking residence ticker. I would be more than happy to say.
Board member Eric Czernizer [3:05:54] Sure.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [3:05:54] Cambridge Everett eliminates parking. Everett bills and frequently stadium and puts 10 parking spaces. They building a freaking stadium and they’re building 3,000 parking spaces and it’s an 80,000 stadium or 30,000. It’s ridiculous. Ever is not a place to look for parking. They don’t care about parking and they park in Chelsea to begin with. And Chelsea and if you go to Cambridge they did eliminate all the parking but they kept the residential zoning and it’s. And they upped and you have to pay and they have zones so you can so if you live in East Cambridge, you cannot park on Brattle street. You know. So I think there’s ways to change it. I’m happy. I want the step I want to protect the city. And if the bureaucrat and if the developer knows that we that we are flexible it will not deter them from coming into Chelsea. This idea that if that’s the idea with oh look Chelsea’s remarks move parking requirements Now I can come over. If they know the board is flexible and they will approach they’d say then there’s no reason they wouldn’t come to Chelsea.
Board member Sara Haidar Escobar [3:07:00] I mean just going off the. Can you go back to the stats? I mean I’m just going off the information that was provided that it was consultants who did that.
William Cecio, planning director [3:07:08] I’m assuming the MAPC.
Unidentified speaker [3:07:11] Right.
William Cecio, planning director [3:07:11] Sizing parking study.
Board member Sara Haidar Escobar [3:07:12] Yeah. About how many developers who like the building was like six sixty something percent. Is that what you said of developers who didn’t bring forward a plan?
Adam Roy, city planner [3:07:23] Oh that that was just the effective parking ratio is that we permit 0.62 spaces per unit.
Board member [3:07:30] Yeah.
Adam Roy, city planner [3:07:30] Like already at least in the past five.
Board member Sara Haidar Escobar [3:07:33] I don’t know why I felt like I saw a statistic about how X amount of percent of that was in different cities. Okay. So yeah, I mean going based off that again, Chelsea is a different city. It’s not one size fit all. But it’s like if there’s statistics and data in front of me, I am going to give some deference to that. But again not how much weight we want to apply to it depends on the person.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [3:07:56] But you’re talking Buffalo, San Francisco. They are massively bigger than we are. Right. And Buffalo is incredibly spread out. So is San Francisco. So is so we’re talking. We’re three miles.
William Cecio, planning director [3:08:09] Right.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [3:08:09] So I just think I’m very protective of Chelsea. I love where I live. I’ve lived here a long time. I Want. I, you know, I’m all for the. Whatever the heck the final name becomes. I’m all about sort of, you know, walking. I’m all about building tall buildings. You know, I’m just Superman. These go me the. But I don’t see how we can. I just can’t approve it without knowing what the parking is. You trust the city council. I mean, you trust that city council and it, and how long is this parking band been in? How long have they been hearing about it? And the councils that I talk to are not willing to change the parking. So I, you. I’m not giving, I don’t want to give a two tool. I want to see what happens. But I just, I gotta.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [3:09:04] But when they come before us and we make these exceptions, they’re not eligible for a sticker.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [3:09:09] And so now they won’t have to
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [3:09:10] come before us for us to make an exception. They’re gonna build a park and they’re gonna build. And they’re still not eligible for a sticker. So I’m, I’m, I appreciate that they’re related, but I’m struggling to understand why
Board member Mimi Rancatore [3:09:23] if we eliminate, if we reform, if we reform the parking and everybody who lives in Chelsea can get a parking sticker, then we need data.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [3:09:31] No, it’s the other way around.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [3:09:32] No, if the city council has a, if the city council decides, but we’re going to say we’re not, we’re going to reform the way the parking permits are issued. If they say if you live in Chelsea and you have a car, no matter when you built, when you move, you can get a parking sticker and so you could park on the street. Now they can reform it any way they want, but let’s just assume that we’ll just have blanket parking, that the sticker will be good anywhere in Chelsea. If they do that, then you need data to see where people are. Because in order to get the parking sticker, your car has to be registered in Chelsea. It cannot be registered in another city. So people. It can take. It can say Massachusetts. You don’t. But insurance is. Your insurance rate is based on where you’re sitting, where you live. And Chelsea is very paid for insurance. It’s not cheap in Chelsea. A lot of people say that register their cars in other cities. So I, There’s a lot of data that we don’t know. Just like that, like the city is undervalued. We don’t know how many citizens actually live here. There’s so many different factors. But if to get back to this, I want to reform this. If we want to attract developers, which is what this is for. This is for developers. I’m with Eric. The ADA unit parking is such a big issue. We solved the problem. We told the guy, keep the six parking spaces for visitors. Everybody. You know, it’s, it’s. Parking is, as you say, it sucks in Chelsea. And I don’t see how doing this is going to eliminate parking. It’s nice to show me a parking lot that’s empty in the middle of the day for UPS. Then why is every resident in Chelsea. It’s not a perception, it’s a reality. Every resident in Chelsea says barking, and so why not always open up all the parking lots? Why can’t you park in. You can’t park overnight in Market Basket. It’s illegal. They’ll tow your car.
Board member Eric Czernizer [3:11:40] You can.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [3:11:41] That’s the, you know, you can’t park there. You can’t park in the Home Depot. They’ll eliminate it. So why not just say, let’s just free for all. You can park through overnight. There’s a lot of different other solutions we can come up with. I’m happy to do this, but not until this council, I think you’re assuming
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [3:11:59] that they’re going to make the worst possible changes to the ssticker program.
Board member Eric Czernizer [3:12:08] Yeah.
Board member [3:12:09] I also feel like, though, I’m sorry, but I think seeing this number here, if we technically usually approve a little bit over 0.5 spaces per unit, then if we’re bringing it down from 1.5 to 0.5, would technically eliminate this step for the developer. But if they are looking to bring it to zero now, we come in and step in and be like, hey, that’s not okay. I will say this committee meeting at La Colaborativa that I went to, William brought up a good point. Most of those people did not talk about parking in terms of these requirements. They were more worried about the on-street parking that we already have. And I agree with Mimi that it is like a little bit of a leap of faith to make them say, yeah, stick away parking right now and then not know what that next step will look like. I have what I think is a suggestion for making this doable. But if we were to require that building owners revisit or reapply each year with the city and if they have a surplus of spots, that could help alleviate some of the on-street parking for cars that are going to be parked for a certain duration of time, I think. Right. So I think there can be some synergy between, you know, private and public parking. And it’s a revenue, it could become a revenue generator for the developer for underutilized spots and free up a few spaces on the street, but ideally for cars that are going to be parked for long periods of time for discounted rate. So I think there are some win stages situations. But if you, if we simply require that they revisit this every year and make sure that it’s, you know, working for both of us, both the city and the developer, then it seems like it could take a step out of the process, but it would be a little bit more of an administrative burden. But I think there’s, there’s a lot of, you know, symbiotic relationships between the two.
Unidentified speaker [3:14:13] Yeah.
Board member Eric Czernizer [3:14:13] I’m curious if there’s like some opportunities for creativity. If the city could collaborate with its property owners on like Eastern Ave. And create like public parking lots and offer shuttles from like market basket so people interested in parking can park along Eastern Ave. Hopefully at some point it can replace oil tankers, which would be awesome. Yeah, like, I’m just curious if there’s creative opportunities outside the scope of like this conversation, but I don’t understand the need for like such drastic action. Like are developers like saying, oh, I don’t even want to touch Chelsea because the parking requirements, is that actually occurring or are we afraid of it? I don’t know. This just all feels like under informed without thinking through all the potential implications. I am so in for sake. 25 parking spots per unit. But just like scrapping, it seems kind of hasty and like if Cambridge is doing it, if Austin does it, if Everett does it, is offering parking an area of competitive advantage for Chelsea? If people are like, I can’t find a place with a parking spot in the Cambridge, but Chelsea, they still have their parking spots. So it’s like following a trend gonna screw us over at a future point in time. We all saw what occurred with inclusion zoning policy in 2016. It was like super hot. Everyone implemented it. And in 2026 everyone’s like, oh no, it’s blood blocking people from coming here. They’re all going to Austin. Is this going to be the same exact thing? Following a trend that screws us over in future?
William Cecio, planning director [3:16:30] I don’t know. Yeah, no, I really appreciate all of the points that you guys are raising right now. I think that the reason why we aren’t considering half a space and our instead consider proposing to eliminate the minimum number of parking spaces requirement is because if we require half the space we find ourselves in the same situation where we have a blanket standard that doesn’t allow for site flexibility and customizability for parking. Projects that are in areas that are close to transit, that wouldn’t need parking would still be required to meet this, you know, number. And so, you know, when developers, when home builders, like, come before us, this is costing money. And those, you know, development teams aren’t just eating that cost gets transferred onto the rent, the sale price of those new units. And so I think what Adam was sort of speaking to was kind of like trying to provide some predictability because someone could come in here, you know, with trying to meet, you know, half a space, whatever, and the boards could deny them. And all of that money kind of, you know, went into nothing. So I think it’s trying to push for more predictability and flexibility. I also think, again, these sort of requirements can produce sort of weird urban forms. Again, I think Adam’s photos were not necessarily trying to say, like, look at these sites. They’re unused, but, like, we have a Vero apartment that has parking with parking built in front of the parking. It’s like, these requirements do have real impacts and change the way the built environment is created.
Unidentified speaker [3:18:24] Right.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [3:18:25] But I have people who live in that building, and they say that parking garage is a nightmare because people, they have assigned spots. They don’t use them. The parking out front is for the commercial units. That was.
Board member [3:18:36] I.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [3:18:37] You know, so they couldn’t go into the parking lot. And that’s the hope, and that’s the whole point. So, you know, you can, you know, every. Everyone says they don’t drive. That’s, you know, it’s like, check is in the mail. I understand. So. But it’s sort of like, I live in Cambridge. I work in. I own a business in Cambridge. Everybody says they don’t drive. Everybody drives to my ice cream store. It’s like. It’s like parking’s a nightmare. In Cambridge. They’ve eliminated a lot of parking spaces because of bike break. Now I’m all for it. I don’t mind sharing the road with the bikes, but, man, oh, man, a lot of people do, but they have. It’s like bike lane city over there.
Unidentified speaker [3:19:15] Fine.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [3:19:15] I’m happy to do it. So I’m just saying it’s like, you need parking for small businesses. If you want to have a business on the base. On the base of a part, you know, UPS. No one’s gonna walk to UPS. They might walk with a package. But, you know, when somebody tries to Pick up a cake at Toscanini’s. I say, you better bring, you know, or they buy a box of ice cream. I said, you better bring a car because you can’t put it on a bike. Inevitably. But so I’m just saying sometimes you need a car for pickup and drive off for sure.
William Cecio, planning director [3:19:51] I mean, again, commercial and industrial uses still have a parking requirement. This is just for residential. And I do agree. I think the conversations around on-street and off-street parking are related. And just to clarify, while updating, changing our on-street parking management program isn’t attached to eliminating the off-street parking requirement, like this doesn’t mean these two policy changes can’t happen in parallel to each other. I’m just saying that the city manager’s office, as Adams mentioned, is like just started this and we actually just saw a map because we looked into, yeah, where are we allowing parking permits? And there are units that have seven, like one unit has seven parking permits. You know, like everything is on the table when it comes to the on-street parking management. Whether it’s eliminating, limiting like permits per unit, charging more for the permits, putting metered parking in certain areas, creative options like shared parking, working with other properties. Like all of it’s on the table. And I just don’t, I don’t know the timeline for when that would change, but I don’t think it’s going to be four years from now that that can change. I think this conversation has really spurred more serious like, effort to like, look at our on-street parking management program and like find ways to improve it. So but again, I think the reason why we’re trying to eliminate it entirely, the off-street parking requirement is not necessarily just to follow like a trend. Like this actually is very much informed by tons of research. And while Chelsea is unique, there has to be some room to like, take into account studies and data from other communities and notes on us to kind of figure out like, how does this actually relate and how does this like impact our city? And you know, Chelsea is a small city with very small sites, so it becomes really difficult to put parking on certain areas. So again, eliminating the requirement just allows for the flexibility. That was a good point. Someone said earlier that like when projects come before us for relief, you can still bring up parking and discuss it and condition that as part of your decision. And again, all of the research that we have seen, all of the studies that have looked at the communities that have eliminated this, show that in areas that need parking gets built. It’s not that parking doesn’t get built.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [3:22:19] Because what we forget is that developers can charge money for parking, too. So we’re all like, oh, the developer. Developers aren’t going to build any parking. They’re gonna. Parking theoretically can be profitable.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [3:22:34] I’m not saying the developers are gonna build parking. I. But developers will build limited parking.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [3:22:41] Sure.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [3:22:41] Right. So, you know, I’m just saying you’re comparing apples and oranges. If you’re comparing it to Chelsea, to Cambridge. You’re comparing apples and oranges. You’re comparing a city with immense wealth, two universities attached to it, tax. It’s just unbelievable. Right. If you go to Everett, you’re talking about a city that is in flux with its political system and has built things that they don’t care about parking. It’s true with the casino, it’s true with the stadium, it’s true with the development. So, you know, they don’t care about. That’s not their number one priority. So. And they have built housing, which is admirable. But it’s like you need, you know, I’m not, I think, like, I’ll. This last time, I’ll say it. Until we know what’s going on with that off-street parking, I want to have the protection of saying to the, to a developer, yes, like we did tonight, we’re gonna keep that parking because visit. Because even everybody said same thing. What are we going to do when visitors come? And now they have six spaces. That’s a really good compromise. They have six spaces for visitors. Instead of saying, you know, let’s put in a, you know, I’m just saying.
Board member Eric Czernizer [3:24:00] I just want to say that this is such an incredibly interesting conversation. It’s like living demographics. Like the people, like, I often agree with, like on opposite ends.
Unidentified speaker [3:24:10] I don’t know.
Board member Eric Czernizer [3:24:11] This is just fun to talk about, at least for me. I don’t know if others are stressed by this.
Board member [3:24:15] What do we need to decide on tonight?
William Cecio, planning director [3:24:18] Oh, no, this is just, we’re just having a conversation trying to see where you guys are at. And if you have feedback for the policy.
Unidentified speaker [3:24:26] We have some.
Board member [3:24:27] We’ve gotten some favor of it. I would be in favor of it if we have some caveats like you mentioned. If someone’s going to turn that into an adu, I think we need to think through potential unintended consequences. But if we can eliminate one more bar of entry for developers by taking away this requirement, we’re that much closer to solving the housing crisis. And I think as a city, the housing crisis is a more important priority than the parking crisis. But we certainly need a lot more attention to the on-street parking program. And I think that that’s where a lot of the problems can be solved.
Board member Eric Czernizer [3:25:15] Or what we can do is eliminate parking requirements for buildings of a certain size. It’s like anything over 20 units, there aren’t any parking requirements, but anything under it is required. So it kind of creates option and incentivizes builders.
William Cecio, planning director [3:25:46] Yeah, we can think about and consider all the different creative ways to go about our off-street parking requirements. Sorry, Adam.
Adam Roy, city planner [3:25:55] No, I, Yeah. Just one thing I wanted to note was that while off-street parking requirements and on-street parking management are related, this proposal like doesn’t necessarily impact how on-street parking management will operate in the time from when or if we adopt this to when city council will adopt it. Right. Like currently we offer flexibility for parking requirements through the zoning process and then those projects are ineligible for the on-street parking sticker. We can continue with that status quo until city council ultimately changes the entry parking ssticker program. Or what we could do is go with this path and remove the parking mandates and then all new residential development will be ineligible for the on-street parking ssticker program similar to how it currently operates.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [3:26:46] Well, what if they grandfather their parking requirements in. So if you live in a building that was built, you can’t get a parking sticker. There’s so many different things that council that parking can do. I know what people want, they want it to be completely eliminated, but I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen because there’s just so many different ways that they can do the off-street parking. Off street parking hasn’t, you know, the developments of what we are talking about has, you know, like I said, people want parking near their homes. They. And that’s not an unreasonable request. I, you know, if you live in the North End, it’s impossible to park. If you live on Beacon Hill, it’s impossible to park. Live in Back Bay, it’s impossible to park. You know, and, but if you know if you live out in parts of Dorchester, not so hard to park. And if you live in, you know, East Boston, a little bit easier. So there’s, so there’s different areas. Right. But Chelsea is, I think there’s, you know, unless you live on Admiral’s Hill, I don’t think anybody thinks it’s easy to park anywhere in the.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [3:27:55] But I think what’s under discussion for the parking program is making it more restrictive, not less restrictive. I think how that will happen is very much up for debate and this conversation, but I think that that’s what we’re hearing is it’s, it’s too. It’s too easy to get a sticker, which makes it too hard to park. So for making it harder to get a sticker, it gets easier to park.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [3:28:17] Well, they’re thinking of zoning all kinds of things.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [3:28:20] And so that’s why to me, these don’t need to be so tightly coupled because that process is going to take as long as it takes, and we’re going to work through it and there’s going to be a lot of community engagement. And, you know, I think it’s not going to come before the planning board because that’s not a zoning requirement. But obviously, we’re all citizens of residents of Chelsea and we’ll have an opportunity to make our voices heard. But I don’t think that we need to wait on that to make this happen, because in the interim, anybody that moves into a new development, what will
Board member Mimi Rancatore [3:28:52] be like eligible for a sticker.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [3:28:53] And if they are under the new program, that’ll be something that city council.
Board member Mimi Rancatore [3:28:57] But the developers don’t care that you’re not. You’re not. Developers literally do not care that they don’t. That their residents are not. They don’t, because most of the developers do not live in Chelsea. The guy lives in. He lives in Medford. You know, he could say he lives in somebody. He lives in practically Medford. So most of the developers do not live in Chelsea. So they don’t. To them, it’s just like saying, you got to paint your sky blue. Okay, that’s fine. So since most of the people who are applying don’t. Don’t understand the impact that parking restriction has, to them, it’s just a line in the sand. So to us, to the residents. You know, when I moved from 44 Beacon over to the other side, I had two requirements. I had to have an elevator because I have very bad knees. And I needed a parking space I want. And I never looked at a condo that didn’t have a parking space attached to it. And, you know, so I had the luxury. I was fortunate enough to be able to do that, but not everybody can. And so it’s, it’s. So that’s another thing. It’s develop. I’m not saying developers are heartless, but I’m just saying since they don’t know the impact what that has and how. And I get it. How could they just don’t live in the city.
Board member Hamza Abdul [3:30:20] I was gonna say, are we. Is this going to be voted?
Board member Eric Czernizer [3:30:23] I know.
Board member Hamza Abdul [3:30:24] Not tonight, but anytime soon.
William Cecio, planning director [3:30:26] The plan is to gather feedback from you guys. And we are hoping to submit a zoning amendment package to city council in November, which would mean that the public hearing for the zoning amendment that the planning board has to hold would be in December at the December meeting.
Board member Eric Czernizer [3:30:43] And the planning board is required to vote on a recommendation.
Unidentified speaker [3:30:48] Yeah.
William Cecio, planning director [3:30:48] Recommend to city council whether to approve or deny.
Board member Hamza Abdul [3:30:52] But that vote’s not having happening tonight at all.
William Cecio, planning director [3:30:54] Not tonight. It would be December.
Board member Eric Czernizer [3:30:56] Perfect.
Board member Hamza Abdul [3:30:56] Can we let this marinate?
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [3:31:03] I will.
William Cecio, planning director [3:31:03] We will send these slides out to you guys. And we can. I think we sent resources before, but we can keep sending resources as well, just so everyone can be as informed as possible.
Board member Sara Haidar Escobar [3:31:13] Can I just add one final very quick point? And I just want to say, Mimi, when, you know, when you noted all those neighborhoods that have very hard parking, those are also neighborhoods that are very walkable and very pleasant to go through. And I think that’s a direction Chelsea wants to go towards. And I think when we’re thinking about policy, we really need to think like, not today, tomorrow, a year, two years. We need to think like 10, 20, 30 years. Those policies are what bought America, frankly, in the city of Chelsea to where we are today, which is like towns and cities of parking lots, is these car oriented policies. So I think, yes, it is absolutely frustrating to be dealing with the current parking situation we have, and that needs to be addressed. But I think instilling policies that deter away from car centric cities and encourages businesses that are more walkable, and we have so much business front space that can be introduced. I think having that focus and having that more long term thinking might be beneficial. Again, there’s drawbacks to everything, but I just think that’s where I see the intent of this policy. And that’s just the last thing.
Adam Roy, city planner [3:32:22] A lot.
Board member Sara Haidar Escobar [3:32:22] Again, there’s negatives to everything, but that’s it. Thank you.
Board member Hamza Abdul [3:32:25] I’ll respond in November.
Adjournment
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [3:32:29] Okay, so that concludes our business. Would anyone like to motion for an adjournment?
Board member [3:32:33] I’d like to make a motion to adjourn.
Unidentified speaker [3:32:35] I second.
Vice Chair Jordana Mather (presiding) [3:32:36] All in favor? All right, we are adjourned at 9:25.