Chelsea Neighborhood Developers: Equitable Community Redevelopment

The City of Chelsea, MA is located just across the Mystic River from Boston. It is a small and densely packed community of about 32,500 whose diverse residents include immigrants from Central and South America as well as Asia and Africa. Through most of its history it has been a gateway city, a stepping stone for successive waves of immigrants who land there, learn their way in America and move on.

Being home to populations whose makeup changes over time can cause problems for communities. Recent research suggests that, while diversity is generally hailed as desirable, it can actually result in less social cohesion and greater isolation for residents.¹ This pattern is true both across and within racial and ethnic lines.

Immigrant populations also tend to be lower income, and language barriers often make them easy prey for predatory schemes. In Chelsea, families get squeezed into small apartments owned by real estate investors who do minimal work on the units to make them habitable. Ann Houston, executive director of Chelsea Neighborhood Developers (CND), a NeighborWorks® organization, notes that in some neighborhoods as many as 50 percent of units are in illegal rooming houses. Immigrants are also vulnerable to predatory lenders, and the recent wave of foreclosures that has swept over Chelsea is due in part to families accepting loans for home purchase or renovation that were impossible to repay.

Taken together, these circumstances present formidable obstacles to revitalizing Chelsea, but Chelsea Neighborhood Developers has made impressive gains through an approach Houston calls “equitable community redevelopment.” This is a three-part strategy that focuses on redeveloping the built environment, strengthening connections among residents and between residents and the city, and helping residents build assets.

Redeveloping the Built Environment

Redeveloping deteriorated sections of Chelsea was a big priority for the City Council. One such section was the so-called “Box District,” which Houston says had been dying for 25 years. Just over a block from City Hall, this neighborhood had been home to shuttered factories and vacant commercial buildings, connected by stretches of cracked asphalt. The city re-zoned it for residential use, but there were no takers until Chelsea Neighborhood Developers stepped up with a redevelopment plan that included demolition and new construction of town homes and multifamily housing. While mixed-income developments are considered a standard of sound community development, Houston notes that Chelsea Neighborhood Developers is just as committed to mixed-tenure development that provides high-quality, affordable housing opportunities for both homeowners and tenants. The key is to ensure that the multifamily housing is owned by investors, such as Chelsea Neighborhood Developers or other partners, who are committed to the community for the long term. The Box District redevelopment is approaching the halfway mark, with 41 affordable rental units and 26 mixed-income homeownership units completed to date. All but two of the 26 single-family units have sold, testament to both the high quality of the units and the excitement within Chelsea about the new neighborhood.
Chelsea Neighborhood Developers is also leading efforts to revitalize a 12 square block area of Chelsea known as North Bellingham Hill that is adjacent to the Box District. This is a densely populated neighborhood in which half of the units are in illegal rooming houses. The community is very diverse, and there was no history of residents working with each other or the city. Recognizing the challenges Chelsea Neighborhood Developers advocated for an intensive, “granular” approach to the planning process. Over the spring and summer of 2009 Chelsea Neighborhood Developers held a series of four planning charettes at which over 100 residents and city officials came together to create a new vision for the neighborhood. Houston thinks that residents participated in the charettes because they had been watching the Box District blossom and “were willing to take a chance on having hope that positive change could occur.”

Strengthening Connections

Houston thinks author Robert Putnam was right on target in his conclusion that diverse communities can increase social isolation. “We see it all the time,” she says. “People can live right next to each other for 20 years and never speak.” As a result, Chelsea Neighborhood Developers’ work in neighborhoods also includes an active program to bring neighbors together and to connect residents to city officials. In North Bellingham Hill, during the period that the charettes were taking place, Chelsea Neighborhood Developers held three NeighborCircles.² The NeighborCircle model brings 8–15 neighbors together over a meal and through a facilitated process helps them share concerns about the community and decide what (if anything) they want to do to address them. A primary benefit of NeighborCircles is that they build bridges across the social divides that are a daily experience for residents of diverse communities.
Houston notes that when levels of suspicion and hostility are high, community organizing can become an adversarial experience. Also, residents who came to Chelsea from countries plagued by civil unrest have no experience in participatory democracy. “They don’t understand ‘government by the people and for the people,’” says Houston. Part of Chelsea Neighborhood Developers’ role is that of convener, making sure that both residents and city officials are at the table when issues of consequence are discussed. For many residents participation in the North Bellingham Hill planning charettes marked the first time they had sat across the table from the city manager, city councilors or the chief of police and talked with them as equals. Houston gives high marks to the chief of police, especially, who personally attended all four planning charettes. He understood how important it was for the police department to be part of the conversation. The experience was tremendously empowering for residents, and it resulted in a detailed plan that is governing the revitalization work now under way.

Resident involvement is critical in both proactive planning and in responding to issues that threaten the community’s health and safety. Soon after residents moved in to the newly built housing in the Box District, for example, gang violence broke out. Chelsea Neighborhood Developers swiftly organized a meeting with the police chief that was attended by 50 residents. There were several important outcomes of this meeting. Residents became better acquainted. They formed a block watch to improve security. And they learned more about community policing and how they could work with law enforcement to keep their neighborhood safe. Meetings like this help to change how residents feel about an issue and their role in the life of a city.

Asset Building

In addition to real estate development and community building, Chelsea Neighborhood Developers offers direct services to low-wealth residents to help them build assets. These services include financial literacy workshops, offered in English and Spanish, that cover topics such as budgeting, banking, using credit and consumer rights. Graduates of the workshops can attend peer support meetings that offer additional training and support toward meeting their financial goals. Matched savings Individual Development Accounts are available for income eligible residents. Chelsea Neighborhood Developers also supports and promotes volunteer income tax assistance (VITA) sites, which can help low-income families file for the Earned Income Tax Credit. Houston notes that last year VITA helped over 400 families file tax returns, which brought more than $600,000 back to the community.

Chelsea is on the move. It is a city that had all the essential ingredients for disinvestment, including a poor immigrant population drawn from many parts of the globe, high levels of social isolation, a run-down housing stock and most recently the housing crisis and a lengthy recession. Yet Chelsea Neighborhood Developers has found a way to harness the collective yearning and hope for renewal and change to build new partnerships among residents, the city and community stakeholders. These partnerships are leading to tangible improvements that benefit everyone, regardless of wealth, tenure or community position, a hallmark of equitable community development.