By Adam Swift
The city’s Department of Housing and Community Development provides a wide range of services that hit close to home for many Chelsea residents.
At the planning board’s next meeting on Tuesday, Nov. 18, Housing and Community Development Director Ben Cares is scheduled to give the board an update on the department’s accomplishments over the past year.
The Department of Housing and Community Development provides housing, transit and transportation, open space and recreation, climate resilience and sustainability, and economic development services for the city.
“I would say that the biggest accomplishment of the department is that we’re overseeing almost $27 million in grant funding and that is related to one-time installments from the American Rescue Plan Act,” said Cares. “It also includes a lot of revolving funds that we manage on behalf of the city, such as our Community Development Block Grant program, Mass Gaming Commission block grant, and then other grant programs that support all our initiatives.”
Cares said housing and community development handles a majority of the city’s grant funding that revolves around improving the quality of life for residents, such as supporting affordable housing and climate resiliency initiatives.
That grant funding, as well as the other services the department provides, help many of Chelsea’s most vulnerable residents.
“We recognize that the demographics of Chelsea have been through the ringer over the last decade, whether that is related to the Covid-19 pandemic or the response of the federal government to status, we recognize that people need a lot of support right now,” said Cares. “We feel lucky that when we are able to work together, internally with the housing and community development department and streamlining all our initiatives, but also collaboratively with nonprofit leaders, with state and regional partnerships, and also with deep community engagement with our residents, we are able to let everybody know what the resources are. It’s not just about setting up resources for those programs, but letting people know how to participate in designing and taking advantage of those and creating a long-term stewardship among the city council, leadership, and the community to help understand what we should be driving towards.”
One of the bigger examples of working together with other stakeholders over the past year has been in the climate resiliency space with the Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness (MVP) 2.0 work, Cares said.
“We’ve put together an MVP 2.0 steering committee that helps us engage residents in creative ways beyond your typical survey,” said Cares. “We’ve hosted on the ground engagement, we’ve done community dinners, and we’ve worked strongly with GreenRoots and the Mystic River Watershed Association to bring in environmental justice community members to the conversation. So that’s creating that long-term stewardship that we want where people follow up and they are interested in the work that we are doing and that is how we continue to push forward on the climate resiliency initiatives.”
Other examples of working with the community include the weekly eviction task force meetings, where all the social service providers in the city meet to discuss how they are dispensing services and working to help prevent evictions in Chelsea.
“That’s a great example of how housing and community development functions as a hub for the community,” said Cares.
Cares said one of the changes in the housing and community development department in the past year has been its continuing shift to being a partner rather than an authority figure in the city.
“Big issues come down from the federal and national stages, like Covid-19, but now, under this current administration, we continue to do that work where we are coming across as a partner to the community, and people have become used to that,” said Cares. “I think we are still delivering on that type of relationship. The needs of the community have always been around the themes we are working in, they are just more pronounced now.”
The housing and community development department will continue to work on a number of major initiatives in the coming year, according to Cares.
“We are working on a number of potential changes to our zoning to bring in more affordable housing and to bring in more equitable development to the community,” said Cares. “We are continuing to work on major climate resiliency initiatives around extreme heat mitigation and coastal resiliency, flood mitigation. We keep pushing for it on the Island End River flood resiliency project.”
Cares said the department is also making sure it supports the small business community through the recurring storefront improvement program and technical assistance.
“We’re answering the call on all the other issues that are cropping up in the community that are really related to quality of life and affordable housing and workforce development,” said Cares.