Jay Ash runs a city, but he isn’t a mayor. In his mind, that distinction makes all the difference in the world. Significant development, unchecked by politics, has fueled Chelsea’s recent growth. Ash has succeeded in attracting investment to the north end of the Tobin Bridge by tailoring commercial and industrial properties to specific economic sectors, balancing gentrification with affordable housing development, and permitting projects at the speed of business.
I grew up on the North Shore, and I remember coming down through Chelsea on the commuter rail. You’d stop, and the conductor would yell, “Chelsea! Nobody’s getting out here! It’s Chelsea!”
We’ve had to fight that. I remember my first night away at college, there were a couple kids from Malden, Revere and Everett, and they started making the Chelsea jokes. It just drove me crazy. I wanted to come back here and do something about that image. You go down to that commuter rail stop today, there’s no graffiti. I paint over all that graffiti. When I grew up here, we never had a first-class hotel. The hotels we had typically would rent rooms by the hour, not the day. The Wyndham hotel has been a huge financial benefit for us. But now every single car that drives through Chelsea on Route 1 sees that Wyndham hotel. I had chances to do a Super 8 and a Motel 6, and I refused to let them in. I was afraid that those hotel chains would just perpetuate an image of Chelsea to all those cars driving through.
Why do developers come to Chelsea?
We’re able to get things done pretty quickly. We’ve cut the politics out of development without cutting out the public process. There used to be a mayor who sat here. He’d look down the hall at the city councilors and say, “Which one of those bastards is gonna run against me next?” And those bastards down there would look at the mayor and say, “I’m not gonna support any of his proposals because I don’t want him to be here forever.” As strange as this may seem, the community’s hooked on development here.
How are you holding up lately?
We have close to 500 units that are either going through permitting now or under construction. We’re still having a lot of discussions over here about development. The underlying projects make sense. [Developer] JPI has a 300-unit project a block from the commuter rail. In 20 minutes you can be out your door and into your office in Boston. There’s all kinds of potential, as long as we continue to work the plan that we have, and we continue to make sure that every single development experience here is a positive one.
When you meet with businesspeople, how do you pitch them? What’s that conversation like?
I try to go out and see them. I have one developer who talks about reverse graft because I’m always buying him lunch. It’s about trying to be an individual amongst a whole bunch of other voices, and trying to make businesses and developers feel like we care as much about them as we do about their taxes. And it’s word of mouth from there. Even if I don’t get their business, I get them to think differently about Chelsea. One of my all-time favorite meetings, this guy had a hotel in Boston. This is 1997. I go up to his hotel and he said, “I used to own property in Chelsea. In 1975.” Now, I went to high school here from ’75 to ’79, and it wasn’t a pleasant place to be. He said, “The last time I was there, I identified the body of my building manager.” And now I’m trying to sell him on Chelsea! But two hours later, he said he’d come over and take a look. He developed our first artists’ lofts, at the Prattville School. That was a signal to everybody. Without that project, we probably don’t get the Spencer Lofts project. Without Spencer Lofts, we don’t get the Box District. You build one off the other.
Do you see a lot of repeat developers?
Every now and then somebody will level a criticism that we do business with the same people over and over again. I say with a big smile on my face, “Yeah, we do.” When people do things to the standard you want them to be done, and produce for you, it should be human nature that you want to do development with them over and over.
And on their end, they work with you because you move more quickly than anybody else?
ACS Development’s last big project was an office building that exceeded the allowable height restrictions. Imagine in Boston, you’ve got an office building that’s going to exceed height restrictions – you’re looking at months, years. We did that in under 90 days. If you can show the development community you’re serious about delivering something quickly, but it’s got to be quality in order to be quick, they respond. We just had a project that was shut down and we got it restarted in six weeks. Synergy had bought three-quarters of a block to transform it into micro-lofts. In this market, all of a sudden, that project didn’t make any sense. Within six weeks, we were able to put the developer together with our leading affordable housing developer, Chelsea Neighborhood Developers, and restructure the project so it could go forward.
