Methodology

Barriers Within the Built Environment Property Ownership Within Private & Public Sector

The city of Chelsea currently lacks community access to the majority of the minimum community driven resources and locations the city offers to its residents. Our goal is to promote and encourage circulation throughout the city by incorporating safe walkability and convenient transportation for the community in designated areas of interest.

The way both workers and residents travel both exogenously and endogenously is critical while considering the most trafficked corridors within the city and examining what the land use patterns around these zones look like. Presently, getting to both the single commuter rail station within Chelsea and the few silver-line bus stations is deemed as difficult by pedestrians and commuters. The bus line is divorced from the center of the city by the highway and therefore cannot make direct connections for people to travel more easily.

Any public project cannot be realized without adequate funding the back of it. After the general public and stakeholder groups have been informed, the question becomes how to incentivized business owners and public agencies to endorse a project. The first motivation business owners have is whether they will be located where there is prime foot traffic within the city. Location means everything for both the business owner and the resident; therefore, ensuring that these efforts will spur economic development is valuable. For residents and business owners to consider themselves to be located in a prime location, such an environment would be described similarly as the 15-minute city. This means that all three “places” (work, home, play) can be accessed equitably within a fifteen minute commute time in any given transit mode. However, once achieved, this normally translates towards an inflammation in property values due to these zones becoming transit-oriented. Our policy explores how these economic nodes that may develop as a result of transforming our case study areas will not provide an increase in property values nor generate gentrification.