LYNN — Roughly 25 residents gathered in the Council on Aging Center on Friend Street Thursday evening to provide city officials and members of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council with their views on what the affordable housing development planned at the State Street Parking lot will look like.

Residents overwhelmingly prioritized “deep affordability,” or housing available to residents earning roughly $30,000 or less each year, as the most important aspect of the redevelopment project, with the creation of parking spaces coming in second.

Opening the brainstorming session, Principal Planner Aaron Clausen told the crowd that under Housing Lynn, the city’s long-term affordable housing development strategy, the city plans to construct a five or six-story affordable housing complex with roughly one-third of the site used for public parking.

Clausen added that with the city’s goal to open a request for proposals on the East side of the School Street lot this year and begin construction as early as 2026, the city wanted public opinion to help determine which potential factors Lynn residents would like to see prioritized in the future property.

“At some point in the future, we’re going to take your feedback and build a request for proposals,” Clausen said. “The value of that process is it gives a lot of control to the community to define how the development benefits you want.”

After using a scale and weights to demonstrate how municipalities must weigh the potential costs and benefits of a development project, MAPC Senior Housing Planner Alex Koppelman gave each member of the crowd a stack of poker chips and invited them to distribute the chips into a variety of jars labeled after each potential priority — greenspace, parking space, community space deeply affordable housing, very affordable housing, and moderately affordable housing.

The cost of chips for contributing to each jar, Koppelman explained, varied to resemble the cost differences between each of the priorities. Parking and deeply affordable housing cost each participant three chips per space, whereas public parks — the cheapest development priority— came at the cost of only one chip.

After many residents, including the organizing director for Mayor Jared Nicholson’s Office, Jean Michael Fana, placed all of their chips into the “deeply affordable housing” jar, the priority gained a vast majority of the chips, with parking spaces coming in second place, and very affordable housing coming in third place.

As of press time, Koppelman outlined three potential development scenarios — one that prioritizes predominantly deeply affordable housing, all of which would be rental units. The second plan includes a “substantial portion” of very affordable housing units, with some deeply affordable housing units and a mixture of rental properties and affordable home ownership, and the third scenario, which Koppelman said was not in line with the Housing Lynn plan, would comprise moderately-affordable housing with mainly market-rate units.

“Very affordable and moderately affordable housing and this mix of incomes is necessary financially because moderately affordable homes help pay for some of the costs the developer takes on by building deeply or very affordable homes. They also ensure that the building’s integrated socio-economically,” Koppelman said.