Ash famously engineered a renaissance in Chelsea, which was in state receivership for much of the ’90s. But can he create any jobs?

I’ll leave it to Barry Bluestone, an economics professor at Northeastern University, to answer that question. Bluestone spent a year working with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston to analyze 20 struggling cities, including Chelsea.

Of those communities, Chelsea experienced the biggest job growth, a rate of nearly 11 percent between 2001 and 2013, according to Bluestone’s analysis for the Fed.