Point Reyes Light- November 12, 1998

Point Reyes Station inches toward affordable housing

It wasn't a big step, but residents from around Tomales Bay agreed Tuesday night to form a steering committee to start planning an affordable-housing complex in Point Reyes Station.

At a meeting that drew 130 people - roughly 20 of them Spanish-speaking - Supervisor Steve Kinsey explained that the project, which months ago surfaced as a proposal for 50 units of both rental and for-purchase housing, is now just a blank page awaiting the community's hand.

"The sheet is completely bare," he said. "You can't even see the sheet."

Lamar Turner of Ecumenical Association for Housing, the nonprofit aiming to develop the low-cost housing project on 19 acres downtown, said the "immense feedback" he received from residents about the 50-unit plan suggested that EAH was maybe heading for an unwanted fight in planning commission and county supervisors hearings.

If a new plan is to come out of a broader, more-inclusive community-led process, that process must be "fair and open and just," Turner said. Otherwise, consensus is unlikely, and without consensus, "there's no project."

Turner noted, however, that the drive for consensus could also result in "no affordable housing" project, or at least not one that EAH could get involved in.

Later, after a few in the audience complained that the invisible project is moving ahead too fast, he cautioned that if the project is to happen, it must advance to the formal environmental-review process sometime next year. The clock is running; money for the land is due to the Toby Giacomini family three years from last June.

By an almost unanimous show of hands, the crowd (save Point Reyes Station innkeeper and painter Greg Ferrando) agreed that a steering committee should start working on ideas that folks can actually chew on.

The committee will have 12 members, six of them "at large" and six offered up one each by the following groups: the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin, Point Reyes Station Village Association, Shoreline School District, the Dance Palace, West Marin Senior Services, and West Marin Chamber of Commerce.

The at-large candidates, who will apply for the spots or be nominated, will be selected by the other members of the group along with Supervisor Kinsey.

Kinsey's suggestion that the Marin County Farm Bureau also produce a member was rejected, in large part because no ranchers are showing up at meetings on the EAH project.

Suggestions surfaced that the steering group also include a renter, a senior citizen, and someone under 30. Since such groups aren't formally organized, the crowd agreed those interests can be represented by the steering committee's at-large members.

Helping the group plan the project will be Design, Community & Environment, which EAH has hired. The Berkeley-based consultants have also been hired by the county to help San Geronimo Valley residents build a bridge over Lagunitas' Inkwells.

DC&E's literature speaks of "sustainability," "environmental responsibility," "non-automotive circulation" and the like, and so the small firm would seem to be a perfectly palatable pick for the job.

Still, a few took offense at the introductory slideshow by DC&E's David Early; they found its promotion of community values and so forth too canned and obvious, or at worst "insulting," as innkeeper Herb Goldberg called it.

Over the course of the evening, all the main fears about the project got aired: that outsiders (apparently meaning EAH and DC&E) will plan a housing development that people from outside West Marin will move into; that the project will simply be too big; and that it will encourage the development of other open land in West Marin.

Inverness's Michael Parmeley, while saying he supports the idea of affordable housing, said his "one fear" is that the project would be "also creating precedents for some unknown future project."

At present, West Marin's typical arrangement of one septic system per single-family house helps limit growth, and some people expressed worry that approving a shared septic system for housing might invite large-scale growth. (In fact, many residences in West Marin already use common systems).

Trying to reassure the crowd, Supervisor Kinsey agreed there would "no point" in building a high-density project "if it could be applied on every ranch across West Marin."

Overall, however, the crowd expressed a desire to move forward with the EAH project, albeit cautiously.

Mac Holliday of Inverness and others reminded the audience that to do nothing offers no protection against growth or community values. The property, he noted, could accommodate two dozen homes built at market rate, and would likely be owned by people who don't live here now.

With this project, he said, residents can shape the future "the way we like...or let it run away from us."

Bob Montgomery, a longtime resident of Point Reyes Station's Mesa, lamented the disappearance of young children in town. No trick-or-treaters came to his house this Halloween, he said, the preschools are "suffering," and he worries that the town is getting distilled into a "tired, old, moneyed community."

And Michael Carney, a resident of the 10-house, owner-builder project built north of downtown 15 years ago, recalled that when that project went up, people worried then too about who was moving in.

As it happens, he said, they were people who were all ready here, including "two Mexican-American families that were able to move off the ranches."

To be skeptical is fine, he said, "but we need to remember that people are getting squeezed out [of West Marin] all of the time too."

As for number of cars the project might bring, Carney suggested that whatever congestion exists now likely results from the rise in tourism, not town growth. "If you can't find a parking place," he said, "it's not because of any affordable housing that's been built in Point Reyes Station."

In recent days, residents of Point Reyes Station, Marshall, Olema, Inverness, and Inverness Park have been sent a survey about their own housing situation.

EAH's Turner, who emphasized the information sought will be kept confidential, said EAH has received back about 30 surveys so far.

He said he hopes to see many more, particularly from Latino households which, he said, have been underrepresented among the surveys already returned.

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