The Bolinas Community Land Trust has hired Jerry Bernstein, a 77-year-old former businessman and nonprofit executive from Mill Valley, as its new executive director, after longtime head Lesa Kramer left at the end of 2014. “I like the idea of nonprofits and giving back, but I’m not kumbaya,” he said. “I’m a businessman. What I bring to the table is business experience.” Mr. Bernstein graduated from Stanford Law School in the ‘60s but gave up the field after a brief stint in New York. He founded and ran a business in Silicon Valley that offered support services for semiconductor companies, and worked as a chief operating officer for San Francisco’s LightHouse for the Blind. He says he boosted that organization’s liquid assets from $19 million to $200 million and doubled its net worth. At the end of 2014, he retired, but it didn’t quite suit him. “On about January 15, I thought, ‘This is the worst decision I’ve ever made. I’ve got to get a job,” he said. Mr. Bernstein had some strict parameters: he wanted a part-time, dog-friendly position, so he could bring his Border Collie, and he was searching for an organization that “didn’t care about me being 77 years old.” Still, he said he turned down a handful of job offers before coming across the land trust’s call for a new leader. “I think this is the perfect job for me… I really like the board, and they needed a businessman.” The position, which he took in March, has taught him a lot about West Marin—primarily how unique each community is. He has also learned about Bolinas’s shrinking affordable housing stock. It’s a tough problem, he says, considering how much money property owners can make on short-term rentals, but he said the land trust is working on one second-unit project that will hopefully be done this year. “I think the answer to affordable housing in Marin is a little help from the government and a lot of help from the residents,” he said.