Some West Marin residents are confused and disconcerted by the county’s plans to meet state housing goals. At a well-attended community Zoom meeting last week aimed at honing the list of potential properties to rezone, coastal communities got the chance to hear about the sites identified for development, ask questions and offer feedback.
Many attendees balked at the draft rezoning list, which represents an early stage of planning and could face prohibitive challenges to realization. But the variety of negative reactions underscored the challenge Marin faces in responding to state housing mandates.
“Why didn’t the county ask people: ‘What’s the best place to develop?’” asked Ken Levin, president of the Point Reyes Station Village Association. “Instead, they’re scaring everybody, and the county seems like it’s the enemy instead of an ally.”
Morgan Patton, the executive director of the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin, said the process was focused on numbers, not on appropriate or realistic locations for development.
“I think there’s creative ways that you can accommodate the need for additional housing. I think it can be done,” she told the Light. “But looking at the parcels, I’m left with a lot more questions.”
Marin is under the gun to identify thousands of potential new housing units for the next decade, and local governments will face more pressure than ever to get them built. After its appeal of the housing allocation was rejected last year, the county has continued to plan for more than 3,500 new units in unincorporated areas by 2031. Last fall, it hired land use consulting firm M.I.G. to come up with a list of properties that could help it meet the requirement.
The list, a collaboration between M.I.G. and county staff, was unveiled last month. Leelee Thomas, Marin’s deputy director of housing and federal grants, called the work a “zoning exercise.” Last week she walked attendees through the sites in West Marin, but cautioned that the county cannot mandate development or dictate exactly where it will be. The list must be realistic in accordance with state law, and private developers and land trusts will be the ones to select and propose projects.
The state’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation comes in eight-year cycles, and the 2023-2031 period brings dramatically boosted goals across California. Marin’s cities and towns have their own allocations through the Association of Bay Area Governments, while the county must manage an almost 20-fold increase from the previous cycle for unincorporated areas.
In the cycle that began in 2015 and ends this year, the county had to plan for 185 units; still, Marin failed to meet the allocation, especially for affordable housing. Only 25 moderate-income units were built out of an identified 37, and only 30 of 55 planned very low-income units broke ground. When it came to more expensive housing, the county exceeded expectations: 171 above-moderate-income units were built since 2015, though the state’s mandate showed the county only needed 61.
Until recently, the state had few options for enforcing these mandates. But in the past few years, California lawmakers have become less tolerant of housing shortfalls and more ambitious in their planning goals. The state’s new allocations are not only much larger, but will come with more teeth.
After the state certifies Marin’s rezoning plan, the county must demonstrate that new housing is being built through annual production reports that include the number of permits it issued. Last year, California created a new enforcement arm of the Department of Housing and Community Development that can take counties and municipalities to court if they put up too many obstacles to new development.
Senate Bill 35, passed in 2017, also hangs over the county’s head. Under that bill, which was opposed by Senator Mike McGuire and Assemblyman Marc Levine, counties must forfeit local control of certain new developments if they fail to meet their allocations. A Mill Valley group, Catalysts for Local Control, is collecting signatures for a ballot measure that would allow local regulations to override state housing laws like S.B. 35.
Although the Housing Element—the county’s housing planning document—is just about zoning, “there are laws that could be used to penalize cities and counties for not building enough housing,” said Tom Lai, the director of Marin’s Community Development Agency. “That’s a big threat to local control.”
County staff said due to their relatively small size and pandemic backlogs, they had to hire M.I.G. to help draft the list of candidate sites. “This is unusual for us, to have a consultant partner with us on a Housing Element,” Mr. Lai said. “But we have such a huge [mandate] to comply with—much more than in the past, when we’ve done it in-house with our staff.”
The list was released along with the county’s Balancing Act online tool, a means of providing public feedback on the sites to supplement community Zoom meetings. County staff describe the process as a way of transparently and publicly honing the list, but some objected to the method.
“They have some numbers and they’re asking us to do their work for them,” Mr. Levin said. “Nobody’s at the helm. It’s a small county with small staff and they’re being asked to respond to immense questions.”
Mr. Levin called the process misguided. West Marin’s tourism and livability depend on a relative lack of development, he argued, and the county does not need a major increase in housing, but in affordability. Only about half of the 3,500 new units mandated by the state must be affordable.
“Why don’t we build half that housing and make it all affordable?” he asked.
Others argued that the list was an inadequate starting point, featuring unsuitable sites such as a public park and an operational hardware store.
“If there’s information which is not accurate, this is one of the reasons that we’re going around and making sure that we ground-truth it, that we get your feedback,” Ms. Thomas said.
Several locals said the county should limit short-term rentals through companies like Airbnb first, and then take steps to ensure that any new units couldn’t become vacation rentals. “We hear this loudly and clearly every time we’re in West Marin,” Ms. Thomas responded.
Environmental issues, both in the form of climate change-driven hazards and potential adverse impacts of development, were other major points of concern. Wildfire risk and sea-level rise both limit development, but the draft housing list doesn’t account for them. Instead, the county’s parallel project, the Safety Element update, will help dictate where and how development takes place once the list is finalized.
“The Safety Element is planning for policies to protect our existing infrastructure from hazards,” Mr. Lai said. “At this point in the process, if we were to say, ‘Let’s not put any sites in fire severity zones,’ we would lose a huge chunk of potential housing.” Instead, county staff aimed to suggest as many sites as possible initially, knowing that further environmental review will later preclude some of them.
Before the housing and safety updates are complete, the county will complete a programmatic review under the California Environmental Quality Act to determine the environmental impacts of rezoning and come up with recommended mitigation strategies. But the programmatic review won’t exempt individual projects; each developer would likely have to conduct its own separate CEQA review before building units on a given parcel, Mr. Lai said. And fundamental roadblocks to building exist, like West Marin’s dependence on septic systems.
The Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission will host the first of two virtual meetings to discuss and refine the list on March 1, and the Housing Element will be adopted next January. Marin residents have until Feb. 28 to submit feedback on the county’s Housing Element website, at marincounty.org/depts/cd/divisions/planning/housing-and-safety-elements.