Over the last two years, affordable housing has become the hot button issue in Marin County.
Marinwood is currently ground zero in the bare-knuckles fight over affordable housing in Marin, though it’s not the only match on this fight card. There were also plenty of haymakers being thrown in Strawberry, where locals were fighting mad over being included in a designation called “priority development area,” a category that lets an area receive state transportation funds but is rumored to be a precursor to affordable housing development. That designation was scrapped post haste, and tempers have abided. Novato was the scene of a 15-round bout over its housing plan, which was finally passed in 2013. Corte Madera and Larkspur have seen affordable housing dust ups as well.
Over the last two years, affordable housing has become the hot button issue in Marin, a place with a heavyweight reputation for its love of the environment and knowing all the words to the song “Kumbaya.”
On one side are residents of areas where possible affordable projects could be located, who worry about traditional issues such as increased traffic and decreased housing values. On the other side are housing advocates who argue building affordable units in a community with housing prices that resemble the debt of some third world countries is a good thing for people working in Marin. They also say it’s good for the environment, because it takes some cars out of the daily parking lot known as the Highway 101 commute.
But those arguments have given way to charges and counter-charges of race baiting, fear mongering and class warfare. The normally polite discourse in public meetings has been trumped by shouting and name-calling and, in more than a few cases, cops have been stationed at the doors in case things take a turn.
The Marinwood Plaza currently holds the belt for ugliest scrap. The five-acre property is owned by Marinwood LLC of Novato, which has an agreement to sell the property to Bridge Housing Corporation for a proposed 82-unit, mixed-use project, with an application before Marin County. The project includes the existing Marinwood Market, two other retail buildings and 82 housing units, with up to 72 of them planned as affordable.
Marinwood is an area tucked between Novato and the Terra Linda neighborhood of San Rafael and is represented by Marin County Supervisor Susan Adams. Allison Chakko and Carol Joyce Sheerin led a high-profile effort in 2013 to have Adams recalled not just because of her support for the Marinwood project, but, more to the point, her failure to side with its vocal opponents. But the recall failed when the pair never bothered to turn in the petition needed to force a special election; Adams faces a primary election challenge in June and affordable housing promises to be a huge issue.
Today, Marinwood Plaza is just an off place. It has an upscale supermarket, the Marinwood Market, and Savemor Discount Liquors at the opposite end of the center. In the middle is a strip mall waiting for last rites. Marinwood Market opened in 2011, with Jeanne Fitzgerald, former operator of the shuttered Boardwalk Market in Tiburon, running the store, which boasts fresh sushi and a coffee bar.
The market, with its arbor and polished look, shines compared with the rest of the derelict plaza, which is made up of rotting wood, locked doors and sketchy windows. Video Point, Gold Mirror Style Salon, Marinwood Cleaners and Max Sportsters have all given up the ghost. The last shop was an outpost where Marin parents flocked with their kids to celebrate birthdays without the worry of cleaning up birthday cake from bamboo floors or Restoration Hardware sofas. Marinwood Plaza hosts a farmers market on Saturdays (weather permitting).
Savemor has operated for 25 years, the last 10 on a month-to-month lease—a sort of deathwatch for the plaza with the mixed-use project in waiting. On the other hand, Marinwood Market signed a 34-year lease in 2011, according to someone with knowledge of the center and its tenants.
Marinwood LLC, the legal entity set up by Novato-based Hoyt Enterprises, didn’t return phone calls seeking comment for this story.
The edge of the Marinwood property is overgrown with weeds, and a no-trespass sign warning of onsite guards (who are no place to be found) oversees a dumpsite of chemical containers including industrial wood preservative. What’s more, Trichloroethylene (TCE), a chemical used at a former dry cleaner from 1990 to 2005, has released into the soil, though the extent of migration into the groundwater isn’t yet known. Initial groundwater testing across the freeway from the Marinwood Market has been done by Marinwood LLC, under the direction of the Regional Water Quality Control Board (RWQCB), and a remedial investigative report has been submitted. A work plan submittal, due to the RWQCB in late April, will likely include additional offsite soil and water sampling. The final step is a remedial action plan that will submitted to RWQCB once all the required data has been collected and a plan prepared.
Marinwood LLC claims it’s already spent $500,000 on the problem, while the county of Marin and Bridge Housing both contend it’s up to RWQCB to clean up the toxic plume. And both the county and Bridge have stated that nothing can be built at Marinwood until the water board signs off that the toxics have been cleaned up.
“Affordable” vs. “workforce”
Robert Eyler, professor of economics at Sonoma State University and the CEO of the Marin Economic Forum, says the debate over affordable housing has become hung up on “nasty dichotomy: You have ‘affordable housing,’ which tends to be big projects built in large cities with the perception that it’s inhabited by people who have no intention of having a job. And then there’s ‘workforce housing,’ which has teachers, firefighters, nurses and people who work right in your community. The idea is it’s housing built for local workers.”
Eyler says one positive economic impact of building more affordable units is, it places a downward pressure on rental housing, possibly making other rentals more affordable.
He also says some studies have shown that, by adding affordable housing to a community and including a more diverse mix of students in schools, the quality of the schools improved, with a corresponding rise in resale values of homes in the area.
Here are some other affordable housing numbers. There are no less than 10 different groups that have advocated for and against affordable housing in Marin in recent months. Everybody from Stand Up for Neighborly Novato to Citizen Marin have put in their time at public meetings attempting to not only win the hearts and minds of the public about housing projects, but also influence the outcome of those projects with elected officials.
Google “affordable housing Marin and Tea Party” and it’s clear the debate has moved far beyond neighborhoods arguing about whether or not a project makes sense. The debate has blurred the lines between local interests, political agendas and even moral questions. For good or ill, the term NIMBY (as in “not in my backyard”) is tossed around the same way Target uses the term “data breach.”
Outraged residents
Opposition has been sharpest in Marinwood. “More than 83 percent of all low-income housing in unincorporated Marin may be built in Lucas Valley if we do nothing to stop it!” reads an alert from Stephen Nestel, an activist from Marinwood. “This means our community of 6,000 may grow by 20 percent and taxpayers will have to pick up the tab for more schools, police, fire and new public infrastructure.”
Nestel has created the website SaveMarinwood.org, a blog dedicated to keeping affordable housing at bay in his corner of the globe along with informing like-minded residents of threats to the neighborhood and how they can get involved. He says the website’s official position is: “We support a fair allocation of affordable housing in our community that’s sensitive to land use, fiscally responsible, healthy for the families and integrates diversity within our community.”
He added by email, “There is much more to the housing story in Marin (and Sonoma for that matter) if you are willing to look beyond the propaganda generated by politicians, developers and urban growth activists.”
There’s a tendency to paint all critics and, for that matter, proponents of affordable housing in the same way. Opponents are fearful of change, classist and—wait for it—racist. Advocates are wild-eyed socialists who want to take away your cars and care more about the environment than people. Public meetings become a contest to see which anti-housing supporter can come up with the most original version of, “I support affordable housing, but…,” while those on the other side look for ways to not call anti-housing folks bigots.
Tom Peters is a veteran of affordable housing in Marin. As president/CEO of the Marin Community Foundation, he’s helped fund numerous projects over the years, and he’s noticed that getting projects started is much tougher these days. “It’s now more difficult in the public arena. Civil exchange is much more difficult.”
The opposition to affordable housing has been noted by everyone involved in the process, from community members to builders and from planners to nonprofits. “We’ve overcome a wide range of barriers in our 30 years as a leading nonprofit developer and owner of affordable housing. While this development may present a unique combination of challenges, these are all issues Bridge has experienced before,” says Cynthia Parker, Bridge Housing president/CEO.
On the other hand, the vocal and angry opposition to the Marinwood proposal has actually caused some connected to the project to question whether it will be built, according to a source familiar with the project.
Peters’ point on the tenor of the affordable fight was most evident at a June 26 meeting at the Marinwood Community Center that was designed for residents to hear about local proposed zoning. Supervisor Adams was there and tried to conduct the meeting in a straightforward fashion. But it soon broke down into a verbal melee, with affordable housing opponents taking her to task for everything from not keeping the community in the loop to being in the pocket of developers. Things went from bad to worse when real estate agent Melissa Bradley told the crowd Adams had “volunteered Marin for the ghetto.”
Adams feels she did nothing of the kind. “There’s a tremendous amount of misinformation out there and a mistrust of local government,” she says by phone from Washington, D.C., where she’s attending the annual legislative conference of the National Association of Counties. “One of the things the opponents of the Marinwood project say is they weren’t informed of the project.”
Nestel makes this point repeatedly in a long email. “Of course the plan for Marinwood Plaza isn’t a fair fight. It was developed for years behind closed doors. Susan Adams created a group of handpicked ‘neighborhood leaders’ to provide a phony ‘public outreach’ to approve her plans. She was shocked when the general public learned and became outraged at her deceptions. The county, ABAG has teams of full-time planners (making $100,000 to $400,000) to develop these plans and hold ‘public’ meetings during the workday when few can attend. When the hardworking parents and people found out about them, most of these plans had been approved. They won all of the early rounds by keeping plans from public view. Now comes the harder part. The pro-urban development forces have to win political approval from the voters. This is unlikely to happen. The plans will fail due to political, financial and physical (water, transportation, etc.) realities. Much damage will be done in the interim to our communities. It would be best if democratic principles of openness were used from the start.”
And Adams answers back. “I’ve been deeply engaged with the community over this for eight years. There have been public notices of meetings, public meetings and televised meetings. Some people may not like the idea of a mixed-use development at Marinwood, but to say that this hasn’t been a public issue is simply not true.”
For Nestel, Adams herself is an issue. In an email interview, he accuses Adams of advocating for the slowdown of the toxic cleanup, lying to her constituents about the nature and scope of the Marinwood project and not thinking about the impacts of the project on the community.
He and Adams don’t agree on much, certainly not about the commercial prospects for Marinwood Plaza. “There have been two different commercial projects proposed for Marinwood, and neither of them ended up going forward,” Adams says. “The plaza is in terrible shape and has been the scene of drug deals and all kinds of graffiti.”
Nestel sees the property as the last commercial prospect for his community. “Marinwood Plaza is our only commercially viable retail site in Marinwood-Lucas Valley, as it abuts Highway 101 and is at the gateway to the community of 6,000. It should be preserved for retail shopping to keep our community walkable and bikeable. The current plans will kill the Marinwood Market because it will be surrounded by a 14-foot sound wall and be starved for parking spaces.”
Of course this argument is somewhat negated by the fact that Marinwood LLC wants the affordable mixed-use project.
While there’s no love lost for Nestel where Adams is concerned, his wedge in this issue is fairness. “Marinwood-Lucas Valley has 71 percent of all affordable housing units for unincorporated Marin, yet is only 5.62 square miles of the county’s 850+ square miles. This means 71 percent of the costs of development, pollution, government services, police and safety will be borne by our tiny community. Yes it’s unfair. It’s exploitation. Fairness would be distribution of affordable housing across Marin proportional to the community size. Financial feasibility would be a fair contribution from the developments to support the schools and government services.”
In the end, Marin has never done well with change. There’s a drawbridge mentality here shared both by long-time residents, who remember a different time, and newer residents who frequently spent all they had to buy their little slice of Marin.
Some call it fear.
Nestel has no patience for those who paint the Marinwood opposition as fear mongering. “The claim that it’s fear mongering is just more spin from the pro-development crowd. Is it fear mongering to point out that toxic waste is 2,000 times above safe levels at Marinwood Plaza? Or to repeat Susan Adams’ revelation that she hadn’t thought of the impacts on the Dixie School district from hundreds of new school children without the supporting tax base? We’ve been raising concerns and the response has been, ‘They’re just fear mongering. Listen to us.”
Adams also talks about fear. “It’s been very challenging,” she says. “But a lot of what has been said by some in public meetings is meant to induce fear. But I think that there are people in Marin who do care about the greater good and the need for more affordable housing. There will be a full and open process, the issues will be studied, and if we see this process through, the community will see that it works.”
By the Numbers
According to a February 2011 report by the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California, almost 60 percent of Marin’s workforce lives someplace else, higher than Napa County (46 percent) and Sonoma (28 percent). And a lot of those workers aren’t coming to Marin for the long green. While Marin business leaders have hoped the Buck Center for Research on Aging would act as a magnet for biotech or pharmaceutical companies and high-paying jobs, the reality is that about 66 percent of Marin employees are lower income, given the county’s largest employment sectors are retail and service.
That reality means most of the people working in Marin can’t afford to live there. At the end of the day, they get in their cars and go home. This, of course, makes the commutes worse, hurts the environment and impacts everyone’s quality of life. It also means a majority those earning their paychecks in Marin are spending their money someplace else.
Supply and Demand
Mother Nature is revered in Marin and the result is that the hills are neither filled with subdivisions nor billboards. Moreover, 85 percent of Marin’s lands are reserved for open space and parks of the local, state and federal variety.
For economic scholars, this means land on which housing can be built is in short supply and, thus, it’s expensive, making housing and construction expensive as well.
In 1973, the Countywide Plan created three corridors; the Coastal Recreation to the west; Inland Rural in the central portion of the county; and City-Centered to the east. The plan was to have the majority of development take place in the City-Centered area, close to the existing cities as well as Highway 101, the main street of Marin.
While the plan prevented development in such places as the Marin Headlands and West Marin, it effectively pushed future housing development into Sonoma County, making housing and building in Marin more expensive and setting up a nightmare commute years later.
The high cost of land has made building affordable housing more difficult in Marin, even without the recent backlash in neighborhoods anxious to keep it from having any built.
Accommodating Growth
Marin, like all of the other 57 counties in California, is required to put a “housing element” together once every eight years, which demonstrates that it’s created zoning that makes it possible to accommodate projected growth. It doesn’t guarantee the housing units will be built, only that the county has made it possible via zoning. Part of the element is including housing for all income sectors. Regional organizations ride herd on the process and, in the case of the Bay Area, that duty falls to the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG).
According to ABAG, the Bay Area will need 187,000 new housing units by 2022, with 110,000 of those being some form of affordable. Marin’s share of the housing is 2,292 units, with 1,400 of those units the affordable variety.
While opponents chafe at the number of affordable units, they’re almost as upset at the state and ABAG for telling Marin what it must do. For a place that prides itself on its love of Planet Earth and its understanding and empathy for struggling people in Taiwan, the Ukraine and Venezuela, that worldview vanishes when it comes to helping those much closer to home.
