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common theme at meetings in Marinwood and elsewhere is the notion that information is being withheld. Carol Sheerin, one of the founders of the Susan Adams recall effort, says the anger on display in Marinwood comes partly from a feeling of futility: suddenly there appears to be all this compounded development, without the type of public process neighbors feel that they deserve. “Just in general, people feel like they have not been made aware,” she says. Stephen Nestel, the founder of SaveMarinwood.org, seconds this. “Our community, like most around the Bay Area, should have been brought into the planning process at the very earliest time, about 10 years ago,” he writes in an email, adding, “This is undemocratic and an affront to citizens.”
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NO GROWTH A pink dot marks a site under bitter debate for housing in Marinwood; the green areas of open space show just
how little room there is for any type of development off the 101 corridor.
So what, exactly, is being proposed in Marinwood? Is it the acres upon acres of concrete, high-rise slums that many speak of as though the first cinderblock is about to be laid? No, it isn’t. As Adams explained at the meeting, one developer has turned in an application to renovate the derelict Marinwood Plaza, and that application will be subject to all the public processes—EIR certification, design review—that developers are subject to under California law. But what has so many homeowners up in arms is a little thing called a PDA, or a priority development area, and that concerns zoning, not actual development. A word on zoning. Under state law, government entities are supposed to zone their communities cyclically to plan for future growth. (These same entities do not build housing, which is the domain of private or nonprofit developers.) One of the ideas behind housing element law is integration. Public entities are supposed to make sure that zoning does not “unduly constrain” development of multifamily housing, where
people who cannot afford to buy a three-bedroom home with a yard can live. Government is supposed to match projected growth for all income levels with fair zoning. This is a huge problem in Marin County, where, as one advocate wrote, the poor are “zoned out.” According to a county document prepared for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, multifamily housing is clustered in only a few areas like Marin City and San Rafael’s Canal District, where racial and ethnic minorities tend to live. According to a study funded by the Marin Community Foundation, 60 percent of Marin’s workforce lives out of the county and commutes in daily, holding jobs that tend to pay under $50,000, like residential care and retail. The study also notes the environmental hazards of such a freeway clog—an unnecessary 2.4 million pounds of carbon pouring into the atmosphere every day. This is a rough equivalent—daily—to the emissions produced by 42,000 U.S. households in a year. As Adams points out, none of the zoning in Marinwood
has been proposed in secret. Though audience members at the town hall shouted “You did not come to this community, you did not notice this community!” she replied that every meeting where potential zoning was discussed had been done in a public. Discussions over the housing element update—public. Board of supervisors meetings, where Marin’s 101 corridor was discussed as a place to concentrate future growth because so much of the rest of Marin is preserved as open space—public. “There have been public meetings, with audio streaming and webcasting, so you can see not only all the documents discussed, but the conversation around those documents,” she tells me on the phone. She’s right. I’ve been covering land-use issues in Marin for three years, and none of the zoning changes discussed at the Marinwood meeting were new to me. Still, audience members seemed to feel that public process wasn’t enough. “It’s not our full-time job!” one audience member yelled. “It’s your job as ) 18
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bizarre—not just in the form of meetings like the one described above, but also in a recall effort against Adams, which would cost as much as $250,000 and oust the supervisor from office only months before she faces a general election anyway. How did this happen? After all, as Carla Marinucci pointed out in a recent San Francisco Chronicle piece on the county’s current incivility, Bush-era Marin County was supposed to be a Greenpeace mecca of laissez-faire hippies soaking in backyard hot tubs. It continues to be caricatured as a rosy-vibe utopia policed by the handholding Kumbaya Patrol, not a place where mob mentality sweeps town halls. Is this chaotic mass opposition to housing the byproduct of top-down leadership on the part of local government, as some claim? Is it hysterical fear of Big Development in the wake of mortgage plummets, national bailouts and an economic machine that many no longer trust? Or is it really as ugly as it looks from the outside—wealthy suburban privilege at its worst, organizing to keep renters, low-wage workers and recent immigrants far, far away.