Workforce housing works

IJ columnist Dick Spotswood’s latest attack on new housing cannot go unchallenged. It is simply too simplistic to accept.

His question is fair: Will residents living near transit use it?

But, he posits, if residents who live near transit don’t use it each and every time they leave their homes, the transit-oriented housing experiment has failed.

The test for the success of transit-oriented housing, as with housing near or coupled with retail centers, is not whether its residents never drive. Rather, the question is whether the location of their homes will reduce the miles they put on the road.

Surely, Highway 101 and its feeder routes would benefit if we enabled more of our workforce to walk to the ferry terminals and nearby bus and SMART rail stops, even though they may still need their cars for nighttime, weekend and other travel.

Doesn’t it make sense to site more of their housing close to the centers of our communities, which also happens to be where transit is available?

While public transportation may not work very well to get around within Marin, the ferry boats and commute buses are a proven success for those who work in San Francisco.

We import much of our local workforce from the East Bay, all by car due to the lack of other transit options.

Unless we find a way to house more of these people within our communities, we will continue to suffer from lengthy travel times on almost every outing we take. And, if more of our local workers could move to Marin, it would make imminent sense to have them live near transit and other services, so that the number and length of their vehicle trips could be reduced.

Life would be simple if everything were black and white. It is not.

— Steven Saxe, Corte Madera, board member, Marin Environmental Housing Collaborative