Objections are roadblocks to solving housing crisis
Objections are roadblocks to solving housing crisis</3>
I am writing on behalf of the Marin Workforce Housing Collaborative. (sic) (Should read “Marin Environmental Housing Collaborative”)
Workforce and affordable housing is hard to build — especially in Marin, where smaller and less expensive housing is much more difficult to pencil out within acceptable norms of profit. With reviews, hearings, public engagement and input, design changes and more reviews, the process is years long and delays are enormously costly.
Cities are part of the problem. So are planning policies that give housing opponents multiple opportunities to quash good multi-family housing . Critics say, “wrong place, wrong size, wrong color, it’ll shade my deck.” When all those objections are met, the next wave of opposition comes.
Opponents want to “preserve community character,” but for whom? We are losing our community characters, the unique personalities of our county. Marin attracts larger employers who pay high wages, and high-wage earners who work elsewhere can afford to live here. But our service-sector employees — store clerks and bank tellers, dental hygienists and teachers — can’t. The local control so coveted by housing opponents has a huge hand in preventing new housing from being built. Local control drives up the cost of workforce and affordable housing, pricing smaller and nonprofit developers out of the market.
If passed, State Bill 1487, the San Francisco Bay Area Regional Housing Finance Act, can bring financing to communities whose vision is to provide adequate housing to preserve what — and who — makes them unique, according to their own specifications. It’s time.
— Kiki La Porta, Fairfax