The lack of it hurts everyone

Most people who work in Marin don’t live here. This trend has been going on since the early 2000s and it’s getting worse.

In 2003 there were approximately 102,000 jobs in Marin. Over 56,000 of those jobs — 55% — were held by workers who commuted from other counties. Over the next decade we added nearly 8,000 jobs, and the in-commute had gone up by over 11,000 workers. Today, 62% of the people who work in Marin live in other counties.

Why do so many of Marin’s workforce live outside the county? It’s because they can’t afford to live here.

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), “Families who pay more than 30 percent of their income for housing are considered cost-burdened and may have difficulty affording necessities such as food, clothing, transportation and medical care.”

In June 2015 the average residential rental in Marin cost $2,456 per month. Based on HUD’s housing affordability standard, a household would need to earn $8,187 per month or $98,240 per year to afford this average rental in Marin. Here’s the disconnect: the majority of the people who commute to Marin for work – 52% — make less than $40,000 per year.

In addition to the social and economic challenges, there are serious environmental impacts when workers can’t afford to live here. Today, fully 68,000 members of the workforce drive into Marin. Most drive alone, making our already exorbitant carbon footprint even more egregious.

This pattern will get worse. Service businesses, which are weighted toward lower-wage jobs, are the fastest growing sector of Marin’s labor market. A few service workers and their salaries include:

Recent experience suggests serious problems ahead in one of the most important parts of the local service sector: education. The San Rafael School District can no longer rely on recruiting for teachers locally or even region-wide. This year, administrators and School Board members are casting a much wider net, attending teacher fairs as far away as San Diego and Chico.

The hard truth: the starting salary for an elementary school teacher in San Rafael is $43,050, nowhere near enough to cover the cost of an apartment, let alone a single-family home.

Hopefully San Rafael schools will be able to find young starting teachers who are willing to share housing, but can they afford stay when it’s time to start a family? And will they want to?

Continuing upward pressure on housing costs is pushing young people out. With few peers and faced with an economic juggling act to manage Marin’s cost of living, young teachers and other young professionals may find better quality of life elsewhere.

We can’t build our way out of the workforce housing dilemma, but here are things we can do to improve the situation:

• Build affordable housing close to jobs and transit.
• Make it easier to build second units.
• Adopt local ordinances to allow junior second units.
• Support source-of-income protections for section 8 voucher holders.
• Educate landlords on the benefits of Section 8 to property owners.

Our policy-makers can address this serious workforce housing dilemma as they make all of their zoning, permitting and other housing decisions. Developing policies to support diversity of age, income, culture and ethnic origin will also help.

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Gentrification in the Bay Area

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