Marin Voice: Novato’s Oma Village is a great housing model

After five years of persistent effort, Oma Village will welcome its first residents by the end of the year.

This ground-breaking, employment-focused housing, designed particularly for families with children, is the kind of environmentally friendly affordable housing that the Marin Environmental Housing Collaborative supports.

Oma Village offers 12 two-bedroom/two-bath and two one-bedroom/one-bath apartments on a small lot on Nave Drive in Novato, an infill location close to jobs, transit and other services — and away from environmentally sensitive areas.

MEHC applauds this Homeward Bound development, which will provide formerly homeless families with healthy, safe, affordable and service-enriched housing.

Building stability for families moving out of homelessness requires a variety of supportive services. The services at Oma Village will include coaching in education, career and financial planning geared to creating assets.

Through fundraising with individual donors, foundation grants and county funding, Homeward Bound capitalized, rather than borrowed, 95 percent of the project cost.

So, Oma Village does not have to rely on rents to cover its development costs, allowing this housing to operate sustainably at very low cost to its new tenants, who will be just entering the job market.

Oma Village rents will be fixed at $750 per month, a rate affordable to a single person making the minimum hourly wage of $15, even as the family is able to increase its income. And, families can stay as long as there is a child under 18 in the household.

This will allow families to build savings and eventually move into market-rate housing as they develop self-sufficiency for the long term.

MEHC believes that, to be environmentally friendly, housing, affordable or not, must avoid sensitive habitat, areas subject to wildfires, flooding and extreme earthquake risks, and areas designated for conservation, open space or agriculture.

Oma Village satisfies all of these requirements.

This is an example of the “gentle infill” that MEHC supports.

The apartments are solar-powered, have tankless water heaters and are insulated well above code requirements.

Stormwater runoff is naturally filtered before it leaves the site, and the landscaping features native, drought-resistant plants.

Oma Village replaces a dilapidated building with attractive, energy-efficient, environmentally friendly affordable housing.

MEHC knows that affordable housing should be located near jobs, transit and other services. There is a region-serving bus stop a block from Oma Village and a SMART station will be within walking distance.

Hamilton Marketplace offers grocery shopping three blocks away, and an elementary school and community center are within easy walking distance.

While commercially-zoned properties are generally viewed by local governments as sales tax opportunities, some are languishing because their particular locations are no longer competitive.

MEHC says that one of the keys to solving the housing crisis is identifying and rezoning such underutilized properties to medium- or high-density residential affordable housing, as happened with Oma Village.

Novato realized that the area was losing its attractiveness to the commercial and office real estate market and recognized that rezoning to accommodate 20 unit-per-acre multi-family residences would open an opportunity for affordable housing.

Oma Village is remarkable for so many reasons. It will support the very lowest-income and the most-burdened families. It has tremendous community support and is already 95 percent paid for.

Homeward Bound has turned a blighted property into an attractive community asset.

MEHC members met with Homeward Bound’s executive director, Mary Kay Sweeny and her deputy, Paul Fordham, to prepare this article. We asked them to name a takeaway from their Oma Village experience.

Their response was immediate: “We can do it again!”

Let’s hope so. The housing crisis needs many strategies for success, and Oma Village is a good one of the many good models in Marin County.

Marjorie Macris is a member of the Marin Environment-Housing Collaborative. She is a former Marin County planning director and has been a local environmental leader.