At the start of 2022, we were shocked to discover the State of California had mandated a requirement for cities and counties to plan for more than one million new housing units, as part of the Regional Housing Needs Assessment or RHNA.
The RHNA happens every eight years and requires every jurisdiction to plan for a share of the state’s housing needs. For Marin County, the RHNA is more than 14,000 units. In unincorporated Marin, it’s more than 3,500 units. Here in West Marin, we are in dire need of affordable and residential housing. We support our local community land trusts and actions that support residential housing plans; however, we are very concerned about the number of units the state requires the County to plan for development in the next eight years.
The County led public workshops to identify locations for developers to construct the required number of housing units by 2030. More than 6,000 potential units have been placed into the Housing Plan, as well as precedent-setting changes to the Countywide Plan planning corridors, and zoning to accommodate development in places the public worked to protect over the last 50 years.
Since January 2022, we have been actively engaged in this public process, submitted multiple written comments and attended all of the Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors Workshops on this topic.
EAC’S POSITION & ADVOCACY FOCUS:
Protect Sensitive Habitats: The County needs to remove any potential locations near sensitive habitat and species. The impacts on critical habitat areas, listed and special status species, water quality, and wastewater development within 100 feet of sensitive habitat areas would be significant and unavoidable.
Support Smart Growth Aligned with Plan Bay Area 2050 and Marin’s Countywide Plan: The County should be planning for high-density infill, redevelopment, and rezoning of commercial areas near job centers and transit corridors. Rollbacks to A-60 zoning, (one house per 60 acres of agricultural land), must be avoided to prevent urban sprawl and increased greenhouse gas emissions in order to meet local, regional, and state climate goals.
Uphold the Integrity of Community Planning: Local communities were excluded from the initial site selection process, and local community plans were not honored to identify appropriate areas for potential development. Housing is a balance of people and place that requires careful planning and community participation to ensure appropriate development that does not harm our environment or displace residents. For decades, residents in unincorporated Marin County have worked to develop community plans that balance these needs.
Support the Integrity of Adaptive Planning: This Housing Plan creates significant and unavoidable impacts that are not in alignment with the County’s Climate Action Plan. Pushing through a Housing Plan that fails to plan for climate change hazards like drought, wildfire, rising sea levels, and groundwater intrusion is inappropriate and will have long-term negative impacts.
Support Residential Housing: We support policies to ensure housing remains within the residential community and is not converted to second homes or short-term rentals that continue to deplete the availability of residential and workforce housing. This includes our support for the short-term rental ban, the creation of a vacancy tax, and support for community land trusts to ensure dedicated long-term affordable housing and solutions to these complex problems.
Support Proactive and Long-Term Planning for the 2030 Housing Element Update: The County is making dramatic and precedent-setting changes to the Countywide Plan to meet the RHNA. Changing the planning corridors and rezoning A-60 parcels is significant. We are concerned the County may be placing too many sites in this update that will become by-right development projects that bypass local planning review, undermining the last 50 years of proactive community planning!
FALL AND WINTER UPDATES
In late October, the County released the programmatic Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) for public review.
The more than 800-page document analyzed the potential impacts of the housing element update in the following categories as defined by the California Environmental Quality Act or CEQA: Aesthetics; Agricultural and Forestry Resources; Air Quality; Biological Resources; Cultural, Tribal Cultural, and Historical Resources; Geology and Soils; Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Energy; Hazard and Hazardous Materials; Hydrology and Water Quality; Land Use and Planning; Mineral Resources; Noise; Population and Housing; Public Services; Transportation; Utilities and Service Systems; Wildfire; and other CEQA and Social-Economic Analysis.
We reviewed the entire document and attended the public workshops to provide comments and ask questions.
While we understand the complex challenge the County is facing to meet the significant Regional Housing Needs Allocation in a timely manner, we raised several significant concerns. A primary concern is that the DEIR was incredibly challenging for the general public to review and understand the project scope.
EAC’s Primary DEIR Concerns:
The DEIR is an inadequate and defective analysis. Information, analysis, and mitigations are missing or incomplete in several areas. Details are noted below in our comments by chapter.
The DEIR fails to provide a framework for decision-making on site selection or clear alternatives.
The DEIR does not include enough information to identify protect and mitigate impacts from future by-right development projects.
The DEIR fails to provide a way to identify a specific site and understand how a parcel may be used in the future due to the split programmatic analysis of the Proposed Project Sites and Candidate Housing Sites that fail to identify potential impacts to the Project Planning Area and foreseeable impacts with neighboring communities.
Ultimately, the DEIR lists more than 15 significant and unavoidable impacts if the Housing Element is approved and submitted.
The DEIR is unable to provide mitigations to the unavoidable impacts to fresh water resources (having enough water for all the new units and increase of popluation), greenhouse gas emissions, wastewater, and others.
We submitted our letter to the County on November 21st. We anticipate the Final Environmental Impact Report will be released to the public on December 19th and look forward to reading the responses to our letter and planning for the next steps.
We are ultimately concerned with the potential long-term consequences of the implementation of this plan, specifically the potential for all locations identified in the site maps to become eligible for by-right development (bypassing local controls and the requirement for site specific CEQA analysis) if the units are not developed.
The County is on track to approve the Housing Element by the end of January 2023 in spite of the precedent-setting changes to our Countywide Plan to adjust the planning corridors, subvert local community plans, change A-60 zoning of two parcels to allow for above moderate housing development, and more.
We encourage you to contact your Marin County District Supervisor to raise your concerns with this plan and the lack of comprehensive public engagement and outreach. It’s unacceptable for the County to disregard decades of collaborative community planning to meet the state deadline.
Read our November 21, 2022 letter and our webpage with general information and resources about the Housing Element update.
