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Health & Fitness

County Housing Element Is Flawed - Marin Can Do Better!

One of the core values that most Marin residents share is a love and respect for nature, which has been demonstrated by a long history of environmental conservation. However, since the adoption of the 2007 Marin Countywide Plan (CWP), Marin County’s leadership has been taking Marin in a different direction.

 

The most significant finding of the CWP’s Environmental Impact Report (EIR) was that "land uses and development consistent with the 2007 Countywide Plan would result in 42 significant unavoidable adverse environmental impacts."  These impacts include, but are not limited to, traffic congestion, flooding, impending sea level rise, air & noise pollution, endangering habitat and a potential water deficit.

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The Marin County Board of Supervisors had an opportunity to reduce these unfortunate impacts, but instead, approved the CWP with a “Statement of Overriding Considerations”, essentially stating that providing housing was more important than protecting the environment and public health and safety from the harm that such residential development could cause.

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Marin County Supervisors recently adopted the 2012 Housing Element.  According to the Housing Element’s EIR, implementation of the plan would result in many of the adverse impacts disclosed in the CWP’s EIR.  Indeed, the plan’s Inventory, which identifies sites that are supposedly suitable for new housing (particularly affordable housing), includes sites located in Marin’s most hazardous areas, thus fostering environmental injustice by encouraging Marin’s most vulnerable residents to live where they must fend against the County’s highest health and safety risks.

 

Worse still, proposed County Housing Element programs reduce local control, public input, transparency, and environmental protection by fast-tracking permit review and furthering streamlined environmental review of high-density affordable housing.

 

Other Housing Element programs also treat affordable housing differently than market-rate housing, giving affordable housing exceptions/exemptions to density limits, development standards and safety regulations.  Such exceptions are a boon to housing developers but pave the way for lower income households to live in conditions substandard to those of higher income households. Moreover, high-density development has greater environmental impacts and is incompatible with the character of most Marin neighborhoods.

 

Why are Marin County Planners ignoring environmental constraints and pushing for more housing? 

Marin County Officials have felt pressured to fulfill the County’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation – RHNA (a quota for housing units that each jurisdiction is supposed to plan for) due to incentives (E.g. transportation funding) for RHNA compliance and penalties (E.g. accelerated Housing Element cycles, possible legal action by a third party, and possible carrying over of units from this Housing Element cycle to the next cycle) for non compliance.

 

Yet, to simply comply with the RHNA allocation is short sighted. First of all, the allocation is based on unrealistic job and population projections and conflicts with the Department of Finance’s and Marin County’s forecasts.

 

Secondly, Marin County needs to conduct a much more comprehensive, cumulative and long term cost analysis. The costs related to dealing with the adverse environmental impacts caused by overdeveloping our County far outweigh the incentives attached to RHNA compliance or penalties attached to noncompliance. Consider the staggering costs associated with lack of water; cleaning up polluted waterways & habitats; increased damages and injuries due to worse traffic and placing housing in high seismic activity zones; increased illness due to exposing residents to toxic air contaminants; constructing and maintaining dikes to protect buildings from sea level rise; building new schools, etc.  

 

Marin County Supervisors should take back Marin’s land use planning and meet the true housing needs of all Marin’s constituents, including lower-income households, in a manner that upholds community character, respects the limits of our environment, infrastructure, and public services, and protects public health and safety.

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