Novato council approves 66-home development

The Novato City Council has approved a plan to convert a commercial property to housing at 100 Wood Hollow Drive.

The project will include 66 two-story houses on 6 acres of the nearly 13-acre site. Nine homes will be deed-restricted for low-income households. In Marin, that would be less than $154,700 a year for a household of four.

The developer, Align Real Estate, plans lot sizes of 2,300 to 3,735 square feet.

“It’s a relatively compact style of development,” said Steve Marshall, a city planning official. “It’s a lot size that we are seeing more frequently where the preference is perhaps smaller yard spaces to maintain but a larger home with more room.”

The plan calls for 26 street parking spaces, a 4,250-square-foot recreation area that likely would be a park and a primary entry on Meadow Crest Road. An emergency vehicle access point is planned on Wood Hollow Drive, which connects to Redwood Boulevard north of San Marin Drive.

The project would redevelop a nearly vacant 124,000-square-foot office building on the lot. David Baldacci, an executive at Align Real Estate, said the company bought the building in 2016 and renovated it when the occupancy was less than 80%. Now it is down to one tenant.

“So we saw the writing on the wall a few years ago and approached the city about converting this to a residential site, which we thought would be a better use,” Baldacci said.

The applicant is using the so-called “builder’s remedy” provision of the Housing Accountability Act. It says that if a municipality lacks a “substantially compliant” housing element, it can’t use its zoning or general plan standards to reject a housing project that meets affordability requirements.

This is a point of contention between the city and applicant, however. The developer filed a preliminary project application in March 2024 and a full application in July. While the city had adopted its housing element at the time the preliminary application was completed, the state housing department had not yet certified it.

The developer believes this means the builder’s remedy applies to the project. City staff disagree, but Marshall said the project’s benefits outweigh the legal question.

The upsides include a low-density development that is similar to nearby neighborhoods, avoids slopes and the oak woodland and counts toward the Novato’s share of the state mandate for new housing, Marshall said. The mandate requires the city to allow 2,090 new dwellings by 2031.

“We thought it would be best to move the project forward to a decision, not focus on the builder’s remedy issues, focus on the benefits of the project,” Marshall said.

The City Council approved the project during a public hearing Tuesday night.