Editorial: Sausalito housing Measures J and K deserve support on Nov. 4
The state housing mandate is requiring Sausalito to zone land for the future construction of 724 units over the next five years. That’s an ambitious 16% increase in a town that – like other Marin municipalities – has experienced recent decades of slow growth.
Sacramento’s housing quota for the bayfront city – requiring the rezoning of 13 parcels – has propelled two local measures for Sausalito’s Nov. 4 ballot.
Just like other municipalities across the state, failure to zone properties to set the stage to meet the state-set quotas could mean state fines, the loss of state funding and the state stepping in and making local planning decisions.
Measure J asks voters to rezone parcels in Sausalito’s central commercial area and in Marinship to set the stage for construction of apartment buildings. Most of the Marinship sites are currently occupied by underused office buildings.
Measure J has not drawn any formal opposition.
A second measure, Measure K, is a different story.
Measure K would rezone two acres of the city’s 17-acre Martin Luther King Jr. Park for construction of a 50-unit apartment complex for low-income seniors.
Most of the site is now occupied by a single-story building off Coloma Street. The city plans to move those uses to Marinship – at the city’s expense.
Mayor Joan Cox, who lives nearby and has recused herself from any of the council’s official deliberations on the issue, supports Measure K and says that it won’t interfere with recreational uses at MLK Park.
She and Councilmember Steven Woodside stress that because the land is city-owned, it is the only site where the city can mandate that it be used for affordable housing and control its size and design.
Its plans to negotiate a 99-year lease with a developer – likely a nonprofit – would keep the city in the driver’s seat.
Unlike other housing plans proposed around the county under the state’s pro-housing laws, the city’s plan for the MLK park site calls for buildings to be two-story, not six or eight as have been proposed in Fairfax and San Rafael.
But the measure’s opponents are wary, worried that state housing laws could pave the way for even a larger housing complex, one over which the city would not have any say.
“That is the extraordinarily high risk for this plan,” Joe Penrod, a spokesman for Measure K’s opposition group, Build Smart Sausalito. He’s worried Measure K opens the door to other parkland being converted to housing development.
In addition, Measure K’s opponents say the housing could be built on another site.
The importance of the MLK park site is that it is city-owned and city-controlled.
Woodside, an attorney who spent most of his long legal career as a county counsel dealing with land-use law, says Measure K is the city’s best opportunity to not only provide senior housing, but help satisfy the state’s quota.
“We need affordable housing. We need senior housing and this is the best way forward,” he told the IJ editorial board.
“A private developer cannot force the city to violate those restrictions that the voters have already imposed on this site,” Woodside said, stressing that Measure K limits the development to 50 units and the city’s strategy is legally defensible.
Opponents’ worries are understandable. State lawmakers have rewritten land-use law – effectively undermining local control – in order to promote the construction of housing that California needs.
Across Marin, that means the county and local towns and cities have had to rezone properties to accommodate new housing at a pace unseen since the building booms of the 1950s and 1960s.
Measure K meets that challenge while at the same time preserving local control over the development. Even more important, it meets an important local need.
The IJ recommends yes votes on Sausalito’s Measures J and K.