Plan to solve housing crisis could transform the Tiburon Peninsula

Senate Bill 827: Proposal would override local zoning to allow 8-story buildings near major transit stops like Tiburon ferry landing, corridors like 101 interchange, Strawberry Village

By MATTHEW HOSE
mhose@thearknewspaper.com

Developers would be able to get fast-track approval for eight-story housing complexes in Tiburon’s downtown and waterfront — from the old Shark’s Deli on Beach Road to The Caprice near Mar West and points between — along with areas around Strawberry Village and the Highway 101 interchange under a proposed bill that’s meant to curb the statewide housing crisis.

The proposal, which emerged in the state legislature just after the new year, would override local zoning rules and allow projects between 45 and 85 feet tall in residential areas that are near transit routes. Cities would not be able to review the projects for local concerns including design, parking or fitting in with a neighborhood’s character.

Senate Bill 827, from state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, would apply those changes to areas within a half-mile of a major transit stop, which includes the Tiburon ferry landing and its coordinated bus service there, and within a quarter-mile of “high quality” bus service — fixed intervals of no more than 15 minutes during peak commute — which includes stops near Strawberry Village and the Redwood Highway frontage road.

The Golden Gate Transit Route 8 and Marin Transit Route 219 buses that run up and down Tiburon Boulevard do not currently provide service frequently enough to fall under the proposal.

While the bill could have huge implications for development on the Tiburon Peninsula and across the state if passed, Tiburon Community Development Director Scott Anderson cautions it is in early phases and is still evolving.

“Obviously this is just a preliminary, pending bill,” he said. “This is a long way from being inked into law.”

Anderson said the bill’s provisions “wouldn’t play very well in Tiburon,” as the projects would be exempt from zoning requirements on density, floor-area ratio, parking requirements and building-height limits.

“It would strike at the heart of local regulation,” Anderson said.

Ray McDevitt, a leader of the Strawberry Community Association, said he sees echoes of an attempt in 2013 to label the Strawberry neighborhood as a priority-development area, but he said the new bill is “more of a blunderbuss.”

“It’s crazy,” McDevitt said. “It’s just a crazy piece of legislation.”

Bill part of a bigger picture

The proposal comes on the heels of a package of housing bills passed last year to make it easier to build affordable housing throughout the state.

Those bills included Senate Bill 35, which allowed for fast-tracked development of housing that has a certain percentage of affordable units; Senate Bill 2, which added a real-estate transaction fee to pay for that affordable housing; and Senate Bill 3, which put a $4 million housing bond on November’s ballot.

SB35 was tied specifically to affordable housing by applying only to municipalities that haven’t met state-mandated goals to build affordable units, while this year’s new proposal would apply to market-rate housing as well.

Wiener wrote in an online post the goal of the new proposal is to increase the housing supply near major transit routes, to make the housing stock overall more affordable, to alleviate traffic and to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The latter would help the state get closer to its goals of reducing carbon emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

The bill’s impact would be felt most strongly in cities like San Francisco, where almost the entirety of city limits would be rezoned to allow for the four- to eight-story buildings.

Housing activists say it’s not just the major California cities that need to pull their weight, but also the surrounding suburbs that have been more resistant to building dense housing.

Marin County had the third-highest median rental price in the nation in February, after San Francisco and Suffolk County, N.Y., according to real estate website Zillow. Within Marin, the highest rents were within the 94920 ZIP code, which ranked as the 11th-most expensive ZIP for rentals in the nation with a median rental price of $6,500.

Potentially impacted areas

The bill has two distinctions that would apply differently in downtown Tiburon and Strawberry.

First, housing of up to either 55 or 85 feet tall would be allowed within a quarter-mile radius of a bus stop on the high-quality transit corridors — those with bus service every 15 minutes or less during the peak commute. The taller height limit would be applied where a street is a minimum of 70 feet wide from property line to property line.

The rule would likely apply in Strawberry to the bus stop at Reed Boulevard and Belvedere Drive, just behind Strawberry Village, along with the one on the Redwood Highway frontage road near De Silva Island Road. That would create a radius that would envelop all of the Strawberry Village Shopping Center, portions of Reed Boulevard and Belvedere Drive, the Highway 101 interchange out to the Chevron at North Knoll Road, and most of the Eagle Rock neighborhood.

Joe Sherer, a developer who is also chair of the Strawberry Design Review Board, said the implications of the bill could be good or bad for Strawberry, in his view, based on how the final bill looks, how the county interprets it and what developers actually decide to build.

He noted some of the apartment complexes around the Strawberry Village shopping center are getting old and could use updating, and while he hesitated to say that should come with increased building heights, he did said they could be denser.

“(Those) could be updated to be very nice, and that would be walkable to transit,” he said. “How great would that be?”

Jeremy Tejirian, the planning manager for the county, said the county had not done an analysis of the bill, and he was uncertain of its effects on particular areas of unincorporated Marin.

The second part of the bill imposes a wider radius for taller development around a major transit stop, such as the Tiburon ferry landing with its connecting bus service.

Around such a stop, the same rules apply within a quarter-mile radius: 85-foot building heights, or 55 feet where the street is narrower.

Anderson said it would apply to Tiburon’s whole downtown commercial area. An Ark analysis and one prepared by an advocacy group showed the radius would include all of Corinthian Island, parts of The Boardwalk Shopping Center and CVS/pharmacy, all of the Point Tiburon Lagoon area, and all of Mar West between Beach Road and Paradise Drive.

Tiburon Boulevard near the ferry landing is considered a wide enough street, according to Anderson, that the 85-foot building height would apply; Tiburon’s Municipal Code denotes that residential developments must have a maximum height limit of 30 feet.

Further, from a quarter to half a mile away, developers would also be able to build housing of up to 55 feet, or 45 feet where the street is narrower.

A half-mile radius includes, in Belvedere, Beach Road along most of Belvedere Island’s southeastern shoreline, the Belvedere Community Center on San Rafael Avenue, portions of Lagoon Road — and half of Peninsula Road, which juts into the center of the Belvedere Lagoon. In Tiburon, it envelops the Belvedere-Tiburon Library, the southern portion of Vistazo West, Vistazo East, Centro West and Centro East to Paradise Drive.

With the rules not applying to the broader corridor along Tiburon Boulevard out to Highway 101, applying them around the ferry terminal could essentially make the area an island of dense residential development without any frequent bus or ferry service to connect it to other areas. Route 8 to San Francisco only runs three times a day; the Route 219 shuttle offers service every 30 minutes or longer; and the Tiburon-San Francisco commuter ferry only makes eight runs a day, with more than an hour between each departure when running.

Bigger problem or no problem?

Belvedere resident Bill Rothman posited the bill could have far more drastic consequences on the Tiburon Peninsula if that development was allowed downtown.

He noted more density would likely bring more-frequent bus service along Tiburon Boulevard in the future — potentially leading Route 8 or Route 219 to have a service interval of 15 minutes during peak hours. If that happened, Tiburon Boulevard and parts of Belvedere could then become high-quality transit corridors under the law, kicking in the dense-development rules around those bus stops as well.

“Once you start the ball rolling, then all of a sudden Belvedere is impacted and all of Tiburon Boulevard,” Rothman said.

But Alice Fredericks, a Tiburon councilmember, said even if the bill passes, it likely wouldn’t make sense to build tall buildings in downtown Tiburon.

For one, she said, much of that area is built on mud fill and developers would likely have to sink in deep piers to have a strong enough foundation for a high rise.

With construction prices likely to soar in the next few years as reconstruction begins to replace the damage done by the North Bay wildfires, she said it likely wouldn’t make financial sense for a developer to try to build a high-rise in downtown Tiburon.

Chuck Ballinger, a Strawberry resident, said he didn’t think the proposal would work with the existing mass-transit system in the area.

“You don’t build that type of housing until you have the mass-transit infrastructure in place,” Ballinger said.

But Sherer, the Strawberry Design Review Board chair, acknowledged that Strawberry “could certainly do better” when it comes to housing, and he noted allowing developers to build more dense projects can frequently be the difference from a project getting built and fizzling out.

“These kinds of bonuses turn a project from a not-make-sense project to one that will actually pencil out,” Sherer said.

He said, however, that he wouldn’t want to see 85-foot-tall buildings and would want ones that are tapered and have setbacks, not ones that “appear like the World Trade Center.”

“That’s one of the things the Design Review Board can somewhat help (with), but an aggressive developer may be able to try to take full advantage of height limits without other specificities,” Sherer said.

In Marin, Corte Madera, Fairfax, Larkspur, Mill Valley, Novato, San Anselmo and San Rafael have sent letters to Sacramento in opposition to SB827. Belvedere has tentatively added a discussion and action item regarding the bill to its April 9 agenda, according to City Manager Craig Middleton; Tiburon Town Manager Greg Chanis did not return an email request for comment.

Implications of affordable housing bill

Tiburon, Belvedere and Strawberry can already technically be subject to streamlined housing development under the other bills passed last year.

Cities across the state have to budget every eight years to create a certain number of housing units for very-low-, low- and moderate-income people, called their Regional Housing Needs Allocation.

However, up until recently, those numbers were used for planning purposes, and cities did not have a mandate to actually build the housing.

SB35 changed that, requiring that cities and counties that have not actually built the number of units on their allocations begin approving projects on an expedited basis as long as they have a certain percentage of affordable housing and comply with other objective guidelines.

Tiburon and Belvedere, along with a vast majority of cities and counties in the state, are subject to streamlining under SB35 if a project has more than 10 percent affordable units.

Unincorporated Marin County, including Strawberry, is also subject to the streamlining, but only for projects that have 50 percent or more affordable units. That could include a project like development of the former Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary site, which has seen significant community pushback for plans that would include housing and a school.

In its general plan update for the years 2014–2022, Tiburon budgeted to build a total of 78 units for people with very low, low, moderate and above-moderate incomes units. The town has built 13 total new units for the first three years of that period — only two of those units low-income, the other 11 market rate.

Belvedere budgeted to build 16 new units as part of its allocation and has built four.

However, development locally under SB35 seems unlikely, as that bill includes requirements workers be paid a prevailing union wage for construction.

“It’s difficult to make a project pencil out when you’re having to pay prevailing wages and provide affordable housing at the same time,” Anderson said.

Sherer agreed.

“Right now development has slowed down significantly because of the cost of labor, and a prevailing-wage rate is so much higher than existing wage rates, which already make development difficult,” Sherer said.

Additionally, SB35 doesn’t apply to areas within a flood plain, which would exclude much of lower Belvedere and areas around Tiburon Boulevard near downtown.

But in other areas, developers have already made headway on proposing projects through the law.

In Cupertino, for example, the owners of the defunct Vallco Shopping Center had tried and failed for years to do a major mixed-use project with 800 housing units, 10 percent of which would have been affordable, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

Last week, the owners came back and submitted plans that called for 2,402 residential units, 50 percent of which would be affordable.

They filed their proposal through the SB35 framework, giving the city 180 days to approve the project, assuming it complies with zoning rules.

Reporter Matthew Hose covers the city of Belvedere, as well as crime, courts and public safety issues on the Tiburon Peninsula. Reach him at 415–944–4627.

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on the web

To view an unofficial interactive map to see areas that would be subject to taller construction, visit: sb827.info/assembly/10.