Focus Group: Housing and Transportation
Marin Economic Forum held a focus group on December 18, 2014. This group considered the four, bold questions below and drafted the following answers. We invite you to comment and add your voice to this community conversation. Thanks for your input!
Housing Goals: What four goals should additional housing accomplish in Marin County?
- Create a spectrum of housing options (e.g. Junior 2nd units; regular second units; apartment, condominiums; co-housing and single-family homes) to meet various life cycles;
- Workforce housing to better match what our employees can afford;
- Focus new and infill housing in our downtown areas to: increase vibrancy; support local businesses; create a greater sense of community; preserving outlying open space, or existing single-family home neighborhoods; and
- Environmentally efficient; remodels and new housing- context sensitive and human scaled; enhancing character of built environment (e.g. form based codes); streamline application processes with green standards (reduce red tape).
Transportation Goals: What four goals should transportation systems in Marin County try to accomplish?
- Increase Transit usage locally and regionally through bus and train: affordable; efficient; frequent; better connectivity;
- Reduce regional freeway travel times: reduce bottlenecks on freeways and local roads; improve Interstate 580/Highway 101 connectivity; improve connectivity to airports and universities;
- Increase walking and biking for everyday trips: improve safety; complete streets; connectivity; and
- Reduce VMT (Vehicle Miles Traveled): reduce Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions; reduce car trips.
Housing Locations: Additional units should go where? And why there?
- Downtowns (above shops; on parking lots; infill)
- Why? Walk/Bike; transit; local shopping; vitality; quality of life;
- Shopping centers/Neighborhood Retail;
- Why? Walk/Bike; transit; local shopping; vitality; quality of life;
- COM and Dominican Student Housing;
- Why? Live on campus and quality of life
- Ease of transit; and
- Why? Work/life balance; environmental; quality of life
- Second Units and co-housing, shared housing.
- Why? Stay in homes; small, affordable; near schools
Marin County Transportation System 2020: What additional options should be in place and where?
Major Themes:
- SMART to Larkspur and better Ferry connections;
- Feeder system-
- First/Last Mile to home work and shopping;
- Sharing vehicles (electric bikes, cards, vans);
- Transit Policies (Pedestrian first, then bike, transit , cars ; subsidies for low income)
- Specific Roadway improvements
- Schools- more buses walking/biking and less driving!!
- Electric Bikes, cars, transit
- Connections between counties-e.g. to Oakland, University of California, Berkeley, UCSF, etc
We encourage your comments below!
Joyce Kawasaki
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I would like Marin to have a BART system that goes to the San Francisco Financial District during commuter hours and with less frequency during the day. If there were one, I’d go into SF more often.
Anonymous
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Here are the priorities as i see them:
Improve Interstate 580/Highway 101 connectivity; your local transportation ideas are a pipe dream. If you want better local transportation, move to SF or Oakland where the universities and colleges are located.
Housing options: Allow homeowners to create in-law units they can rent to third parites. We do not need to build more apartments, condos or SFDs.
Alejandro Moreno S.
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Pipe dream or not, dreams are required for vision, and vision is required to see what local transport needs exist and how best to meet them. Doing nothing is not a solution, and apathy is the mental equivalent of gangrenous decreptitude. Agree with improving connectivity for 580 to 101 (especially the pm commute). It fries me to no end how traffic is a nightmare until you make it past the Richmond bridge exits when coming back into Marin from SF in the evenings (I don’t even commute anymore, gave it up cuz it was such a nightmare and a life-suck). As for the comment that we don’t need to build more apartments condos or SFDs, that’s ridiculous, and a lame effort on the part of what appears to be a self-interested homeowner who doesn’t want more comptetition between property owners in Marin while pushing for change to allow property owners to make even more money, completely bogus. Leaving the housing needs up to private individual homeowners without a community plan to improve the housing supply would only increase rents on current units and any increase in in-law unit availability would not be sufficient to offset and meet the demand for affordable housing. It’s the local housing equivalent of letting Wall St police itself. Laughable. And just fyi, I’m a homeowner in Marin, not a renter. But I care more about the quality of life for all here in Marin, not just the value of my own home or my own wallet. We need to start thinking LONG TERM, and about the needs of ALL, and not as if each one of us were the center of our own universe whose top priorities are the Zillow values on our homes. And a comment to all posters, if you want people to give more weight to your comments, sign them with your real name.
– Marin resident since ’77, Lagunitas grad ’81, Redwood High ’85, UC Berkeley ’89, Dominican ’11
Anonymous
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I agree with what’s been outlined so far. On the Transportation Vision please add first/last mile connections to SMART stations and connections to other counties, including Vallejo. Regionally, Highway 37 is a concern.
Bill
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I believe in and support growth. I do not support forcing people into areas they are not equipped to live in. By that I mean places where they can not afford to live. By doing so we put a greater financial burden on everyone to pay more in taxes to provide additional services for those people.
I moved to Marin because that is where I want to live and I can afford to do so. If I could not afford to I would have moved to a different county even though I wanted to live in Marin. It is my responsibility to pay for what I want – not society’s.
Bottom line, if you can not afford to live in Marin go to a place where you can. My exception is seniors who have paid their way through life. They deserve to have the support in low rent and additional services. The rest, go where you can afford to live. Don’t force taxpayers to spend money on your lifestyle.
Marc Berger
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HOUSING: Marin County needs rent control. If you cannot afford to buy, then rentals should be kept affordable.
As it stands now, landlords can double the rent with impunity , upsetting families and uprooting communities. RENT CONTROL IS A MUST!
TRANSPORTATION: The fact that driving is pretty the only to commute in Marin is environmentally unsustainable and just wrong. The ferry is now super expensive. The comment if you want public transportation move to SF or Oakland is in my opinion haughty! The fact that BART does not come here is crazy! I believe it is time to isolate Marin to have ONLY (or mostly) people of higher economic status.
Both Rent control and rail transportation would diversify and enrich our county in different ways. There I said it!
Cosmo
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I fully support the goals already articulated. We will not achieve them if the issues are framed and enflamed as they have been in the recent past. The business community needs to send out the message that Marin needs housing and balanced transportation system (ie, multi-modal) for its economic health.
bill
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The travesty on the third lane on the RSR Bridge should be an embarrassment to our politicians and public servants. So far only one politician has attempted to resolve this. Consider all the lost hours and pollution caused by thousands of cars in stop/go traffic every day – all cause by MTC’s intransigence.
As for housing – this is not meant to be harsh or unkind – if you can not afford to live here go to where you can.
Bill