[stellar678]

Can you describe a bit more clearly what the state is requiring of towns around Point Reyes?

Looking at the top line numbers of the Regional Housing Needs Allocation plan - the Bay Area needs to make space for an additional 440k homes in the next 9 years. Presuming that gets allocated evenly based on population, Point Reyes Station with 1,000 people needs to build about 6 homes per year for the next decade.

Even one huge apartment building would massively overshoot the needs for Point Reyes Station. But I suppose the requirements would be more sensibly met with townhouses or small apartments or some kind of senior housing.

Am I missing some numbers, or maybe there's another program or changes that I'm not aware of?

I generally agree that our low density places should stay low density. Point Reyes is not a job center, not a sensible commuting destination, and a difficult and expensive place to build basic infrastructure like power, water, sewer - so it doesn't make sense to build a lot of housing there.

[crhulls]

You can look at the Marin County Housing Element (https://www.marincounty.org/depts/cd/divisions/planning/hous...)

The county, based on state mandate, is requiring unincorporated Marin to build in the thousands of housing units. The various districts are each expected to shoulder their burden. The number of housing units the county proposed, via out of town consultants, puts hundreds of units in Point Reyes and Inverness. This is not a conspiracy theory - it is all out there for anyone to see.

And yes, it really doesn't make sense for rural small towns to be housing or job centers. It seems like this is being driven by a misguided sense of equity (e.g. it isn't fair only rich people can live in this nice area).

[stellar678]

Thanks for the link, very interesting. The maps that I see are presented as possible candidates for how to meet the housing goals, not a fait-accompli - and they're overwhelmingly concentrated near 101 and the Bay.

I doubt that Marin County is very interested in trying to provide public health and other county services for a bunch of low-income folks moving way out to rural coastal communities. Seems likely that most of the housing going into unincorporated Marin will be smushed right up near 101.

But what about local low-income folks in West Marin like your friends, or the service workers in tourism, hospitality, etc...? Has anybody in your village association talked about what it would take to preserve local control but with a serious commitment for Point Reyes Station to provide housing to meet the needs of local low-income folks?

History has shown that basically once a community exists in California, residents start using local control to blockade housing - with the result being that new housing is mostly built in exurban sprawl by developers who pave over and then subdivide wild lands. These big hammers coming down from the state are basically a self-inflicted wound on the part of supporters of local control.

To provide some personal context: I grew up in the Russian River area. Housing is silly expensive and yet basically nothing gets built, so the towns are turning into retirement/vacation communities. There's roughly no housing that's accessible to people working local jobs, unless you inherited property from your family. I don't think those communities should be sopping up the housing demand for people working in San Francisco, but something's got to push them to build housing for the people who work right there.