Marin officials review strategy on building standards for housing

Marin officials are reviewing proposed changes in the county’s development code designed to ensure that new housing complexes match as closely as possible with surrounding structures.

“The purpose of these form-based codes is to mimic the patterns of development that exist in Marin County already,” said Supervisor Stephanie Moulton-Peters. “It’s copying the patterns of what we have and trying to deal with density in a very local way.”

A raft of new state laws over recent years has severely limited the ability of California cities and counties to determine what gets built in their communities. The laws have been passed in reaction to the state’s severe shortage of affordable housing and its rising homeless population.

During a joint meeting Tuesday, Marin supervisors and planning commissioners were briefed on a proposed “form-based” building code that would employ new objective design and building standards.

In many cases, objective standards — such as height, setbacks, lot coverage, open space ratios, density and parking requirements — are the only discretion left to local governments when reviewing a development application.

For example, SB 35, which took effect in 2018, mandates a ministerial approval process for projects proposed in jurisdictions that haven’t created their state-mandated quota of housing. Ministerial projects are statutorily exempt from having to comply with the California Environmental Quality Act.

SB 9, which took effect at the beginning of this year, gives the owners of homes in areas zoned for single-family residences the ministerial right to add a second house and an accessory dwelling unit (ADU), or to split the lot and build up to three new houses and three ADUs on their combined properties.

The objective standards under consideration would not limit the number of residences that could be built on parcels. The goal is simply to reduce the visual impact of projects by requiring developers to place their residences in multiple smaller buildings, instead of one or more massive structures.

“Depending on the zone district that is selected, a series of building types would be required to break down the scale and size of the building,” Stefan Pellegrini, vice president at Opticos Design, said Tuesday.

Marin County is paying Opticos $1.14 million to create a set of objective design standards that can be used by it and Marin’s cities and towns.

Pellegrini said that before creating the standards he analyzed nearly 800 parcels viewed as potential housing sites by the county and participating cities. Mill Valley and Tiburon chose to develop standards on their own.

Elaborating after the meeting, Marin County Planning Manager Jeremy Tejirian said, “If you’ve got a larger property, you’ll need to break that property into smaller design sites and then choose buildings for each design site.”

Tejirian said that had the proposed form-based code been in effect when a five-story, 74-residence complex on a 1.1-acre lot in Marin City was approved in 2020, the project might have been divided into several buildings.

Exactly how the proposed form-based code would induce developers to build smaller structures instead of fewer larger buildings is murky. There is no simple formula for determining how many design sites a parcel would have to be divided into based on its size.

Instead, the plan involves a complex process that would give developers a wide range of options. In most cases, a developer’s first choice would be which of eight “transect zones” it wants to employ.

Each zone in turn will offer the developer different options of building sizes and types. The zones range from “edge neighborhoods” with low-intensity housing choices such as duplexes and fourplexes to “core Main Street” locations with high-intensity housing choices such as block-scale buildings. The choice of zone would not be limited by the parcel’s location.

“They’re going to figure out what is the best way to develop that site to meet the number of units they want,” Tejirian said.

“In some sites that is going to be a fourplex, or a series of three fourplexes,” he said, “In some sites it will be a series of 12 townhomes. It depends on the size and the shape of the site.”

At the meeting on Tuesday, Pellegrini said, “We have a narrow funnel of choices that would be conducive for the applicant to chose when applying their transect zone. The form-based code is designed to produce certain outcomes.”

The form-based code would create a new floating zoning district whose specifications could be substituted for those of any existing district allowing multifamily housing.

“The form-based combing district is intended to provide objective design standards for multi-family housing development projects that qualify for ministerial review,” the law says.

Tejirian said any project that is using state law to take advantage of ministerial review would be required to use the form-based code. That would include sites that the county has zoned to meet its state mandate for creating new housing in the past and where no building has occurred.

Tejirian said the owners of sites that are being proposed for the first time to meet the county’s state mandate — to zone for 3,569 more residences in the unincorporated areas over eight years, beginning in 2023 — would also have the option of using the form-based code, and would be granted ministerial review.

Andrea Montalbano, a member of the Planning Commission, asked if developers could make use of state mandated density bonuses, available for building a certain amount of low-income housing, to get around the objective standards and build larger buildings.

Pellegrini confirmed that is the case.

“The use of the density bonus is something that weighs very heavily on all of us,” Pellegrini said.

Supervisor Damon Connolly noted that the rationale being provided for the objective standards is that they are necessary because of state mandates.

“A lot of community members find that reason dissatisfying, I would put it that way,” he said.

“I think you’re addressing the elephant in the room,” Tejirian said. “There is a great deal of consternation in Marin County and elsewhere in the state about the gradual chipping away at local control. Part of this is, we’re trying to turn lemons into lemonade. There is no other game in town.”

During the public comment period of the meeting, Strawberry resident Bruce Corcoran said, “When I hear our leaders, including our supervisors and commissioners, say there is nothing we can do to prevent the loss of local control and the imposition of state control, I say that is a cop-out.”

“There is one thing you can do: support the lawsuit against SB 9,” Corcoran said.

In March, four southern California cities — Redondo Beach, Torrance, Carson and Whittier — filed a legal challenge against SB 9, asserting it violates local governments’ constitutional right to make zoning decisions.

Other public commenters voiced support for the state mandates.

“SB 9 seems very reasonable to me,” said Kevin Beals, who said he moved to Los Ranchitos from Oakland. “Single-family-zoned housing has been used intentionally and unintentionally for many years to keep Black, brown and lower-income people out of neighborhoods. We need to get away from having single-family zoned areas.”

Supervisor Katie Rice said, “Regardless of the reason we’re doing this, it is kind of exciting at some level to be thinking this way. I can see why we brought in Opticos.”

Supervisor Dennis Rodoni expressed concern that the form-based code might make projects too costly to build. He said the 74-residence complex in Marin City might have been financially infeasible if the form-based code had required additional design and building.

“We shouldn’t lose focus on affordability,” he said.