Marin adds $2.4M to affordable housing fund
Marin County supervisors have earmarked more than $2.4 million to the county’s affordable housing trust fund.
The deposit — excess funds from the county’s 2023-24 budget — boosted the fund’s uncommitted balance to $10.1 million.
“I appreciate that we are moving on this now,” Supervisor Mary Sackett said. “We could commit eight times that much because of the increasing cost of construction.”
The outlay comes in addition to a $5 million contribution to the fund from the county’s general fund in fiscal year 2023-24. That year supervisors established a new financial policy to contribute $5 million per year to the fund over the next five years.
“This is just one of several things that we’re likely going to have to do in the coming years,” said Josh Swedberg, the county’s budget director. “Certainly, $2.4 million is not going to get us there, but every bit counts.”
The state has mandated that Marin County zone for allow 3,569 new homes by 2031, and nearly half must be “affordable.” The county defines affordable as residences for households at or below 80% of the area median income, which would be $141,000 for a three-person household.
“Access to affordable housing is identified as one of three critical focus areas for the county to advance racial equity in Marin,” county staff told the supervisors in a report about the $2.4 million allocation.
Applicants for funds from the affordable housing trust are required to state how the project will help overcome patterns of segregation. They also must submit an “affirmative marketing plan” that describes how they will market the project to “different groups of people based on protected characteristics such as race, color, national origin, religion, sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity), familial status, and disability.” Applicants also are required to list the ethnicities of the people expected to live in the proposed housing.
The Bay Area Housing Finance Authority was expected to put a multibillion-dollar bond measure on the November ballot to raise money for affordable housing. Marin County would have received between $352 million and $704 million if the measure had passed. However, the authority decided in August not to put the initiative on the ballot after polls showed it was likely to fail.
High interest rates and rising construction costs have put a county-backed housing project, the Village at Oak Hill, at risk. The plan calls for 135 apartments on a site adjacent to San Quentin. Thirty-four of the apartments would be reserved for county employees, and the rest would be for local school employees.
The plan involves making the apartments affordable to households earning between 50% and 80% of the area median income.
However, the project has a budget shortfall of more than $17 million, and the Marin County Public Financing Authority, which is overseeing the plan, said it might have to reduce the affordability of the apartments.
Speaking at the authority’s last board meeting, Leelee Thomas, deputy director of the Marin County Community Development Agency, briefed board members on the cost of producing local housing.
“A study done in 2022 by Enterprise Community Partners found that Marin County had the highest cost for affordable housing per unit in the Bay Area, even higher than San Francisco,” Thomas said.
Thomas said the cost of land is a major roadblock. She said the sites that are left to develop in Marin are problematic. Each of the Oak Hill apartments is estimated to cost $877,000, even though the land was donated by the state.
Thomas said the per-residence cost of most affordable housing being proposed in Marin County is more than $1 million.
“There is a funding gap with every single one of the projects that I am working on right now,” she said.
Speaking at the same meeting, authority board member Paul Jensen, formerly San Rafael’s chief planner, said, “There are a handful of market-rate projects in this county that aren’t moving forward that are fully entitled. They have huge funding gaps.”