Marin supervisors add $5M to workforce housing outlay

Marin County supervisors approved another $4.97 million Tuesday to help ensure that 250 “affordable” residences get built adjacent to San Quentin prison.

“It’s worth noting that your board has previously awarded a number of different funds to this project totaling over $5.3 million,” Leelee Thomas, deputy director of the Marin County Community Development Agency, told supervisors.

Following the meeting, however, Thomas said she had neglected to include a previous $1 million contribution from the county’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund. That means the county has now allocated about $11.2 million to the project, some of it money passed along from the state and federal government.

The project is known as the Village at Oak Hill. Education Housing Partners (EHP), formed in 2004 by Mill Valley-based Thompson Dorfman Partners, plans to construct a 135-apartment building there.

The plan is to reserve 101 of the apartments for educators and 34 for county employees. The residences will be available to people earning between 60% and 120% of area median income.

In a separate but adjacent building planned for the 5-acre parcel, Eden Housing hopes to build 115 residences that will be reserved for people earning between 30% and 60% of area median income.

In Marin, Thomas said, “a household of three with an income of about $141,000 is about 80% of area median. A household of three who earns about $117,000 is considered to be at 60% of the area median income.”

The bulk of Tuesday’s new allocation, $2.97 million, came from the county’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund. It has $14.6 million remaining in it.

The other $2 million was a one-time expenditure for workforce housing included in the county’s 2023-24 budget.

Thomas said the new allocations will make the project more competitive when vying for grants from the state’s Local Housing Trust Fund (LHTF). Last year, both EHP and Eden Housing applied for LHTF grants, but neither was successful.

“They met the basic criteria but didn’t get enough points to get funded,” Thomas said.

In her report to supervisors, Thomas wrote that applicants that can demonstrate either a 3-to-1 or 2-to-1 local funding match receive a higher score.

EHP has submitted a new LHTF application requesting $1.5 million, and Eden Housing has reapplied for a $975,000 LHTF grant.

Thomas said another reason the project failed to receive LHTF grants last year was their environmental review was completed too late.

The state certified the final environmental impact report for the Oak Hill project in July 2023. Because the apartments will be built on state-owned land, all of the entitlements and permitting for the projects, including analysis required under the California Environmental Quality Act, were overseen exclusively by the state’s Department of General Services.

In 2022, Joanna Julian, a project manager at Thompson Dorfman, said EHP expected to complete the environmental review by the first quarter of 2023, which would allow construction of the project to begin by the end of 2023.

No one from Thompson Dorfman Partners or Eden Housing attended the Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday. Dorfman was traveling on vacation and was unavailable for comment.

The developer has previously said that the biggest hurdle EHP faces is financing.

“Due to an increase in interest rates, which have nearly doubled since we initiated the project in 2020,” Dorfman said in August 2023, “it is necessary to identify and secure funding from a variety of sources.”

The total cost for the Village at Oak Hill project has been estimated at between $200 million and $225 million.

The 135-apartment complex will be owned by a joint powers authority that was formed between the county and the Marin County Office of Education. Thomas said part of the funding for the EHP apartment complex will come from about $94 million in bonds to be issued through the joint powers authority.