Housing II
A second community workshop was held on February 22, 2022, to explore specific sites, housing unit densities, and building heights to accommodate the Town’s regional housing need allocation (RHNA) of 639 units. Community members struggled with the inevitable trade-offs that needed to be made but ultimately recommended strategies that would meet RHNA using the sites presented in the workshop.
Every eight years, the Town of Tiburon, like all local governments in California, must update the chapter of its General Plan known as the Housing Element to accommodate housing needs and address barriers to housing production. For the next Housing Element planning cycle, the Town must ensure its zoning regulations can enable the construction of 639 new homes over the next decade.
In November, the Town held a community workshop that provided an overview of existing housing conditions and needs and began to explore potential sites and strategies for new housing. The workshop presentation, recording, and summary are available on the Housing I workshop page.
The February 22nd workshop built on the input received at the first workshop and explored the potential of specific sites Downtown and elsewhere in the community that address these objectives:
- Provide workforce housing.
- Contribute to the vitality of Downtown.
- Are planned in a way that minimizes traffic impacts by being easily accessed by transit or from Highway 101.
- Provide housing opportunities for senior residents to stay in Tiburon.
- Provide affordable housing opportunities that can be afforded by a diversity of households.
The purpose of the workshop was to select housing opportunity sites and identify unit capacities for each site. We discussed existing zoning and site constraints as well as potential changes to uses, building heights, and residential densities to accommodate more housing. We also explored design techniques to ensure new buildings fit into the existing context.
Potential housing sites included Downtown parcels, the Cove Shopping Center, a vacant portion of the Reed Elementary School site, and the Tiburon Baptist Church property on Greenwood Beach Road.
Following Planning Commission and Town Council review, the Tiburon Baptist Church and Cove Shopping Center sites were removed from the list of potential housing sites. The adopted Housing Element contains Program H-jj, which says the Town will rezone these sites if the property owners indicate interest in redeveloping or adding housing to their sites.
