Report: Marin, North Bay pay more for transportation/housing costs

Marin and other North Bay residents pay a lot for housing and transportation, more so than other regions in the Bay Area, according to a report Wednesday by the Urban Land Institute's Terwilliger Center for Workforce Housing.

[Pulipaca]

This article is just typical of the Independent Urinal. Transportation costs are far less and housing is more in southern Marin. And the Sonoma commute trains will do nothing at all to help anyone in Marin for transportation .
Oh, and WE need to build more affordable housing. WHY ? Marin is built out, has been for years, so the only housing that can be built must be built down in the already overbuilt central urban corridor. The high density housing project in Mill Valley being built down on lower Miller Ave. next to the high school called the Tamalpais Communes is going to be renting out 1600 sq.ft. apartments for a whopping $4000 PER MONTH ! You call that affordable high density shared wall housing ? That is $48,000 per year just to live in an apartment down in the flats on a very busy 4 lane city street near a noisy high school. In order to qualify to rent one of these apartments, they figure that a person should spend one third of their take home income on housing. So a take home income of $144,000 which would be an actual income of $180,000 pre taxed income would necessary to rent a new apartment in Mill Valley down in the flats ! Affordable housing, I Chihuahua.

[kitty]

yeah
another agency shilling for high density low income housing to destroy our way of life
its called the marketplace
we choose to pay more to live here cuz its nicer
if you want to save money you have the options of Richmond/Oakland/Pittsburgh/An tioch
just dont expect them to be as nice
you get what you pay for

[Blueberry]

kitty wrote:

yeah
another agency shilling for high density low income housing to destroy our way of life
its called the marketplace
we choose to pay more to live here cuz its nicer
if you want to save money you have the options of Richmond/Oakland/Pittsburgh/An tioch
just dont expect them to be as nice
you get what you pay for

Of course you don't want anything to pop your perfect Marin bubble, with people who do not meet your socioeconomical standards.

[Rational approach]

First, people have a choice about where they live and where they work. It's sheer folly to expect that all such choices will be equal, or nearly equal, in cost.

Second, this article totally misses the hidden factor: The claims that SMART will (possibly) reduce these "housing/transportation " costs BURIES the fact that SMART will RAISE taxation costs! By shifting costs into the public domain, you don't get rid of them, you just fund more public bureaucrats.

Why people choose to live where they do is a very personal choice. Want to live in the North Bay, have a subsidized commute to SF, and buy a low cost home? Vallejo and its ferry fit your bill just fine.

[Pulipaca]

The joke is that the Tamalpais Communes were touted as affordable high density housing in a mixed use development in a business district. That is the kind of projects that are being ramrodded through these days. So this affordable housing in Mill Valley means that a person must earn $180,000 per year to rent one of the apartments. This is just one of the first projects that they want to pepper the lower Miller Ave. business district with. What will happen is they complete the first project and no one will be able to afford the affordable housing. So the buildings might have some retail tenants on the street level, but the apartments above will sit and rot for a few years like the Millworks in Novato which rents for half the price. Then they will recruit a bunch of Christians from who knows where to move in with HUD section 8 vouchers. Lovely.