This rich Bay Area city is fighting a plan for 40 new homes. The developer’s solution: An even bigger project
A view of homes on Belvedere Lagoon from a dock in the Mallard Pointe neighborhood in Belvedere. A developer is proposing a 40-unit housing project, but the city is fighting back.
Ramin Rahimian / Special to The Chronicle
J.K. Dineen, SF Chronicle | January 21, 2024
The owners of a contentious development site in one of the Bay Area’s richest towns have a message for both its opponents and elected officials: Approve our housing project or we’ll use state law to ram through a bigger project that you’ll like a whole lot less.
On Monday, the Belvedere City Council is slated to vote on an appeal of a proposed 40-unit development in the exclusive Marin town. The project, which the Belvedere Planning Commission shot down last fall — the commission determined that the development needed a full environmental study, which could take years to complete — would allow the developer, an affiliate of Thompson Dorfman Partners LLC, to build 40 units on Mallard Pointe, a 2.8-acre parcel that is now home to 22 rental units.
But, in case the Belvedere City Council rules against the developer, Thompson Dorfman filed an alternative application last week that calls for a 70-unit project, a 75% increase from the development that the planning commission turned down.
The 70-unit alternative takes advantage of the “builder’s remedy” clause of the state’s housing accountability act, which allows housing developers to bypass the local land-use approval process in towns that don’t have a compliant “housing element,” the eight-year plan that every California city must submit to the state for approval.
Two houses in the foreground in the existing Mallard Pointe neighborhood that would be replaced as part of new development plans in Belvedere. Ramin Rahimian/Special to The Chronicle