Send Letter to Regional Government Regarding Housing Mandates - YES

I'll be the first to admit that wealthy Bay Area cities need to provide more housing—but we have to do it intelligently. With new reports that the regional government authority, ABAG, could order Corte Madera to produce more than 700 new units of housing in the coming years, the questions of where those units will go and where that number came from are important.

I signed a letter to ABAG expressing our concern with the formula they use to determine each city's housing quotas, which is based largely on a given city's geographical area. The problem is that formula does not take into account what portion of a city's area is located in a disaster zone. For Corte Madera, where the vast majority of our community lies in either a flood or fire zone, the new mandate amounts to essentially forcing us to build new—and often low-income—housing in disaster zones. This is both grossly irresponsible, as well as contrary to the values of equity, which require us to end the centuries-old practice of building affordable housing in the most vulnerable and unsafe places.