Marin City’s Golden Gate Village, a 296-unit low-income housing community built in 1961, is on schedule for a complete makeover.

The Marin Housing Authority, the county’s public housing agency that owns and operates Golden Gate Village, approved the revitalization at its Tuesday meeting.

The upgrades will include full kitchen and bathroom remodels, new energy-efficient heating and ventilation systems, new plumbing and electrical systems, roof replacements and other sustainability enhancements.

Work on the first 88 units in Phase 1 is slated to begin in January 2026, pending the anticipated award this summer of the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. The project is estimated to cost $266.6 million, with over $100 million sourced from a permanent loan on tax-exempt bonds.

An aerial image of Golden Gate Village in Marin City on Monday, Dec. 31, 1979. The traditional public housing property was built in 1961 to house Marin City workers, many of them African American shipbuilders, after World War II. The property is in line for an estimated $266.6 million revitalization beginning in January 2026. (Marin Housing Authority via Bay City News)

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit is a federal program that holds bipartisan support in Congress. Tuesday’s approvals clear the way for MHA and Burbank Housing, the nonprofit development partner, to submit a LIHTC application this May.

According to the Affordable Housing Tax Credit Coalition, a nonprofit advocate for affordable housing, LIHTC has helped pay for 90% of federally funded affordable housing construction across the country since its creation in 1986 and has financed over 3.8 million affordable homes.

Golden Gate Village was created to house workers — many of them African American shipbuilders — after World War II and is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.