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Posted inLocal News

High drama over high density: State housing mandate fuels fierce Fairfax recall campaign

by Ruth Dusseault, Bay City News October 12, 2025October 10, 2025

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Two signs, one in favor and one against the recall of Fairfax, Calif., Vice Mayor Stephanie Hellman and Mayor Lisel Blash, stand side-by-side on the corner of Park and Bolinas roads in Fairfax on Wednesday, Sept., 17, 2025. (George Alfaro/Bay City News)

A DEBATE OVER how to meet state mandated housing goals in small-town Fairfax has boiled into a battle for political control.

In a campaign to recall Mayor Lisel Blash and Councilmember Stephanie Hellman in a Nov. 4 special election, local recall proponents have rallied their neighbors against a proposed high-density, high-rise apartment building that would forever change the character of a town with only a few stop lights.

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Tagged: affordable housing, apartments, California Department of Housing and Community Development, Community activism, development, election 2025, emergency preparedness, Fairfax, Fairfax Town Council, Featured, Featured News, fire safety, government, High-density housing, housing, land use, Lisel Blash, Marin County, NIMBY, Political campaigns, politics, recall election, rent control, special election, State housing mandate, Stephanie Hellman, YIMBY, zoning

Ruth Dusseault, Bay City News

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.

More by Ruth Dusseault, Bay City News
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