Who is it for?
Marin City affordable housing site sparks fears of gentrification
By Ruth Dusseault • Bay City News
February 24, 2026
In about the same number of days it takes to mail a box of books from coast to coast, a 5-story prefabricated building has risen in Marin City.
The Drake Avenue Apartments sit like a monolith between three Black cultural spaces — Manzanita Recreation Center, George “Rocky” Graham Park and the Village Oduduwa adult living facility.
Now that the 100% affordable housing development at 825 Drake Ave. has become a physical reality, the next questions are these: How affordable is it really? Will it benefit or fragment the historically Black community that gives Marin City its cultural identity?
Estimated rents for two-bedroom units range from $1,088 to $2,176, and less for voucher holders who will pay 30% of the renter’s household income. But many Marin City residents don’t feel the building was made for them.
“I don’t know of anyone in Marin City that could actually afford to move in,” said Juanita Douglas, manager of Village Oduduwa, which neighbors the site. Douglas said the construction has been hard for her older residents, especially the noise.
“I had two (patients) in hospice,” said Douglas. “They literally had to move one out because the nurses couldn’t hear anything. Especially when they were doing the drilling for all of the soldier piles that needed to go in for the retaining wall. They were within inches of the balconies.”
“… Look at Marin City. It’s more affordable than the rest of Marin County. It’s incredibly well located. From my experience, that is exactly the kind of place that gentrifies.”
Sarah Jones, Marin County Community Development Agency
Many in the community consider the building to be an omen, a foothold for gentrification. A local coalition fought the project for years, at one point taking Marin County to court, but it did not make a difference.
“There is that fear of gentrification,” said Sarah Jones, director of the Marin County Community Development Agency. “I don’t think that’s unfounded. Look at Marin City. It’s more affordable than the rest of Marin County. It’s incredibly well located. From my experience, that is exactly the kind of place that gentrifies.”
There is a need for housing in the neighborhood. A lot of older rental buildings in Marin City were built under rent restrictions that are aging out and giving way to market prices.
“Those affordability requirements are now expiring, so the rents, they’re going way up,” said Jones.
According to Jones, there are two layers to the building’s affordability — vouchers and deed restrictions. Of the building’s 42 units, most of the rent paid on 25 units is supplemented with federal vouchers, and the remaining 17 units are restricted to a percentage of the median household income in Marin County.
VOUCHERS CLOSE THE GAP
“The voucher holder only pays no more than 30% of their household income in rent, and then the voucher covers the difference between what the renter can pay and what the landlord would charge for that unit,” said Jones.
It is a sliding scale, based on the income of the renters, with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development making up the difference.
The vouchers are project-based, which means they are tied to the building, not the occupant. They are administered by the Marin Housing Authority, the same agency that currently manages the Golden Gate Village, a post-war public housing complex at the southern end of Drake Avenue that is about to undergo a multi-year phased renovation. MHA also distributes tenant-based vouchers, which are tied to the renter. Tenant-based vouchers are to be used in Marin County, but they can be ported to other counties after the voucher holder has resided in Marin County for at least a year, according to Kathleen Wyatt, MHA director of housing operations.
At the new Drake Avenue building, the vouchers apply to two one-bedroom units and 23 two-bedroom units.
How long will the vouchers last?
“The original housing assistance payments contract between the Marin Housing Authority and the (Drake Avenue) property will be for 15 years, which is renewable when it expires,” said Wyatt. “We can renew for another 15 years if the parties agree.”
Wyatt said the vouchers remain viable for the duration of that contract, and if the property should eventually stop being a voucher-based project, the vouchers will be converted into tenant-based vouchers.
Are the vouchers going to low-income residents in Marin City?
“We are still working on the waiting list and preference for this property,” Wyatt said.
There is a possibility, if the planets align, it can be used for temporary housing while the Golden Gate Village undergoes a phased, multi-year renovation.
“Depending on when 825 Drake is available for occupancy, and whether it has vacancies at the time MHA needs units for temporary relocation of subsequent phases, MHA can look into the possibility of using units there,” she said.
THE AFFORDABILITY THRESHOLD
The remaining 17 units are deed-restricted, often referred to as “affordable.” A deed restriction means that the cost of rent, and a renter’s income level, is restricted by terms placed in the deed of ownership.
The rents are 30% or 60% of the area median income for same-sized households in Marin County. Marin has some of the wealthiest households in the Bay Area, so the term “affordable” is often spoken with an eye roll.
Leelee Thomas, deputy director of the Marin County Community Development Agency, said the county and the developer have not yet worked out the breakdown of rates per unit.
The units will be affordable for a range of households making between 30% ($46,440 for a household of 2) and 60% ($92,880 for a household of 2) of the area median income (which in Marin is $154,800 for a household of 2), according to Thomas.
For a two-bedroom unit, rents would range from $1,088 (30% AMI) to $2,176 (60% AMI), Thomas said.
With so many affordable units, the developer first took advantage of the state bonus density laws, allowing him to build 50% more units than local law would normally allow. That bumped the total size up to 74 units, which would have physically divided the low-rise neighborhood and fragmented the community.
Last year, after the community expressed outrage over the project, the county and developer reached a deal. The 72-unit project was split between two sites. Drake Avenue has 42 units, and the other 32 units will go to another site in Mill Valley.
Thirty-six of the total units will be deed-restricted in perpetuity, and the rest will be restricted for 55 years, Thomas said.
Jones said the county was able to negotiate the deed restrictions because it donated about $1.7 million to the project.
“That does give the county more leverage than we would have had otherwise to require a longer period of affordability and some portion of the units to be affordable in perpetuity,” Jones said.
FROM WARSHIPS TO HOMESTEADS
In the mid-20th century, the land beneath Marin City was owned by the federal government. It was a military industrial complex. San Francisco Bay Area shipbuilders produced almost 45% of all the cargo ships and 20% of warships in the country during World War II. The shipyards in Marin City were filled with an extraordinarily diverse workforce — Black families who had migrated from the South and men and women of every race.
Seven hundred apartments and 800 houses were built to house the workers for about four years, said Felecia Gaston, director of the Marin City Historical and Preservation Society.
“They let those buildings stand for 18 years,” said Gaston. “People were happy to have them, because it was better than what they had down south.”
After the war, white workers moved away, while Black workers were restricted from moving by redlining and covenants. As returning white World War II veterans across the country purchased their first homes with the help of low-cost federal loans, Marin City’s Black workers cooked on smoky kerosene stoves in increasingly dilapidated wooden homes.
In 1955, according to county archives, the Marin Housing Authority purchased 365 acres from the federal government. Four years later, the authority sold 121 acres to the Marin Redevelopment Agency, which rebuilt the entire town in a clean sweep, even burning down some housing to transform it into a planned modern community with public housing. State law dissolved the redevelopment agency in 2012, passing governance to the Marin County Board of Supervisors.
The property at 825 Drake Ave. was acquired in 1986 by the Village Baptist Church of Marin, under the ministry of Rev. Emmanuel Akognon.
In 1999, an electrical fire destroyed the church.
For 27 years, the land has been open space. Seniors living at Village Oduduwa could connect to people passing between George “Rocky” Graham Park and the Manzanita Recreation Center.
The Marin Housing Authority offered to purchase the property eight or 10 years ago, but the community was opposed, said Jones.
In 2020, Akognon, on behalf of Village Baptist Church of Marin, sold 825 Drake Ave to a land acquisition company, Affordable Housing Land Consultants LLC, which then sold it to its current owner, Idaho-based Pacific Companies. Back in Idaho, the developer’s own factory manufactured the prefabricated units that are now stacked along the southern flank of Village Oduduwa.
Jones said the developer did take advantage of a 2018 state law, Senate Bill 35 (recently renewed as Senate Bill 423), which removes approval power from local jurisdictions that have not met their regional housing goals set by the California Department of Housing and Community Development. The Regional Housing Needs Allocation is the number of new housing that the state decides should be built per region. The next RHNA cycle deadline is 2031, and the number of units required this time is much higher.