If you ask Fairfax Mayor Lisel Blash, she doesn't love the idea of a 243-unit apartment building coming to her small Marin County town either. But the state has made such developments inevitabilities after decades of NIMBYism in places like Fairfax.
The 7,600-person town of Fairfax is in the midst of a recall fight which could result in the removal next month of Mayor Lisel Blash and Deputy Mayor Stephanie Hellman. And much like the issue of the Great Highway closure coupled with upzoning proposals drove the effort to recall SF Supervisor Joel Engardio, Fairfax residents are steaming mad about an outsized apartment building that a Florida developer is forcing down their throats.
As the Chronicle reports, under the state's density-bonus rules, the proposed development on School Street grew to six stories and 243 units — and many agree that the building would be an eyesore and wildly out of scale with the small downtown.
Blash says her hands are tied, and if the city were to try to stop this housing from being built, it could — much as SF Mayor Daniel Lurie has recently warned here — trigger a "builder's remedy" situation where the state allows developers to run rampant and built even more unsightly things in Fairfax.
But that hasn't stopped recall proponents from putting the blame at her feet, and believing that by removing her from office, they can stop this development and fight the state's housing mandates in some way.
Ironically, as the Chronicle notes, the School Street site where this project is proposed — technically known as 95 Broadway — was originally going to be home to a 40-unit development, under an informal proposal a decade ago, but that proposal was killed by a local referendum that prevented the rezoning of multiple sites in town for housing.
Now that voters have approved a number of laws empowering the state to mandate more housing, Fairfax is one of dozens of bedroom communities around the Bay that have been faced with sometimes onerous requirements to approve new developments, regardless of size.
San Francisco's Housing Element has us on the hook to see 82,000 new housing units approved by 2031, a number that will be nigh impossible to reach unless a significant building boom takes off in the next few years. And the defining fight of Lurie's tenure as mayor may well end up being his "family zoning" upzoning plan, which would bring higher building heights and denser housing to the practically suburban west side of the city, which is dominated by single-family homes built 80 and 90 years ago.
And if the city fails to meet its housing goals, the "builder's remedy" threat still looms.
In Fairfax, the recall fight has turned bitter, and in some cases threatening, and Blash says it feels like a "mircocosm" of the political ugliness we're seeing on the national level, in what was once a quaint and pleasant liberal town.
"I understand people are upset," Blash tells the Chronicle. “We could all be upset about this and see what we can do — or keep tearing each other apart."
She adds, "People say the building will ruin the small-town feeling. But, unfortunately, that’s already happening."
Early voting has already begun in the Fairfax special election, which will happen on November 4. And Blash and her deputy, Hellman, both tell the Chronicle that even if they survive the recall, they do not plan to seek re-election to the city council.
