MGM: KZSU Stanford, 90.1 FM. I'm Mark Mollineaux. This is the Henry George Program. A show all about land, policy, and politics. Today on the program, we're going around the Bay Area, going to our neighbors to the north, up in Marin County, and hearing what goes on up there. We have two guests on. We have Jenny Silva from the Marin Environmental Housing Collaborative, and Warren Wells of the Marin County Bicycle Coalition. So we'll hear all about Marin from the housing/transportation angle and much more. Let's just get into it. So, Warren and Jenny, thank you so much for making here today. Jenny Silva: Thanks for having us. Warren Wells: Thanks for having us, Mark. MGM: Yeah. So before we introduce you all: Marin County. I think it's nationally famous. It's one of those things that kind of when people think of San Francisco, it's the neighbors to the north, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what is your main pitch for understanding Marin from an outsider's perspective if you aren't really keyed into all the details? Jenny Silva: I think the most basic thing to think about Marin is it is the home of conservation. It's really where the national conservation movement kicked off, and that has really impacted housing and land use really since the back in the 60s. There was a major development called Marincello that was going to be done with 30,000 units. And very famously, Marin rose up and successfully fought it. And it really has squashed everything since then. In the last five decades, we've been the slowest developing county of all the counties in the Bay Area. So it's a place where people are really proud of their environmentalism and haven't really realized how much it's impacted the community. Warren Wells: And just to add on to that, so I work for the Bicycle Coalition in Marin, and Marin is an interesting study in contrast in that regard. It's actually the home of mountain biking. It's kind of where the sport of mountain biking was invented. And it really is kind of a paradise for riding recreationally, but it is a place where riding for transportation actually, they've made some great investments, but really is still a challenge compared to San Francisco or Berkeley or Davis or other places that have made more focused investments. And it is a place where there's a great deal of very vocal opposition to reconfiguring roads to make them more bicycle or pedestrian friendly. So again, you have this sort of study and contrast between being the home of mountain biking, but also a real challenge toward progressive policies in that regard. MGM: So I think from a perspective, I always had a take that's kind of tongue in cheek, which is, as Jenny was saying, the founding mythology of modern Marin County is Marincello, defeating this plan to develop the headlands and saving nature. And honestly, I say, yeah, that's great. My biggest question, Marin, it's like, okay, so if it's all about preserving nature, why do people live there? Why don't we just make it all preserve. And I guess as people who live in Marin, maybe I'll put you on the spot, say what is the case for people living in Marin? What is the future of Marin where people in nature can coexist instead of it being just nature? Jenny Silva: Well, we are part of one of the largest economies of the world. I don't think we really have a choice to pretend that we're not part of the Bay Area. But I would say that there is not necessarily a conflict between open space and housing. What I always say to people is you can have two of the three things. You can have open space, you can have low density or you can have affordable housing. And Marinites haven't really come to terms that they can't have all three. And I actually think there are a lot of people in Marin who would choose to have the open space and higher density if they can have affordable housing. But right now we just always fight the high density and we fight for open space. So we've ended up with very unaffordable. Warren Wells: Housing and American settlement and Marin is quite old. It was based around rail infrastructure and the ferries and there is a substantial amount of Marin that is pretty relatively densely developed as far as US suburbs go. And I think that the case can be made again, like Jenny was saying, that just densifying those places, you could get a lot more than Marin's quarter million people in it and still keep the rest of the headlands and West Marin looking the same as they do today. Which Jenny and I were talking about this the other day. I think one can struggle with this balance here. I think we need more housing in all of California and Marin in particular. But I don't want to see a bunch of tract housing in West Marin and the Headlands. I mean, it is something I think that open space is something that one can enjoy. I think the Headlands are some of the most beautiful it's like kind of one of the most beautiful places. And incredibly, it's great to have this like, nature access so close to one of the biggest population centers in America, San Francisco. People really can walk or bike or drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and be there in the Headlands in minutes. But I think that Marin shouldn't shirk its share in terms of actual housing production. But there's plenty of places to do it. There's plenty of flat, like one story residential in the rest of the county. Jenny Silva: Well, there's two related facts I always like to share with people. I'm just outside of Sausalito, and Sausalito currently has a population of about 7000 people and it's actually been declining. But in World War II they actually had a population of 30,000 people. So the idea that we are full and we can't add more people is just not historical. The second thing I like to point out is if we had the density of Paris, we'd have almost 100,000 people living in Sausalito. So there's a lot more room before we start invading the open space of Marin. MGM: I think that the second question is as far as okay if you say okay, Marin is part of the Bay Area. It's a real pain that isn't better connected. Warren was saying you can bike and walk if you happen to be right at the headlands, but most don't. So as far as people flowing in and out of the county, there's many tens of thousands. 16,000 people? No, it's 29,000 people work in San Francisco, live in Marin. But of that, 16,000 of those people drive a car alone to get to work. 5000 take a bus, 5000 take ferries, but wide majority are cars. And I think when you talk about people coming from the East Side past San Quentin, coming from Contra Costa, that's pretty much all car traffic. It's a real missed opportunity. We didn't get Bart across the bridge back in the day. As the population grows, is it going to be better connected or how are we going to manage this? Warren Wells: Yeah, it's a great question. The original Bart plan for the Bart District, back in the early, late 50s, early 60s, when the original planning was being done, was to have Bart cross the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin. And as legend has it, it was Marinites that blocked it, which is actually at least per the official history of Bart. Not true. It seems that the Golden Gate Bridge District were the ones who kind of sabotaged that effort. Probably because they didn't want competition for bridge revenue. Because the way the bridge district exists is by having tens of thousands of cars cross it every day. So they funded this additional study that showed that the bridge wouldn't be able to have Bart running on it. And obviously, it's too deep to do another tube under the Golden Gate Strait. That's just a bit of history. I think you're right that the connections are not great. We have ferries from Tiberon, Sauslido and Larksborough, which are great when they're running, but they're not incredibly frequent. There's no rail transit between Marin and the Bay. There was much more frequent commuter bus transit over the Golden Gate Bridge run by the Golden Gate Bridge district. Some of that has commuter bus has been killed by the Pandemic. So many people who were commuting by bus are now working from home several days a week. MGM: Off hand, there's a bridge fare, there's a toll one way, which is pretty reasonable to take the bridge by car. But the cost of the fare for the commuter bus is $16 round trip. Kind of as a baseline. Sure, if it's more expensive, I get why people drive. Warren Wells: Yeah. And it's the same thing for the Richmond SANFL. It's about twice as expensive to take a bus in both directions. As is to drive. There's just this whole one going one direction. And I guess with maybe it's more defensible with the Richmond SANFL because they have two different agencies, but Golden Gate Bridge District runs both the buses that cross it and the tolls, and that's a choice for them to say. As it is, the bus is subsidized by the car traffic. But the degree to which the subsidy that they do that subsidy is up to them. MGM: But what is the future as far as construct? Let's say that you really explode the population in the dense urban centers of Marin. How do you manage people going in and out? Is there going to be a massive infrastructure project? Warren Wells: Well, I think more people go. I mean, I could look this up real quick if we want to. I think more people go into Marin every day or moving into Marin to work than going out. And at least the people who are going into Marin are people who are much less likely to be able to do their work remotely. So there's this inflow outflow. Probably every county has a lot of people coming in and out. I think that we need to have a lot more bus service, certainly over the Richmond Santa Fe Bridge than there is today. I think that with electrification or hydrification of ferry service, we could see a lot more higher frequency ferry service. And then I think part of that is also just densification of the flats near those transit hubs. You look at Larksburg Ferry, no one lives near it. There's a 20 acre parking lot. MGM: I took it once. That's the only ferry I've taken. I took it once just as, like kind of as a goof to say, oh, let's see what this is about. Someone else. We're at Larksburg. It's like, okay, we saw Larksburg big parking lot. Warren Wells: Let's see. Yeah, there's a huge parking lot, and then some apartments kind of passed commercial development, and then really, no one else lives near it. And then, Jenny, you can fill me you can fill in on this, because there was, like, a Larksburg specific plan that got beat back by the city council or people this is like 2015, 2016. There was a plan to densify near there, but it didn't happen. Jenny Silva: Yeah, and I don't know about that plan, but I do know that in the Larksburg housing element that's being reviewed right now, there are plans to build a lot more housing around the ferry terminal, and that is a great opportunity. But as Warren says, a lot of the traffic is coming in to work there, and a lot of the push is to build more affordable housing. And I think most teachers, most bankers, most people that are doing the sort of jobs that you can't afford to live in Marin now, if they had an opportunity, would prefer to do that over commuting from Alameda or Richmond or many of the places where people commute from. MGM: Yeah, I pulled up some I think it's like 14,000 coming from Contrast and then Alameda and there's 16,000 coming down from Sonoma and there's a lot of people going in their way, but I'm remiss let's finally get to who are you folks? So just kind of a brief introduction, also how you got active in it. Let's start with Jenny. Introduce yourself and kind of what got you to kind of be active in the space, I'm sure. Jenny Silva: So I'm Jenny Silva. I'm the board chair of the Marin Environmental Housing Collaborative, which is a group in Marin that advocates for more affordable housing with an environmental and racial justice lens. And I've been involved with the group for a couple of years now. And I really got involved in the space from a lifetime of following housing and seeing the problems, lack of housing causes and then much more actively after I went through a divorce and was really surprised at how someone with a lot of resources could have such a terrible time finding a place to live. And so once some time opened up in my life where I could spend more time advocating, this is what I chose to advocate for. Warren and I met on Twitter, and I think we've come to share a lot of similar ideas about land use, but from different angles. So, Warren, why don't you introduce yourself? Warren Wells: Thanks, Jenny. Yeah. So, I'm Warren Wells. I'm the policy and plan director for the Marin County Bicycle Coalition in my day job, and I also serve on the board of the Marin Environmental Housing Collaborative along with Jenny. So actually, Jenny, maybe I might have sent you an email after one of your after an article you wrote in the IJ, but maybe I DM'd you on Twitter. I work as a professional bike lobbyist. And actually, just full disclosure, I do live in the East Bay. I live in Berkeley and commute to Marin, typically over the Richmond Sanital Bridge one or two days a week, sometimes over the Golden Gate if I'm going to saucely down. So I've worked in bike advocacy for two and a half years after working in private transportation consulting there. Learned a lot, but really want to start doing more advocacy because it matters, as opposed to kind of being a bit more BS in the consulting field and on the housing front. You know, I I've been kind of working as a I don't know if I'm heavily cost burdened right now. My wife wasn't working for a number of months when we had our first baby, so we're definitely cost burdened at that point. Cost burden renter, living in a missing middle home that couldn't be built today. And I guess since I moved to California and started getting plugged into conversations around housing and land use, you can't help but be annoyed at it. And then I read Conor Doherty's book and started following cal YIMBY. And starting to do more volunteer advocacy. And then Jenny and I connected again, I think be an article she wrote and Twitter and had some conversation around what's going on in Marin. And Jenny invited me to join the board of the Environmental Housing Collaborative. MGM: Okay, so you've never been a resident, but you've treated Marin as a place to work and found it a meaningful place to do advocacy for that reason. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Jenny Silva: And I've always believed if you can make change on housing in Marin, you can make it anywhere. So I feel like we're a good test case for making things happen. MGM: Yeah. You could say the population isn't big, but it is an ideological powerhouse of the NIMBY, so perhaps it's important for morale to do work there. Okay, so drilling down into kind of the politics of Marin. Marin has many incorporated cities and towns and a lot of unincorporated areas meaningfully. What is a pecking order? San Rafael is a county seat in the biggest city. Right. But how much is San Rafael, the real core of Marin County, and how much these other areas matter? And what's the kind of, I guess, solar system of different cities and communities? Jenny Silva: I would probably say Marin County. Unincorporated is more of the core of Marin, and you really can't look at any one jurisdiction. I think a lot of what makes Marin Marin is the fact that we've got twelve jurisdictions for 260,000 people. It's a lot of government for not a very big population, and it's made local control very effective for the NIMBYs. Warren Wells: Yeah. Obviously all the land use policy does get decided at a municipal level. And like Jenny was saying, there are eleven incorporated cities and then the county, which range there's kind of the three big ones. There's Santafel, which is 60,000, and you have about 50,000 people in both the city of Nevada and in unincorporated county. And the remaining 100,000 people are kind of distributed between the smaller cities. I do think that people looks to the county, again, like Jenny was saying that the Board of Supervisors only controls land use within unincorporated Marin, but I feel like they loom large. And the Board of Supervisors all have automatic seats on the Transportation Authority of Marin, which is the county transportation agency, which ends up having they'll be the ones who are they'll be writing letters of support or opposition to certain bills, kind of involving land use and transportation as well. So the county supervisors bat above their weight, even though they don't oversee land that has more population. Even though Santa Fe is a larger population. MGM: San Rafael is also it's a city with a coherent shape and everything else unincorporated. It seems wild to read more about it, the fact it has luxury resort towns and then it has what are the insofar as there are marginal communities hanging on in Marin, it seems like the best example is Marin City, which is unincorporated confusingly. Yeah. And it sounds like a lot of the battles have to do with the fact that the unincorporated areas what is stopping them from making the marginal communities a punching bag? And it seems like they kind of are. I don't know. I mean, this is a question. Let's get into housing elements. What is stopping Marin from putting all the housing in kind of the last remaining minority communities and say, okay, we did our job. How is this looking? How is this all developing? And how is housing elements coming around, especially for unincorporated Marin? Jenny Silva: There is a tension there, but the folks in Marin City are also organized. I would say we have probably put more housing in the housing element in Marin City than we should have. But you can't look at the housing element and say that Marin County put everything into Marin City. They did not. Like I said, I would have put less there. MGM: I guess, like Balinas, for example, is way out of the way. Of course, that's a terrible place to put it. Where are the better places? Or I'd say at least balance it? Where would you balance it more? In unincorporated Marin, all of the supervisors. Jenny Silva: Represent an area, and there was a lot of horse trading between what was fair in the different regions. And so when you look at the end result, it ends up being pushed between the different supervisors districts, according to the land that was there, and Marin County, for as much as it fights development, there are a lot of places where housing can be built, especially in unincorporated Marin. And there's a piece of land, St. Vincent's, where the Catholic Charities have been trying to build affordable housing for decades now. We could have easily put the entire Marin County allocation into St. Vincent's. I think it's 680 acres. It's a very large piece of land, and it's just right outside of San Rafael, so there are plenty of places where Marin County can do it. It's spread a bit, I think, mostly for district representation reasons. Warren Wells: Yeah. And actually, I was wondering if we wanted to have a quick gloss on what Marin City is for people who are not sure. MGM: I think the more hand holding, the better. Warren Wells: Jenny, do you want to tackle the history of this or, like, just some kind of, like, high level gloss on history of Marin City? Jenny Silva: Sure. And we should also recognize that the Canal is also a marginalized community within Marin that is very important, and that's in San Rafael and District Two of unincorporated Marin. But Marin City is a historically black area in Marin. It's right outside of Sausalito. It was formed after World War II when the shipyards closed, and many black individuals had migrated from the south to California to work in the shipyards. And after the shipyards closed, there was no place that they could move to. Most of marin had redline deeds. And so they couldn't buy housing. They couldn't rent anywhere, and they were really pushed into Marin City. The World War II housing was torn down and then some affordable housing projects built there. And so there are multi generations families living in Marin City, but it's still a marginalized community and still underresourced. And I should add with it, the history there is really ugly. And Marin has a very liberal reputation. And if you look at Marin City, it really shows more of the truth of the matter. But the Sausalito Marin City School district was desegregated just three years ago. It was the first desegregation order that the state had made in 50 years. And so there is a really ugly history in Marin that is often not recognized. Warren Wells: And Marin City, the built environment in Marin City, you can see it from space. The entirety of Marin City, again, which is not a city, it is just an unincorporated community, is physically separated from the rest of the county by US 101. There is a single road in and out of Marin City that goes through the interchange with 101. And other than that road, there is no way to get there besides a few unpaved fire roads up in the hills behind it. This road that's called Donahue, floods occasionally, sometimes making it nigh impossible to leave the neighborhood. And also, there's just the fact that everyone who lives there is also right next to 101, which is just so their air is polluted by tens of thousands of people commuting down from the rest of Marin and Sonoma into San Francisco every day. MGM: Yeah, I think you talk about the ugly parts of segregation and everything else. I mean, this could become a surprise to many. I think. Marin certainly has this kind of granola, righteous kind of reputation, which I think if you take the good faith of Marin's ideology, you'd say, oh, they didn't realize that the smallest beautiful mindset can still, in the long term, entrench segregation and doing nothing is not enough. But I've been used to years of just seeing a lot of explicit and ugly stuff at a Marin, too. I've been a big fan of the Save Marinwood blog. Lovely guy who he's the guy who posts Ms 13, folks. And just he has a whole section on affirmatively furthering fair housing and why it's evil to attack the suburbs for their choice to be white Dick Spotted Wood, his legendary guy who just writes op eds. They were cheering on the Trump administration because they were looking to end AFFH. And some people were very, very happy to jump into bed saying, oh, I love the MAGA movement if it preserves the Marin suburbs. But is that like a minority among views or how often we get people to say, oh, yeah, I think he's speaking some truth there? Warren Wells: Jay, maybe I'll just defer to you to answer the question I can follow. Jenny Silva: Up if I wanted to hear your thoughts on it. Warren Wells: Yeah, what I'll say is I think that's certainly the minority I mean, Save Marin Wood and the people who are the kind of professional NIMBY's, I think are pretty few and far between in terms of people in Marin. I think that I would agree with 90% on people on, again, like, national politics, stuff around like guns and abortion, but all politics is local, especially land use politics. And I think that there are a lot of people who again, this is a charitable reading, and maybe I'm being too naive, but I think there are a lot of people I don't know, like, talking to my friends and their parents of a certain generation who just kind of, like, have kind of slept, walked through this world and got a house. And now in the 80s, when it was relative, it was still pretty cheap. Like, Marin wasn't incredibly expensive, I should say. Full disclosure, my wife's parents live in Ren, and they have a house that was in Nevada, which was not expensive at the time they bought it, and it's now worth a whole lot more. Everyone is a hero of their own story. No one thinks, oh, my, supporting our City council's zoning regime is furthering segregation elsewhere in the Bay Area. If you start thinking of that, then kind of everything falls down around you. Most people just don't. But I take a positive spin on it. I think people are reading the articles in The New York Times about the history of zoning in California and starting to have some people are starting to have different views. Jenny and I were talking about how there are and more people now showing up to contentious meetings about proposed developments. They're still the people who are coming there and complaining about the shadows and the parking lot, the parking and the traffic. And then there are people who, like, neither of us know who are showing up and saying, I think this should happen. Sounds great, and then sitting back down. And so I think that there are people who are starting to see the bigger picture in this, but I'll pass it over. Jenny Silva: Jenny yeah, and I would agree with that. And there are definitely the dick spots, and there are definitely the people who are taking it as their life work to prevent change from happening and don't care about the segregated outcomes that they're pushing. But when I was on the Sausage Lido Housing Element Advisory Committee, I spoke to just about everybody who wrote in, and the vast majority of people really do want to see more affordable housing. They just haven't gone through the thought process of if we keep the open space and we keep everything low density, there's nowhere to put the affordable housing. And when you talk with them, they realize, oh, it's not so bad to add a few more stories. I would happily do that if that means our teachers can live in the community. So I think it's more, as Warren said, a lot of people kind of sleep walking through it, having not thought their positions out completely and who are really pretty open to it. And when there's a building that is being proposed in San Rafael, that's 160 units, it's eight stories. It's by Marin standards huge, although by apartment standards worldwide, pretty insignificant. But there were a lot of people there that came up and said, we need this. This is important to the community. And it wasn't just housing advocates that showed up to support the project. Warren Wells: And people are starting to realize that, I think, that there are people who are starting to realize that the current arrangement is unsustainable. Businesses can't DAFF their coffee shops and restaurants. So that particular project in Santafel, the Chamber of Commerce came out swinging for it, saying, we need this to happen. Let's get this done. It's in a vacant bank building, kind of in the commercial quarter, and people were saying, hey, if we want our shops to stay open, we need people who live in the area walking in. So that's what gives me hope. MGM: So I guess the other question is, you were sharing an article, new York Review of Books, I believe, was talking about Marin just a few months ago. And the author was kind of keying into the idea, too, which is like, oh, sure, these nimbies are bad, but do you really want to just build new housing which may not be that affordable? Is this really affordable enough? And I mean, this has been the kind of path of people who are kind of just nimbies in the peninsula. I think it's the path everywhere, which is like, oh, you have to stop talking about property values, you have to stop talking about minorities, and you start talking about I don't think it's affordable enough, because it is very hard to say that. Yeah. New housing in a place which is expensive to begin with is ever going to seem affordable on day one or whatever. Is this in fact, taking hold is the main kind of trajectory, as you see elsewhere? And if two, what do you say to that kind of line of argument if you're trying to say it is worth building even if it doesn't seem like it's affordable enough? Jenny Silva: Well, what I say when I hear that argument, and I do hear it often, is we have a shortage of multifamily housing in Marin. And when we look at these new apartments and people say, oh, but it's market rate, it's too expensive, the reality is there is very little multifamily housing in Marin, period. And any of that multifamily housing is going to be more affordable than the equivalent single family home. And so it's worth building. And it might not be affordable to the person who is checking out the groceries at Molly Stones. But it may be affordable to a teacher and their family. And people of Marin. Again, this is slow, and we're in the beginning, but we are starting to see change. But many people are seeing that their kids have no chance of living in Marin unless they hit the lottery or they become a hedge fund manager. And there's a lot of parents that would like to see their kids move back. And so I think it's starting to hit home a little bit that there's no salary in the world that their kids can make where they can come home. Warren Wells: And this education that Chen is talking about, this is what we're trying to do with the organization that we both are on the board of the Marin Environmental Housing Collaborative. We're trying to help people make that connection that they can't have all the open space, affordable housing and low density development. We're trying to make it clear to people, hey, do you know why your kids can't live here? This is why. Or countering fears just around, I think, classist, or charitably or racist, uncharitably fears around low income housing or subsidized housing. We have a piece that we're working on right now which is just like it's just pictures of all a bunch of different subsidized housing developments that have been built in the last couple of decades in Marin that just look like normal housing. And it just kind of just try to get around this fear where it's like people are always upset about a thing that hasn't happened yet. And as soon as it happens, everyone forgets that there was ever a controversy. There are people who are mobilized and professional and so dug in, who are on the other side, who we will never convince. And then there's just this vast, untapped middle of people who are just like who have very kind of like, basic views about housing. Like, look at this new housing. Look at the rent, so expensive. But if you literally again, this is maybe too optimistic view, but in my experience, there are many people, my parents, it took me five minutes to turn them into a YIMBY because they're like, oh, wow, that makes sense. Cool. And I think there are a lot of people I am optimistic about the role that education plays in this. And if you can mobilize just some number of those people to come out and say, hey, this is good, then it's pretty easy to outnumber the hardcore. No, never, folks. MGM: So I suppose, personally, I wouldn't know if I call this pushing back, but I think I become disillusioned to a degree in the peninsula of like, oh, you need to kind of fight for a few more developments, get your little victories. And I think when you're talking about the Palo Alto City Council or something, you realize there's an ameliorative effect of having a few more. But, like, at the drop in the bucket and I think when things are so screwed up for decades and decades, we don't need moderate fixes, we need big fixes. And that's why I've been a lot more kind of we need big state bills. We need kind of top down planning, like the housing elements. And I suppose the big question is that you're really kind of visioning. It's not just, okay, let's fight for a few more developments. But this is like regional planning. Back in 1960, there was like, I think the Census Bureau was making predictions of the next 60 years for different counties. And they expected Marin to go up to from 200,000 to, like, near a million, I think certainly over 700,000. And they just plateaued in 1965. They just never and I suppose the question is, okay, now you're now we're here, we're planning for the future. Should Marin get up to a million? Should it be up to 2 million? I don't know. Is that too crayony or is there a point in kind of imagining what is Marin? 20, 30, 20 40, 20 50? Jenny Silva: Well, I really do think we need to move our mindset from housing is bad to housing is good. And that is what we're working on. I would have a hard time saying, oh, we should be a million people or 2 million people. I think the Bay Area just needs to change its mind that stopping housing is good and allow it to develop where it develops and be a lot more willing to let things happen. But I did want to respond to something that you said. I don't think the education is enough. And what we're doing in terms of trying to change the political will is enough. It does require the state laws that are happening. But I do think this education piece is really important so that we're not riling up the opposition to the state laws so that people can see, oh, yeah, SB 35, that was really scary. But actually it's good because housing is getting built. But we are way past the time for incremental changes. We need big changes in order to solve the housing needs in the Bay Area, in California overall. Take both of them. MGM: I was going to say, I think that's the education, we want to make sure you're not doing a bait and switch of like, oh, don't be afraid of Duplexes. It's like, well, yeah, that's true, but we need a lot more in Duplexes. I mean, earlier you're talking about Paris density, and I think that's being a lot more honest about in this area, what kind of density we're looking at. But I suppose that's the question. I think educating, but also not trying to make an easier pitch, but being honest about the real need. Go ahead, what you were going to say. Warren Wells: Yeah, I was just saying I don't want it to come across that we think that we can just educate our way into any of the housing cris in Ram. That would be ridiculous. And I think that speaking for myself, actually, I don't know Jenny. I don't know the history of what bills Mech has written letters of support for, but I think the state policy that we have is good and still needs to go further. And certainly there's no way we'd be seeing the production that we're seeing currently in Marin without a bunch of the bills that have been written. And so more needs to happen. But we don't we're at the state level. Our organization is not in Sacramento. We can talk to our elected reps, our Senator and assembly member, but we're working at the local level and we're working to try to support the projects that are happening and change the minds of elected so they don't write a letter of opposition to the next SB Nine and said they're neutral or write a letter of support or something. That's the work we can do at the local level. As far as the population of Marin, I kind of suspect that unless laws are written at the state level that apply very differently between counties, whatever law would make Marin go to a million, would make San Francisco go to 4 million. I don't know if there's that much of it. I don't know if there's enough demand to get San Francisco to 4 million. Marin will probably be always less in demand than San Francisco. But again, like Jay was saying, you could very easily double Marin's population. Again, you could double Marin's population by building triplexes in the flats. Jenny Silva: I think you could easily double our population and people would barely even notice. Warren Wells: Yeah, and then there'd be a bunch more businesses that you could walk to. Team would be so much better from the transportation side. And this is why, just to touch on my role in the bike coalition and why I'm interested in the cross pollination of this work, is that you can have a place that is fun to bike in that is not dense. Like Sonoma County or Big Sur. That's all very nice, but a place that is livable to bike in has to be dense. Where I grew up, in the Burbs of Maryland, the grocery store was five and a half miles away. Even with an Ebike, that's too far. No one's going to do that along a collector road. No one will do that where I live in Berkeley. Berkeley bowl is four blocks away. It's really easy to hop on my bike, put the panniers on, drive the store, get $150 worth of groceries and ride home. And that's because of this density. Because there is so much residential density in Berkeley, there should be more, but there's enough to support this. Quite a few grocery stores within a very easy biking distance. And so this is something that I think actually I had a post on Twitter about this maybe a year or so ago, but the bike advocacy community needs to do work in itself to make people realize how much housing plays into bike ability. I feel like YIMBY's get the importance of fostering walking and biking because they understand that cars and dense development don't work together. But so many people come to the bicycle advocacy world. Not everybody by any means, but many people come from the recreational side and don't understand the role that infill housing, especially indoor commercial, which is there to support that housing will have in making a place where living by bike is really easy. MGM: Yeah, I think we'll get back to the kind of local work of Marin. But as far as, like, biking goes, I think I saw some people make some kind of arguments. This is a Matt Berning argument that as far as cities, unfortunately, density isn't enough because the more you build densely right now, it means the more cars you have. Like, Manhattan has more cars per square mile than kind of a sleepy suburb. And I think there's vehicular bicyclists who I think know what they're doing and are fearless. I think kind of too fearless in my mod. I'm a coward. I don't ride if there's a car anywhere near me. I think obviously you're doing stuff to make stuff more safely. But I guess I would just love to see that kind of necessarily go hand in hand, dense, but also completely separated bike trails and everything. Warren Wells: Yeah. And I will say Marin again, Marin is a really distinguished place. And you really can't talk about the county as a whole. You have to talk about, like, pieces of county. There are places in Marin, central Marin, like Cormadera and Mill Valley, where 80 90% of the kids get to middle school walking and biking. There are parts of it that are incredibly walkable and bikable. It's dense, pre war, just post war, single family housing. Or there is a bunch of pre war missing metal in Marin. MGM: I'm guessing, like old rail stations. That was the hub back in the day. Warren Wells: Exactly. Because Marin was built around commuter railroad, electrified commuter railroad. People would hop on the train, take it to Sausito, get on the ferry, go to San Francisco. And so in this central southern Marin, all those railroads returned to bike paths. And it's really easy to get around kind of like off street or on very pleasant neighborhood streets in Cormidira, Mill Valley. And I don't think that I think you could add twice as many people without adding a ton more bike car interaction in some of those places. In Nevada, which is all postwar development, it's the northernmost city in Marin, that's a much more challenging environment. It's like very wide streets, on street parking on every street, multi lane roads, really very little bike infrastructure. That is a place where if you added a bunch of density, they probably would be adding a bunch of cars. That's kind of the challenge. MGM: Of like, where do we focus having that? I don't know what the I don't see many kind of visions of fixing postwar developments that seem like, oh, yeah, that's going to work. Because honestly, it just seems so hard. Warren Wells: Yeah, it is hard, I guess, just to be, again, maybe too much of an optimist. You look at Davis, what they did in the 70s was start to just build a bunch of side paths. And this is actually Davis is like the origin story of the Vehicular cyclists because they didn't want to be forced off the road because they thought, oh, we'll be going too slow on these side paths above the curb. So let's fight that and stick on the road where we belong. And so kind of where Davis? zigged like the rest of California, zagged and then we see the results. Davis has all these separated bike paths that are that like the the roads might be wide, but if you have a place to bike above the curb next to the road, people will do it and you see just massive bike share in Davis compared to the rest of California. MGM: That's fascinating. Jenny Silva: I do want to make a plug because various cities have done it. And I know Rotterdam is very famous that they were completely car dependent and they've pretty much kicked the cars out. But closer to home, Seattle, I saw an incredible stat that they grew their population 20% and traffic went down largely because of the bike commuting that they put in place and some transit. Warren Wells: A lot of that service. Jenny Silva: Yeah, but it can be done. And I think in Marin, there's just so much room to improve the bike infrastructure. I'm in Sausalito and I walk down bridgeway all the time and I'm like, this could be so much better. It could be so much better and so much safer if we took some of that car space away and converted it to bike space and reduced the speed. Nobody needs to drive 45 miles an hour down the street in Sausalito, but they do. MGM: I don't have a whole lot of reference for Nevada. Is Nevada like cul de sac land up there? Warren Wells: Not quite. It's kind of half in habit. It's actually fairly gridded. But again, all the collector streets are like four lanes with a median. And on street parking on both sides, it's larger lots, like probably like maybe 10,000 foot lots or something like that. 10,000 square foot lots. It's not like total suburb. Cul de sac bill, but it's like just a step more urban than that. MGM: I don't know if anybody's ever done it, but it feels like there's obvious ways to fix cul de sacs through pedestrian walkthroughs and bike bike throughs I don't know. Has it ever been done at scale? Warren Wells: Because it seems not that I know of. And the interesting thing with Nevada, again, you have these challenges, these sort of conflicting challenges. Challenges and opportunities. Nevada has the right of way. The public rights of way are so wide you could just do a protected bike lane on every street in Nevada and all of a sudden it'd be just much more bikeable. But instead they choose on street parking on every street in Nevada. And so that's just like a question of political will and money. They're running a deficit every year because problems that are the case across California is prop. 13 years have these broke cities with wealthy people, but the cities themselves are broke. But that's my job is to try to convince people to recommend the members of the public and the councils that govern the cities that a better allocation of space would be one that actually lets people have choices. Other than driving everywhere, which today, driving everywhere in Nevada is the obvious choice because doing anything else again, I speak as someone who rides a ton. I don't like riding on a busy road with no bike lanes like no one wants to. MGM: Okay, enough about bikes for the moment. Let's go back to housing. So your orgs, have you been active on the ground as far as housing elements and other work? As far as that goes and if so, yeah, just kind of get into kind of what that looks like, the work you've been doing. Jenny Silva: Sure. We've reviewed every Moran jurisdiction housing element and provided comments to the jurisdictions themselves and to HCD and we're really pushing that they try harder to get housing built. So we've commented on the sites when we have specific site knowledge and we've commented a lot on the policies also and to upzone more broadly and to just allow more housing to be built. I really have an issue with the general strategy of the housing element, which seems to be to pick specific sites and just upzone those and try to reach your arena numbers that way. I would really like to see the state push that cities up zone more broadly. There's no reason that 80% of the residential land in Marin should be single family homes. MGM: Yeah, I mean, it seems like at least the cities I paid the most attention to their housing element site inventory, it is very much of where can we scrape together sites so we don't have to touch residential? And especially if you're talking about a place that does have obvious place of residential, which is around like transit hubs, they will do anything, at least a lot of places out there, they'll do anything to avoid upzoning single family homes near a transit center and boy, and they'll say, oh, let's tear down this community center. Let's tear down all these supermarkets and stuff people need, because it's not good. And I suppose there's an answer for this. HCD should flunk them. I think they should. And the question is, are they, I guess how far are you with housing elements up in Marin? Are you up in the flunking stage. Has anyone flunked? Jenny Silva: Well, so far the only housing element that's been certified is Sausalito, which is a whole nother story on its own. I would say all of us that have been watching it have been very surprised that that was the first one that HCD passed. The rest of them are they flunking them. HCDS required them all to go through other rounds. There are a few housing elements that are close. San Rafael, I think, is very close. Marin county is very close. Corda madeira, I believe, is close. And I think those well, Sam Rafell and Cordo Madeira specifically, I think, had pretty decent housing elements. The other ones are all at various stages. Fairfax just submitted their first draft to HCD earlier this month. MGM: So talk more about the SAUS lido. Jenny Silva: One, the sauce lido one. That was really a travesty in my mind, and I'm still surprised that HCD approved it. It was not a good site inventory and it wasn't a good site inventory, and the process was a joke. The aspect that Sausalito is most famous for is the underwater sites that they had on the site inventory. HCD responded that those sites weren't necessary to have a passable housing element. The reality is there was very little buffer without those sites. And even without that, an election is required for half of the sites that are on that housing element. And Sausalito really hasn't put in a decent alternative if the election doesn't pass. And that, to us, was the most fundamental issue. If the Sausalito residents don't believe there's any consequence, if they don't pass this ordinance that allows the housing to be built, they're going to turn it down and the housing won't get built. So we're really, really disappointed that HCD approved that. MGM: Yeah, and I think we talk about surprise that HCD doesn't approve. It makes it like HD is a monolith. I mean, I've been kind of hearing whispers and stuff like how this works behind the scenes and it sounds like they're definitely it's a house divided. They have people over there who really are like housing cops in the good sense. They really want to bust heads of bad cities. And some people, you know, are either very complicit or just don't care, incompetent or whatever. So it's a luck of the draw of what kind of folks you get on the case, which is, yeah, you'd hope there'd be a rubric, it'd be like a lot less discretion, but unfortunately, no. Warren Wells: Yeah, because each city just gets assigned a reviewer, I guess. Is that your understanding? This is my understanding. Sounds like one guy, and they might be either more stringent or less. Jenny Silva: So, yeah, that is the case. But I will say the Sausalito reviewer has been a lot tougher on some of the other Marin jurisdictions. MGM: Overall to me. I mean, it's one of the first places when I first visited California, I saw as part of just like tourist stuff. We're going to school here. But it seems like a theme park more than like a real city. It's just tiny. I don't know, I suppose you can always throw more stuff. It doesn't seem like a real place. It seems more of just a tourist hub. Jenny Silva: There are people that live there. Warren Wells: It's like 8000 people or something. There are small cities. Well, yeah, it wasn't always a small city. They had this time during World War II. I don't know. There are people who live there. I know a bunch of people live there. Jay lives there. It is certainly a place that it is a tourist hub. It's a place where people go to. It's the place where people visit in Marin if they're going to one city. MGM: Right. I guess to me the future should be either it becomes a real city and you build high rises, you build a ton of stuff in Oslido or it becomes governed by the Fisherman's Wharf Authority and it's just like they take it over as a little theme park or something. The fact is, like, it's technically a city, but it isn't. This is kind of goofy. Jenny Silva: It is interesting because if you attend the city council meetings in Sausalito, there are a lot of residents that are really upset that there are not more businesses and services in Sausalito that are serving the Sausalito community. But if you look at it, on any given day, there's probably twice as many tourists as there are residents there. So of course the businesses are going to cater to the tourists. MGM: Sure. Jenny Silva: So I keep saying, if we want businesses to cater to the residents, we need more residents. We should just build. MGM: Yeah. Outmatch them in numbers. It's a battle. Talk more about affirmatively furthering fair housing and the housing elements and what this means and also how it has an opportunity for tenant protections and antidisplacement efforts as the plans are developed and how that's been working out in practice. Jenny Silva: Well, I'll start with the second one first, which is the tenant protections. And I will say MEC, along with several other of the Marin nonprofits have been very active in the housing element process, ensuring that tenant protections are being put in place. And that is a really important issue for Marin right now. There have been several cases recently where institutional investors have come in and bought apartment buildings and increased rents to the maximum level. We've heard that we are a target because we do not have protections in place. So we are pushing that very heavily right now. In terms of the affirmatively furthering fair housing, moran is kind of weird because we've got so many jurisdictions and when you want to talk about affirmatively furthering fair housing in Tiberon or Belvedere, the number one thing you can do is just allow housing to be built. It really doesn't matter what side of town it's put on. And I think that's the case with Sausalito too. We just need more housing. That's going to be the number one thing that we can do to affirmatively further fair housing. Warren Wells: Because in Miranda, it's not like this kind of setting aside like unincorporated county and San Rafao. The cities themselves are not within the city. The city is not segregated. It is the city's existence kind of like separate from the rest of the bay. That is that segregation within an unincorporated county. And Sandra Fowl, which Jenny touched on earlier, sandra Foul is home to a neighborhood called the Canal, another low income neighborhood that is also remarkably cut off from the rest of Marin, again, by this time by the 580 freeway and the eponymous waterway. That the sanitary canal in those cities. You do have in those two jurisdictions, you do have this question of like, well, where do we cite the housing but to everywhere else, like Tiberan or Belvedere? It's just like, you just got to have more housing here. MGM: Yeah, but I was thinking when I was talking about Marin City, it's like, oh, they're piling on the housing there. It makes it sound like housing is scary and bad. And I do think if you're putting all your pressure on just the most marginal communities, I think that's a gambit to raise land values in a place that is going to be bad. I mean, that's authentically what the gentrification looks like when people just get outpaced by the land values. But one, it's a matter of having better balance. I think there is certainly no harm in building as much you can in the most rich areas on down even basically have the cut off median income. Have they cut off 30% and above? I mean, I think as long as you're not exclusively on the bottom end, it's pretty safe. But on top of it, sure throw all the tenant protections out of displacement on top of it too. And we're getting the state level. I guess the question is at the local level, what is that looking like for tenant protections? Is this going to outpace what you're getting? AB 1482? Jenny Silva: It's really interesting. Fairfax actually recently implemented the most stringent tenant protections in the state, and I think everybody involved in the passage of it would say it went a bit too far. And because of that, the landlords have really gotten traction and riling up a lot of fear about it. And at this point, it's really getting a bit crazy. There appears to be quite a bit of institutional money that's going in to fight the tenant protections there. And Fairfax is another tiny town, kind of similar to Sausalito. I think it's 7000, 8000 people. And so you would think institutional money could care less if there was tenant protections in Fairfax. But what we're hearing is that they see that as a toehold and they don't want it to take form. There are apparently all sorts of TV ads playing in Fairfax against it, mailers going out to all the residents, a lot of misleading information that's happening in an attempt to turn it over. And it's almost certainly going to be on the ballot now because they've collected enough signatures. So people are really watching it very closely, not just in Fairfax, but in the rest of Morin. MGM: Well, when you say it across the line and upset the landlords, I always kind of treat like costa Hawkins is a pretty strong guardrail. It's hard to go too far as far as making them inordinately upset insofar as there's limits. I guess the question is, what did they do that seemed to really trigger. Jenny Silva: I think there are two big issues and one much more clear cut than the other. But the tenant protections, which is both rent stabilization and eviction protections, apply to if you rent a room in your house and if you rent an adu. And so if you let somebody rent a room in your house and you're having a problem with them, you don't want to be stuck living with them for the rest of your life. And that's something that's really been used to rile people up. And same with adu. To a certain extent, I feel a little better about more rent stabilization in the adu, but if you're renting out an adu in your backyard and your tenant is a real problem, and blasting music and not being a good neighbor, you shouldn't be forced to live with somebody on your property. MGM: Yeah, just cause is just cause. But I understand when it's personal, people get a bit more timid. But I mean, I will say it is kind of interesting when people talk about mom and pop landlords, it usually means like, oh, anyone under 15 units or something. It's like there are real mom and pops who are the people who are renting a room out. And honestly, there's a lot of dead weight insofar as there's a lot of empty bedrooms that could be rented out. And as far as it goes, we need a ton more institutional big real apartments with real tenant protections, I think kind of bespoke renting rooms inside of single family homes and everything else. It's like, I could take her. That isn't my biggest fight for tenant protection. So I think there needs to be some sort of guardrails for everybody, including people who aren't rooms, but they aren't the same as institutional people with capacity. And I think it's difficult to thread that needle. Warren Wells: Yeah, and it seems as though, like, Jay was saying that feel how we feel, like morally, at least from a political standpoint, the Fairfax City Council, town council seems to have gone farther than they could or than they maybe should have. And there's there's a big backlash and it's gonna probably get repealed and like, who knows what will happen to the people on council. MGM: But it sounds like this isn't like. The thing. A CAA mobilized. It sounds like this is a real kind of grassroots like mom and pop landlords, right? Jenny Silva: No, this is the thing that I have heard and you can't yet access where the money is coming from, that there is a very strong belief that there is institutional money that is going into fighting this. And while there are a lot of mom and pop landlords in Fairfax, they aren't all mom and pop landlords. And there have been institutional buyers for several complexes in Marin and their fear is if they don't overturn it in Fairfax, it will spread to the rest of Marin. What they are pushing for is not just the repeal of this ordinance that was passed, they are pushing that all the tenant protections beyond the state level be repealed, which includes tenant protections that Fairfax already had greater than the state level before this was passed. So they're demanding that Fairfax go back further and reduce what they had in place. Warren Wells: I think that something that people don't appreciate really, when they think about Marin is like I was trying to find an old tweet where I posted this, but there is a substantial amount of multifamily housing in Marin. I think people think of Marino birthplace of conservation. It's all single family. No, because so much development happened before the nothing has happened since the 70s. There's actually a substantial amount of multifamily. Like several jurisdictions, like the city of Larksburg is majority renter. The city of San Rafael is like 48, 52, just minority, barely minority renter. So I think that to Jenny's point, I don't remember what the numbers are in Fairfax, but something like 40, 60 renter homeowner. And there are a number of fairly large buildings in Fairfax and I think that them. The second thing, I think that people outside who are paying attention to Marin can be excused for not knowing that Marin is kind of like weirdly right now. A couple of cities in Marin are weirdly at the leading edge of tenant protections. And I think that folks, some people at the state level are noticing that at least from the realtors association, that's interesting. MGM: I guess I just consider the anti tenant protection places in other cities to be really clueless. In places like the Peninsula I've seen a lot of times they just send a CAA person there to the apartments association landlords lobby, but they'll send one person who's like, oh, this is a bad idea, you're going to stop the incentives to build housing. It's like you're not the people fighting for housing and the people in city council don't really care either. But to actually find a real wedge issue locally, which is the kind of the mom and pop renting rooms and ADUs and if they are able to exploit that wedge issue to peel back a lot of protections, that's actually the first competent thing I've seen from them politically in a while. So I guess I didn't see that coming because they seem pretty incompetent, but that's pretty scary and I need to keep better tabs of this stuff. Jenny Silva: Yeah, I was pretty surprised when I saw the extent of what was happening and the amount of resources that was behind the effort. MGM: Yeah. No, I'll fess up. I've been ignoring essentially everything in Marin local news for a while. So I think it's egg of my face. Jenny Silva: I think that's pretty typical. Warren Wells: Well, because it doesn't get coverage unless you're reading the Marin IJ, it doesn't really get coverage elsewhere. Like, I haven't seen an article in the Chronicle about Fairfax, have you, Jenny? I feel like we would know well. Jenny Silva: And it's so small. I think people just think, oh, it doesn't matter, it's inconsequential. And in this case, I don't think that it is inconsequential. Warren Wells: And there are just to kind of like to broaden it, there are also rent control fights happening in the city of Larksborough. There was a big council meeting about kind of like again where to set they're trying to set a lower feeling below 1482. There's been a lot of conflict in the council there about what number you set that at. So again, I think that people don't know that rent control is kind of such a hot issue in Marin in a way that I don't know if it is in other cities in California at the moment. MGM: It flares up. I think you need a lot of local mobilization and I think good on folks if they can get that energy a lot of places it's very hard to mobilize folks and I suppose my general frame reference is the more kind of suburban and kind of out of the way and expensive tenants get demobilized. So it's surprising to see it kind of happen. Little hotbeds. Warren Wells: And Jenny, do you know who is it who has been doing all the rent control organizing? Because I know that there was like they have really been like this is like last year they were getting like hundreds of people to call into the Fairfax and San Selmo City Council just asking them to agendize it. And that's kind of where this came from, right? Jenny Silva: Yeah. And I don't know all the details on the politics, but I do know that the DSA has been involved in organizing people. I know Legal Aid and Canal Alliance have been very involved in this. But it's funny when you talk about the organizing. I have a friend whose daughter works at Trader Joe's after school and somebody got all the Trader Joe's employees that are renting to show up. And I thought that was brilliant. MGM: It's hard to mobilize people to residents, but at their workplace workplaces are famously an easier place to mobilize people than at their homes. Warren Wells: And again, just kind of going back to what I was saying earlier because there is this, I think, larger share of renters in many towns or cities in Marin than people realize. There is actually a fairly there's a decent audience for organizing around rent control. MGM: Yeah, it's interesting. Warren Wells: Unlike some suburb where everyone owns their homes. What's rent control? What's rent right. MGM: No, absolutely. Yeah. We've been going a bit over a bit long here, but I think just wrapping up any other kind of pants in the stove that you want to make sure we cover before we wrap up here. Jenny Silva: I guess the point that I always like to make and that I like people to walk away with, marin is just an incredibly beautiful place and you can't be here and not be blown away by the physical beauty, but as you go around, the built environment really stinks. It is not attractive. We have a lot of really unattractive commercial strips and strip malls. MGM: I do love that one A and W you have up there. That's a nice A and W on the highway. Jenny Silva: Yeah. There's a real opportunity to make it so much better than it is today. Warren Wells: Yeah, and I love that Jenny, and kind of like touching on that. I think this is the place where bike advocates and housing advocates should do their epic handshake, is on parking reform and also beautification advocates because so much of a remarkable amount of Marin is just kind of paved surface parking. Like you walk around downtown Santa Fe, how is there so much parking here? And so that's something that we're trying to I think there's a lot of room to do work on and education on because people are so uneducated on the cost impacts of parking, the environmental impacts of parking and the opportunity cost of having so much of our city be devoted surface parking. And so actually, a post I'm working on for MEC about and I'm going to cross run with the bike coalition just to try to do more education about how when we do infill both housing and commercial, we make our cities prettier and we give space for more people to live here and more space for things for their things to do. MGM: It's never a bad time to just go to the next tier of stuff and maximum parking laws everywhere. It's a bit pie in the sky. It's not unserious in my mind and. Warren Wells: It'S interesting to touch on that. So there is a big master plan development happening in Santafel right now at the Northgate Mall. It's like a mostly morabund mall, kind of over the hill just north of downtown Santervel. The long term plan for it is like 2100 units. They're tearing down a bunch of these old commercial buildings like the Macy's and putting in housing there. That said, it is right next to the Smart station. Smart is the commuter rail line that goes from the Sonoma Marin commuter rail line. So it's in the catchment area for AB 2011. So in theory, they actually are required to provide no parking there and I've had conversations with the developer because we're pushing for some bike improvements there. And he was entirely unmoved by AB 2011, this bespeaks the need for parking maximum. I was like, hey, they're providing thousands of parking spaces. They're actually adding parking because they're structuring a bunch of the parking. So there's going to be more parking. There more spaces there in the future than there are today, even though it'll be a bunch of housing. And I said, hey, maybe you don't provide so much parking. He's like, this is the suburbs. Everyone's going to drive. We have to have parking. We can't sell it. MGM: Otherwise, it makes sense. No one ever got fired from putting too many parking spaces. And that's the problem. That's why you need policy. Warren Wells: And they'll just charge a little bit more for the units, and everybody walks away winning except for the people who want to live there. MGM: Yeah, you need real weirdos, courageous folks, or you need policy. And I vote for Policy. Warren Wells: Yeah, 100%. MGM: Well, one final question. Is scaling up ferries the future of Marin? There are ferries that work at real capacity. Look at the Staten Island Ferry. Look at Hong Kong. There's ferries that run a ton of stuff. Could you add more, or is it just too perilous or like long of a voyage or whatever? Jenny Silva: There used to be two ferry terminals in Sausalito, and now there's only one. Seems to me like you could have a lot more going on. You've probably looked at it more than I have, though. Warren Wells: I don't want to get out over my skis. MGM: I'm just kind of curious. Just like imagining Star Trek. Future Marin. Warren Wells: Yeah. But then this is kind of like still thinking about Marin as a bedroom community for San Francisco, which I hope we start to move past. Like, we should have more jobs in Marin and there should be more housing in San Francisco. Can choose where they want to live, but I don't think we should be just thinking about, oh, we should be facilitating this kind of just as mono directional commute. Obviously, ferry service is really great as, like, a regional transportation system because the water is there and it would be hard to build another train line over the Golden Gate Bridge. As someone who doesn't own a car, I really look forward to a future where I hope for a future where ferries are more frequent than every hour and a half because it'd be much easier to get around the bay. Jenny Silva: Yeah, my husband and I actually took the ferry to dinner in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, and we realized that the last ferry back was at 730 or something like that. So it was totally useless as a mode of transportation. We had to Uber home, which seemed a little beside the point. MGM: Yikes. But with that said note, I think let's wrap up here. It's been a pleasure to talk and yeah. Thanks for dime. Warren Wells: Here, Mark. Jenny Silva: Thank you. Warren Wells: Yeah. Thanks so much having us, Mark. It was a pleasure. MGM: Perfect. We have been talking to Jenny Silva, Warren Wells, all about Marin County. You can hear this episode and all previous episodes of this radio program at the website seethecat.org This is a presentation of KZSU Stanford.