San Rafael, California is offering up one of its own properties to help close a yawning gap between the affordable homes Marin County's workers need and what the private market can realistically deliver.
The city-owned site at 350 Merrydale Road near Highway 101 is now open for proposals from affordable housing developers, with the city posting an RFP for the parcel on Feb. 19, 2026. The site sits near the Northgate Mall redevelopment corridor, an area San Rafael has long eyed for new housing.
The stakes are significant. California assigned San Rafael a target of roughly 3,220 new housing units to be built between 2023 and 2031, with more than half required to be affordable to lower-income households. That's about four times what the city was expected to produce in the prior planning cycle, part of a statewide push by Governor Newsom to force high-cost, low-production communities to accept more housing. Cities that miss these targets risk losing local zoning control and becoming ineligible for state infrastructure grants.
Marin County, where San Rafael serves as county seat, is among the most expensive places to live in the United States. The median single-family home price tops $1.6 million, and the county has historically built far less housing than its job base requires. In that environment, private developers have little incentive to build affordable units voluntarily. So San Rafael's Community Development Department has been pursuing a public-land strategy: identify city-owned parcels, offer favorable terms to affordable housing developers, and use the land itself as a subsidy.
The approach is encouraged by a 2019 state law requiring local governments to give affordable housing developers first negotiating rights when disposing of surplus public property. A ground lease or land conveyance is the expected structure here, though specific income targets and unit counts haven't been publicly detailed.
San Rafael is more economically diverse than the rest of Marin. Its Canal neighborhood, a predominantly Latino working-class community, has faced severe overcrowding and displacement pressure for years, a reality the city has tried to address through investments in flood resilience and library services for Canal residents.
Proposals from developers are due May 1, 2026. What comes next depends on who responds and what they propose, questions that will go a long way toward determining whether San Rafael can actually hit its state-mandated targets in one of the nation's most resistant housing markets.
