County Where It Took 50 Years To Approve New Subdivision Bans New Airbnbs

Last week, Marin County, California, passed an emergency 45-day moratorium on new short-term rentals in the western parts of the county to address its pressing housing supply and affordability crises. Officials have expressed the hope that pumping the brakes on new Airbnb listings will preserve some of the area’s limited housing stock for native renters and homebuyers.

“Visitors from around the world enjoy our county’s natural beauty and contribute to our economy,” said Sarah Jones of the Marin County Community Development Agency earlier this month. “But it’s a growing problem that the people who work in West Marin be able to live in West Marin.”

A county report on the moratorium notes that 551 of the 5,250 homes in western Marin County are being used as short-term rentals. The report says this is contributing to a housing shortage and an attendant affordability crisis that’s driven average rents to nearly $3,000 and median home prices to $1.8 million.

The moratorium is intended to buy the county time while it crafts new restrictions on Airbnbs. Limiting the supply of vacation rentals is one way to address a shortage of homes. An alternative would be to just build new homes to meet demand.

But that’s easier said than done in Marin County, where regulatory red tape and legal challenges have kept one proposed 43-unit subdivision in planning hell for nearly 50 years. The long saga behind that project suggests that a world where there’s enough housing for both vacationers and longtime residents in Marin County is possible—if only it didn’t take half a century to approve a new subdivision.

The tangled legal history of the much-delayed project stretches back to the 1970s, when Marin County reduced the number of homes that could be built on a 110-acre site owned by developer The Martha Company from 300 to just 34.

That sparked a federal lawsuit from The Martha Company claiming the downzoning was a regulatory taking. In 1976, it reached a settlement with the county that entitled it to build 43 single-family homes on half the site. The other half would be reserved for publicly accessible open space.

Years of planning and abortive attempts to develop the property followed. By 2005, The Martha Company and the county were back in court, after the latter sued to overturn the 1976 settlement agreement. That effort failed. Another settlement was reached in 2007 once again affirming The Martha Company’s right to build 43 homes on its property.

But victory in federal court only freed up The Martha Company to enter the gauntlet of state-mandated environmental review.

The 1970 California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requires that governments prepare environmental impact reports for projects they have discretion over. That law guarantees citizens the ability to participate and make comments via public hearings on those projects. It also allows them to sue a local government if it approves an environmental impact report they think wasn’t thorough enough.

The law