Remote Surveillance Trailer in Sausalito, CA

California is packed with NIMBY local governments that will do seemingly anything to avoid building new housing.

Woodside famously declared itself a mountain lion sanctuary to avoid duplexes. La Cañada Flintridge flirted with bankrupting itself to fight its first multifamily housing project in more than a decade.

But Sausalito is making a convincing case that it deserves the trophy for California’s Biggest Housing Troll.

In 2023, it proposed to meet its share of the state’s housing needs by building homes on sites that were either partially or completely underwater, including a patch of eelgrass whose address was listed as “In Bay.”

Now, the wealthy Marin County enclave is outdoing itself with a borderline Orwellian proposal that would make it all but impossible to build multifamily housing. Here’s what’s happening:

After scrapping its eelgrass ploy, Sausalito raced to pass a hastily amended housing plan by the state’s deadline. The state Department of Housing and Community Development approved the plan in April 2023.

The plan still left a lot to be desired, but at least Sausalito had committed itself on paper to new housing.

But as soon as a developer submitted an application for an actual, real-life project, Sausalito flipped out.

In January 2024, Linda Fotsch, who’s lived in Sausalito for 40 years, proposed transforming a parking lot that she owns at 605-613 Bridgeway into a 47-unit condo building with six low-income units.

The city should have welcomed Fotsch’s application. In its housing plan, Sausalito had identified that property as an “opportunity site” that could accommodate as many as 49 units. Plus, the location — on the city’s main downtown thoroughfare, half a mile from the ferry terminal — was ideal.

Instead, Sausalito began embarking on a mind-numbing journey to stall it. That same month, the city began overhauling its housing plan. In the draft amended plan, published in August 2024, Fotsch was stunned to discover that her parcel had been downzoned to accommodate just 28 units.

Three months later, Sausalito’s community development department sent Fotsch an 18-page letter outlining “inconsistencies” with her project application, which Fotsch had resubmitted in multiple different forms following conversations with the city. While Fotsch and her lawyers appeal the city’s decision, the project remains in limbo.

But the city’s anti-housing crusade didn’t stop there.

Last month, Sausalito staff presented draft rules to mandate that housing developers feed their proposals into a software program that would determine — down to the square centimeter — how much projects obstruct views of “iconic sites” such as the “San Francisco skyline” or the “Pacific Ocean.” Projects would be prohibited from reducing the view of any “iconic site” by more than 5% and from reducing “water views” by more than 10%.

But the software program in question doesn’t actually exist — at least as far as anyone can tell. City representatives didn’t respond to my question as to whether they’d identified one.

The purported goal of this Orwellian algorithm: to create a new “objective design standard” for multifamily housing development in Sausalito. Under state law, local governments can no longer deny or endlessly review projects that comply with these local standards.

“It’s sort of an insane principle, because this ‘objective design standard’ is based on something that doesn’t exist and is impossible to measure until the software does exist,” Rafa Sonnenfeld, senior manager at YIMBY Law, a pro-housing organization that sued Sausalito in 2023 over its housing plan, told me.

But we don’t need to wait for the software to be invented to understand its end goal: to halt multifamily projects in their tracks.

Sausalito is “so afraid of housing that they don’t realize that housing is what really can save them,” Fotsch told me, noting that “an influx of families and people of workforce age coming into the community would be really helpful to the town.”

Over the past few decades, Sausalito’s population has shrunk and grown significantly older — trends that reflect the city’s dwindling housing stock and local laws limiting development, the Chronicle data team reported. (Naturally, Sausalito also blew past its self-imposed November 2024 deadline to put a ballot measure before voters to repeal those laws, which may be necessary for Fotsch’s project to move forward.)

This won’t be sustainable for much longer — but Sausalito is doing everything it can to preserve the status quo.

City leaders deny this is their goal. In an emailed statement, Brandon Phipps, Sausalito’s community and economic development director, told me that Sausalito wants to amend its housing plan to “enhance the city’s ability to meet the future housing needs of Sausalito” while “ensuring and prioritizing the preservation of the city’s historic district … and sustainable waterfront development.” Phipps also said that “city staff do not believe” the proposed objective design standards “would be a constraint on development” and would in fact “provide developers with a streamlined … path to project approval.”

The main question now is whether the state will rubber-stamp these proposals — or hold Sausalito accountable for its shenanigans.

We’ll know more on March 24, when the state housing department is set to complete its review of Sausalito’s amended plan. In a November letter to Phipps, Melinda Coy, the state’s proactive housing accountability chief, raised concerns about the proposal to downzone Fotsch’s parcel and the objective design standards’ potential to inhibit development, among other things.

Coy told me in an emailed statement the state “is actively monitoring the city’s responses in relation to active project proposals” and “is prepared to respond with enforcement actions to the extent that such actions violate state housing law.”

It better be. There’s no excuse for allowing Sausalito to endlessly amend its way out of new housing — especially since Marin County, where Gov. Gavin Newsom’s family recently moved into a $9.1 million home, already enjoys a special carveout in state law that reduces the housing density it has to plan for.

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Sausalito is transparently wasting everyone’s time, energy and money churning out plans, draft amended plans and modified draft amendment plans (yes, this is a real thing the city produced).

Until the state calls Sausalito’s bluff, it will continue to produce endlessly reworked plans that proclaim its commitment to new housing even as it buries new projects in paper before they can be built.

Reach Emily Hoeven: emily.hoeven@sfchronicle.com; X: @emily_hoeven

March 14, 2025