A San Francisco developer has notified Sausalito it intends to build a 294-apartment development in the Marinship district.
The 3-acre site at 1 Harbor Drive is home to an office building that would be redeveloped into housing. It is across from Mollie Stone’s Market and the post office and borders Bridgeway to the west and ICB Artists to the east.
Tenants of the office building, which has a 70% occupancy rate, would be consolidated at 3 Harbor Drive, which would be renovated, according to the developer, Bayspring Development Partners.
The proposed six-story apartment complex would be the city’s largest housing development in decades.
Bayspring said that under Measure J, the project is eligible for ministerial approval and is not subject to discretionary or environmental review.
Last November, Sausalito voters overwhelmingly passed Measure J, rezoning the site to comply with the state’s mandate to plan for 724 additional dwellings by 2031. The city is currently seeking development partners at two nearby city-owned sites for 81 affordable dwellings near Martin Luther King Jr. Park.
“What we just filed basically locks us into the current regulations that are in place,” said developer Bryce Holman, whose company acquired the site after the November vote. “This is a bookmark or a placeholder for what we’re going to do.”
“Next for us, which we’re working on now, is designing the building to a point where we can put in a full entitlement application,” he said. “That’s what the planning department will review and we’ll work together on next steps in terms of the exact process.”
City officials were surprised by the announcement.
“As with any other development application, the first step is for a careful review by staff to determine whether the application is consistent with our zoning codes and the state law, and that could require quite a bit of in-depth review,” Mayor Steven Woodside said Tuesday.
“We take our obligations very seriously and do our best to comply with the state laws, at the same time protecting what’s important to people who live and work here,” he said.
The cautious comments reflect the developers’ goal to bypass planning commission and state environmental review, and use the state density bonus law that doubles the number of residences if 20% are allocated to very-low-income and low-income households.
Bayspring’s pre-application filed with the city references 46 affordable dwellings for very-low-income, low-income and moderate-income households, which is less than 20% of the proposed 294 apartments.
“There’s a number of moving parts with that,” Holman said, when asked about the threshold.
“There are certain levels that you hit to have a ministerial by-right process,” he said. “We’re working through where those exactly will land with the planning department, and we will be hitting those numbers in order to secure a ministerial review.”
Sausalito has had several large proposed housing developments in recent years that got bogged down.
The most high-profile example is a proposal for 59 condominiums in a nine-story complex along the waterfront just south of the downtown tourist hub.
City officials do not face a timetable to respond to Bayspring’s preliminary filing, both Woodside and Holman said.
“Once we put in our application, which will probably be in the next month or so … there will be different timelines,” Holman said.
“If there are truly affordable units added, then the builder is entitled to some degree of bonus,” Woodside said. “That’s the state law. It’s pretty clear.”