Golis: Weary commuters know about housing and highways

Once upon a time, the road that crosses the wetlands bordering San Pablo Bay wasn't considered a major link in the Bay Area system of roads and highways.

Most North Bay traffic moved north and south, not east and west - a travel pattern that obligated state and local agencies to keep their focus on improving Highway 101.

But times change, even if noncommuters are slow to catch up with those changes.

Today, thousands of commuters use Highway 37 to travel to jobs in Marin and Sonoma counties. As many as 45,000 vehicles pass this way each day, and the number is projected to go higher.

And when Highway 37 is broken, life gets complicated - as we learned last week when flooding closed one lane of the highway.

The cost of housing is responsible for transforming this former transportation backwater (sorry) into a major commuter route. No longer able to afford the cost of shelter in Marin and Sonoma counties, workers looked to housing in counties to the east - even when it meant traveling on roads not designed to handle all those commuters.

More than 24,000 people now commute daily from Contra Costa, Solano, Alameda and Napa counties to jobs in the North Bay, according to an analysis produced by the Sonoma County Transportation Authority. As many Marin workers now commute from points east as commute from Sonoma County, a change few would have imagined 20 years ago.

Over the years, Marin County has become the poster child among communities that resisted new home construction, basing its opposition on the notion that new housing would lead to increased traffic congestion.

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Today, more than 40,000 people commute into Marin from neighboring counties to the north, east and south. The congestion and greenhouse gases they generate won't be mistaken for the results of a farsighted approach to environmental protection.

A 2012 study commissioned by the Marin Community Foundation noted: “Though Marin's planners have targeted employment in areas such as biotechnology and software as a way to stimulate the recovery and the county's long-term growth, the lion's share of job growth that has occurred over the last two decades in Marin is overwhelmingly at the other end of the scale: low-wage service employment.”

Meanwhile, the median price of a home in Marin County now exceeds $1 million.

Activists in Marin County would say they were fighting sprawl development, but the result of the county's anti-housing policies is nothing less than sprawl - in this case, sprawl that reaches into neighboring counties.

Now we're learning that there are other costs associated with the North Bay's housing shortage.

Owing to its proximity to water, Highway 37 between Novato and Vallejo is subject to flooding and the ongoing consequences of climate change. And when it comes to rebuilding the highway, the numbers being bandied about are nothing less than breathtaking. By some estimates, it could cost $3 billion to rebuild this 21-mile section of highway.

Meanwhile, problems with the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge have raised questions about the need for repairs on another east-west route, and critics have asked if new safety measures are needed on Highway 116, the two-lane highway that leads from Petaluma toward Highway 37.

Sonoma County, it should be said, also finds itself whipsawed between the number of low-wage jobs and the high cost of housing.

The city of Healdsburg, a Mecca for tourists from around the world, found itself criticized last week for not making the best use of tax revenue intended to promote affordable housing. Critics noted that almost a third of the revenue from a tourist tax has been spent on city staffing.

The controversy looked past a more fundamental issue, which is: In the world of Healdsburg real estate, the annual revenue from this tax - projected at $931,000 next year - will not be transformative. It would barely pay the median price of a single house in Healdsburg.

Good intentions notwithstanding, local government remains ill-equipped to move the needle on housing. If you work in a shop, a hotel, a restaurant or a vineyard, finding a place to live will remain a challenge.

Most Bay Area communities struggle with some variation of the same problem: Where are folks going to live?

Given the cost of land and construction, plus the time it takes to approve new projects, there will be no miracles. Smart people have tried to figure this out - without great success.

In the story by reporter Kevin Fixler, Healdsburg City Manager David Mickaelian admitted as much: “I don't know if we can do everything that everybody wants us to do. We can do what we can.”

What we know is that incremental progress is better than none. So government, employers and other housing advocates will be obliged to keep pushing.

If you worry about the well-being of the North Bay economy, you might want to think what would happen if Highway 37 was underwater - or what would happen if housing costs in counties to the east followed the ascending path of housing costs in Marin and Sonoma counties.

Then where would people live?

Pete Golis is a columnist for The Press Democrat. Email him at golispd@gmail.com.

You can send a letter to the editor at letters@pressdemocrat.com