Marin County, with postcard-like sceneries and meticulously preserved open space, is a community that overwhelmingly prides itself on voting blue. On a typical day in Marin, you may find lawns with “Hate has no home here” signs and Teslas lined up in the Whole Foods parking lot with “Even my dog hates Elon” stickers plastered across — an almost utopian model of progressive values. But, beneath the solar panels and sustainable farmers’ markets lies a different reality.
Marin, a place that prides itself on being progressive and left-leaning, hosts a quiet resistance to some of these values. Not to being progressive as a whole, but to certain policies and changes. Especially when it comes to affordable housing.
For decades, the “Marin bubble” has come to represent the wealth and isolation that makes Marin, Marin. But that “bubble” is so much more than just a byproduct of the privilege held in Marin — it also comes from patterns of strategic detachment, where residents pick and choose when to engage with issues like housing and equity. The “bubble” is not accidental. It is directly reinforced by conscious decisions and a very selective application of supposed progressive beliefs.
Take the housing crisis, for example. In recent years, house prices have skyrocketed, making it so much harder for low-income families who work in Marin to actually live here. According to realtor.com, the median home price in Marin as of August 2025 was $1.4 million — a steep price, especially for the 42 percent of Marin residents that are classified as low-income. This is not just an issue of supply and demand, it is an issue of Marin’s policies (or lack thereof), which have systematically excluded affordable options (with an exception for few low-income housing dispersed across Marin).
In 2023, Marin County adopted state-issued “inclusionary regulations” that aimed to make affordable housing more easily accessible to places like Marin. These regulations allowed for things like the development of affordable housing in commercial zones. According to the Marin Environmental Housing Collaborative, more acts followed, which required Marin to build over 14,000 units over the following 8 years to meet its Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA). As of April 2025, only 825 units have been permitted. To put this into perspective, to stay on track to the allotted 14,000 units, Marin should have issued around 3,500 units as of April.
To put it simply, Marin’s allocated amount of units is nowhere near being met. And here is why: Marin as a whole, despite its progressive tendencies, has been reluctant to extend the building of affordable housing.
However, this pattern didn’t just come out of nowhere. When the Golden Gate Bridge was built in 1933, which essentially ended Marin’s physical separation from the rest of the bay, the Marin Planning Department created the “Can the Place Last” campaign. This campaign essentially laid the groundwork for years of a culture of containment that followed. According to the Sausalito Historical Society, this campaign, at its core, aimed to end unrestrained growth and development of Marin. An immediate consequence of this campaign was very little population growth in the years that followed.
These barriers remain, disproportionately affecting workers and low-income families, who, according to a 2023 Marin County report, are being displaced out of Marin at alarming rates (loss of 33.5 people per 1,000 households of low-income residents). Given that nearly half of Marin’s population falls into the “low-income” category, the lack of action in terms of affordable housing is inevitably affecting a large amount of our own population.
So the contradiction persists: the same community that shops local and buys organic still lacks the action needed to take care of the people who make that very lifestyle possible. The caregivers who take care of the youth, the teachers who educate our kids, the servers who diligently bring us fresh food cannot afford to live in the county they work in. They cannot afford to live here, because, whether it’s realized or not, the choices actively made by Marin’s residents put a barrier between these people and the progressive community we pride ourselves in being a part of.
In order for Marin to truly live up to its “brand”, people must realize that progressive ideals cannot coexist with exclusionary policies or a “pick-and-choose” mentality. Selective progression is not true progress.
