The Town of Tiburon currently has 54 of the 639 required housing units that the state of California mandated it have by 2031. To be eligible for state funding, Tiburon must meet the Regional Housing Needs Allocation’s (RHNA) housing requirements within the eight-year cycle.

During a Tiburon Town Council meeting on Feb. 18, council members discussed housing progress and strategies to address the shortfall. Shari Meads, the town’s director of development, spoke at the meeting.

“The housing element addresses a range of housing issues such as affordability, housing diversity, density and location,” Meads said.

Tiburon’s 8.5 percent progress mark is highlighted by two percent progress for very low-income units and 3.6 percent for low-income units, with a combined 15 units permitted. These low-income housing units represent a shift from Tiburon’s current median home value of more than $2 million, as reported by the U.S. Census from 2020 to 2024.

“The state is really pushing for affordable housing to be throughout communities, but it also realizes that to be most effective and feasible, it needs to be near transit and other types of resources,” Meads said. 

The Redwood community is heavily impacted by affordable housing. According to an April Bark survey, 26 percent of Redwood students lived in affordable housing, with an additional six percent having lived in affordable housing previously in their life. 

Sophomore Preston Headley, Tiburon resident of twelve years whose family owns a local business, has observed spaces available for affordable housing.

“Tiburon isn’t supposed to be a small town, and there’s already a lot of open space,” Headley said. 

Headley also said that Tiburon will have to place the affordable housing in a fitting area, as the homes will have to be more condensed that the ones currently there.

“Higher-density housing would be good, it just needs to be in the right location. If apartments were built in the middle of a neighborhood, it wouldn’t be appealing to existing residents. If they were built in more open areas, that would definitely be a good solution,” Headley said.

Meads also commented on the importance of meeting the RHNA element .“The worst case scenario is that they can revoke your housing element approval and certification and notify the attorney general for pretty egregious violations,” Meads said.

Mayor Jon Welner also commented at the meeting. “The town is doing its best to comply with state directives regarding housing while maintaining the beauty and character of our town,” Welner said, “There was a lot of energy and effort devoted over the last few years to developing the housing element, approving it and getting the zoning in place.”

During the town council meeting, council members also expressed frustration with the state’s failure to recognize Tiburon’s inadequate infrastructure as the state piled on the large RHNA demand.

Vice Mayor Isaac Nikfar shared his frustration with the RHNA to the council. “Our infrastructure again is our infrastructure, we have one lane going out of town, we are not a public transit hub by any stretch of the imagination,” Nikfar said.

Although there is only one lane coming into Tiburon, the town has other modes of transportation due to its location on the water. 

“The state government doesn’t care, and actually Tiburon is considered a transit-oriented community because of the ferry, and we are considered in the same breath as Larkspur and other places that actually have connectivity to the SMART Rail even though we don’t,” Meads said. 

Headley also expressed his concern about the possible strain on Tiburon’s infrastructure.

“An increase in population requires more buses – when I took public transit, it was always packed. Additionally, the police force and firefighting force are really small in Tiburon, so a bigger population would negatively affect them,” Headley said.

Many Tiburon council members shared frustration over the shift from the 78-unit requirement in the 2015 RHNA to the 639-unit requirement in the 2023 RHNA during the meeting, as well as the 7th RHNA cycle approaching in 2031.

Nikfar was a vocal member of the Town Council, comfortable enough to make jokes. “The seventh cycle, do we expect that to be six million or do we expect that to be more reasonable in the 100, 200, 300 range?” Nikfar said.

Benjamin Stock, the Tiburon town attorney, shared similar thoughts with the board members. 

“The hope is that when the next cycle comes, we’re not just going to have [housing allocation] numbers go up for the sake of numbers going up but based on the topography of where the houses are going,” Stock said. 

Meads said she also hoped the housing requirements would go down during the seventh RHNA housing cycle due to Tiburon’s built-out residential zones. However, Meads said she believed the requirements would fail to loosen due to an increasing population and job opportunities throughout Tiburon.

Headley said he remains hopeful that the large requirement for housing will bring more families and communities to Tiburon. This new influx of families would shift the town’s demographics. 

“Either new families are coming in, which brings new kids to schools, or older, wealthier people are buying up houses so new families can’t move in. There used to be a lot of young families moving to Tiburon, but over the past 15 years, that has decreased a lot,” Headley said.

While both the Town of Tiburon’s residents and leaders share many different perspectives on the increase in housing allocations for the town, Mayor Welner remains hopeful of Tiburon’s current progress.

“I actually feel somewhat reassured by the [data] that Tiburon is on track by doing the things we’re supposed to be doing,” Welner said.