Bay Area sea-level study urges defenses for Canal renters

By Krissy Waite | kwaite@marinij.com

PUBLISHED: November 9, 2024 at 10:20 AM PST

Renter protections should be in place in San Rafael’s Canal neighborhood before improvements are made to shore up the vulnerable community against sea-level rise, a new study recommends.

The report, which analyzes the role property rights play in adaptation planning, focused on six Bay Area neighborhoods. For the Canal area, the report recommended that rent control and eviction protections in the Canal area precede physical adaptation measures such as elevating streets, building floating paths and restoring the marsh. This is to prevent displacing residents and potential “climate gentrification,” the authors said.

The water is expected to rise by at least a foot in the Bay Area between now and 2050 — and more than 6 feet by 2100 — according to the California Ocean Protection Council. Global sea levels have already risen around 8 inches since 1880, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This is caused by global warming.

The report, titled “Bayshore Urbanism: Property and Climate Change Adaptation on San Francisco Bay,” was compiled by the nonprofit Next 10 and the University of California at Berkeley. It was released Oct. 24.

Carly Finkle, a policy manager with the San Rafael nonprofit Canal Alliance, said more than 90% of the neighborhood’s residents are renters. Finkle said that reality needs to be “front and center” when looking at the strategies outlined by the report.

“We need transformative property strategies that center on the safety and stability of renters,” Finkle said. “We cannot just consider the costs, tradeoffs and incentives offered to property owners. We must also consider the parallel strategies required to support the resilience and stability of the renters who face the greatest threats to safety and displacement.”

The report also suggests adding a mixed-use urban corridor along the freeway’s edge, repurposing the apartment buildings in phases and using new floating urban districts as adaptation measures.

“Certain things will need to change for it to be possible,” said Kate Hagemann, San Rafael’s climate and resilience adaptation planner. “We do have certain rules or funding streams, other things that sort of limit what we can do right now, but hopefully in the future some of those things will evolve so that we can adapt to new conditions.”

Hagemann said the Canal neighborhood and surrounding area is the most vulnerable to sea-level rise in the Bay Area, partly because of land subsidence coinciding with sea-level rise. The city is looking at feasible adaptation ideas. A typical one used when the land is lower than the water is a barrier between the sea and shore.

“One of the challenges that we have here in San Rafael, there’s space between the land and the water that’s open,” Hagemann said. “Some of the most obvious responses that other communities use aren’t as easy in this physical context here.”

The report states that there are three challenges to achieving equitable adaptation to sea-level rise: shifting a static view of property rights and ownership to a more flexible one; moving away from a fragmented system and toward collective action; and advancing justice.

“Right now, we view property rights as being fixed in space, like millions of separate boxes with a different person or group making decisions for each,” said Zachary Lamb, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of California at Berkeley. “This fragmented and static view of property sets us up to have arbitrary winners and losers as the owner of each box addresses the problem. This approach will be expensive, inefficient and unfair.”

Finkle noted that many of the possible property ownership frameworks in the report are geared toward a managed and phased approach where residents retreat from the area. Canal Alliance does not consider this an option because opportunities to develop other parts of the city at the scale needed are limited.

Instead, Finkle emphasized the need for strategies that allow residents to adapt in place.

“We wholeheartedly support their calls for rent stabilization and stronger protections against eviction, which the community has been calling for years,” Finkle said. “We are eager to work together with government, philanthropic, nonprofit and community partners to apply this framework in our community.”

San Rafael’s shoreline has more than 400 private property owners. About 16,000 people live in the Canal area alone, which is built on low-lying former marshland and is prone to flooding.

Finkle said many of the waterfront properties have been developed into apartment buildings. Renters are primarily low-income, Spanish-speaking Latino families and immigrants.

“This makes the challenge of coordinating collective action and preventing displacement particularly difficult, especially considering that much of the neighborhood is at risk of multiple feet of flooding today, not in some future scenario,” Finkle said.

Hagemann agreed, saying it can make collaboration on adaptation efforts slower. She said it’s more typical to have a publicly owned shoreline when there’s a community that lives below the coastal shoreline because it makes infrastructure, such as levees, easier to inspect and maintain.

“It is more unusual to have the situation in San Rafael where thousands of people are dependent upon a lot of individual properties, like people’s yards and gardens,” Hagemann said. “It’s a very fragmented ownership that we have.”

In general, other policies the study suggested included greater community land trusts and banks; transferring development rights; rolling property easements that allow property rights to migrate with a changing environment; replotting land parcels; more houseboat marinas; limited equity cooperatives; and special districts such as a climate resilience district to help fund adaptation measures.

Cris Criollo, the climate justice specialist at the Multicultural Center of Marin, praised the report but said the policies need to be analyzed further to see how other legal protections may interact with them.

“Some kind of policy has to be in place before moving on to adaptation options,” Criollo said. “We need to analyze if these policies are going to actually protect the communities, because the property owners, the owners of the building, they also have rights. So you cannot avoid that the owners are going to increase rent if they have to do repairs or adapt their buildings to address sea-level rise.”

Criollo said the community must have a voice in adaptation planning, but language can be a barrier. She suggested enlisting translators for every meeting. Community power, and the authority to make decisions about the place people reside, is essential, Criollo said.

“We can have all the studies that we want, but we need the community strong enough to actually advocate for themselves and be there at the table where the decision making process is,” Criollo said.