Canal Alliance Supports Plan for Educator Housing

By Letters to the editor || Marin Independent Journal

PUBLISHED: March 26, 2025 at 12:58 PM PDT

As the leader of one of Marin’s largest social-service agencies, I witness Marin’s profound housing crisis every day. At Canal Alliance, we see how it affects our hardworking clients and staff. Limited access to affordable housing is driving out essential employees from public, private and nonprofit organizations.

The inability to attract and retain talent is already costing taxpayers, schools and county government through staffing shortages, reduced services and high turnover rates. We support the Oak Hill development, located in the San Quentin area of unincorporated Larkspur. The long-term economic and social costs of inaction far outweigh the risks of this project.

Oak Hill represents more than just a housing development — it embodies a collective, system-level solution to Marin’s housing crisis. Housing is not just about providing shelter — it’s a foundation for economic vitality, public service effectiveness and community wellbeing.

Oak Hill demonstrates a collaborative model, which enables different agencies and districts to share the housing units, ultimately reducing risk for everyone and creating a more resilient housing system. By distributing risk across multiple partners, it provides a sustainable solution that can shift the housing system toward greater equity and stability. This innovative model offers a scalable framework for public, private and nonprofit collaboration, and is exactly the kind of systems-level intervention that Marin urgently needs.

Our greatest hope for solving Marin’s housing crisis lies in embracing collective leadership and innovative solutions. Oak Hill represents a shift from fragmented, piecemeal approaches to a more coordinated, system-wide strategy. Now is not the time to back away because of uncertainty.

Canal Alliance supports the call of Supervisor Dennis Rodoni and Marin County Superintendent of Schools John Carroll to back Oak Hill and push for stable, affordable housing for educators and county employees in Marin.

— Omar Carrera, Corte Madera