The Ship Has Not Sailed on Novato's Grant Avenue High-Rises

NOVATO, CA — Residents who raise concerns about the high-rise, high-density projects proposed for Grant Avenue keep hearing the same line from City Hall: "that cart already left the station." It is a convenient framing, because it tells the public to stop asking questions. It is also not what the public record shows.

1st & Grant is not approved.

On the City of Novato's own Planning Projects page, the 1st Street & Grant Avenue Mixed Use Project is listed under "AB 2011 Projects," not under "Approved Projects." The developer, AMG & Associates, voluntarily entered a tolling agreement with the City to pause the AB 2011 statutory shot clock. They did this because they could not yet demonstrate that the site qualifies for AB 2011's streamlined ministerial approval. State law restricts using AB 2011 on properties with a history of hazardous materials contamination unless strict regulatory criteria are met. Until AMG produces that documentation and the City accepts it, the project has no entitlement, no building permit, and no construction schedule. The legal clock is stopped. Leverage still exists.

AB 2011 streamlining is conditional, not automatic.

AB 2011 only streamlines projects that satisfy every objective standard and every eligibility requirement, including site eligibility, labor standards such as prevailing wage and skilled-and-trained workforce rules, affordability mix, and full compliance with the City's objective design and development standards. Each of those is a verification point. The City is supposed to do that verification rigorously, and residents have every right to demand the receipts.

Approved projects still carry enforceable conditions.

3rd Street & Grant Avenue Mixed Use and 4th Street & Grant Avenue Mixed Use appear on the City's "Approved Projects" list. Approved is not built. Conditions of approval, including construction management plans, haul routes, crane and lane closure scheduling, parking and TDM enforcement, affordable unit monitoring, and stormwater controls, are all live. The City can tighten and enforce them. It mostly has not.

924 Grant is still in active application review.

The 924 Grant Avenue Mixed-Use proposal at the old Novato Theater site appears in the active applications list, not in approved projects. CEQA scoping, historic overlay review, scale, massing, and parking remain on the table. This is the easiest project to shape, and the one getting the least public attention.

No cumulative impact analysis. No real downtown plan.

Stack 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 924 Grant together and you are talking about hundreds of new units on a single downtown corridor, with overlapping construction periods, shared infrastructure, and a street grid that was not designed for it. CEQA cumulative impacts analysis exists for exactly this situation. The City has treated each project as if it lived in a vacuum.

There is no residential parking permit district. No downtown parking benefit district. No enforceable Transportation Demand Management ordinance. No curb management plan for loading, deliveries, and rideshare. No public capacity analysis from Novato Sanitary or NMWD for cumulative downtown buildout. No public discussion of fire flow and ladder access for high-rise residential. No honest accounting of school capacity, park acreage, or impact fee adequacy. Just boilerplate traffic studies and reassuring language in staff reports.

The fiscal story is missing too.

High-density residential, on its own, frequently runs a fiscal deficit at the municipal level once service costs are netted out. The City has tools, including Enhanced Infrastructure Financing Districts, that could capture tax increment from downtown development and direct it back into the parking, streets, drainage, and public realm investments that would actually make Grant Avenue work. Those tools sit on the shelf.

Pro-housing means pro-community.

To be clear, I am pro-housing. Novato needs more of it, at prices working families and seniors can actually afford. But a downtown built almost entirely out of studios and single-room units is not a housing plan, it is a unit-count strategy. It does not give a young family room to grow, it does not fit a downsizing senior, and it does not anchor the long-term residents who shop on Grant and show up for this town. A real plan requires a meaningful share of two and three bedroom units, deed-restricted affordability, and density bonuses tied to unit mix, not just checkbox percentages. Studios stacked on studios is not the same thing as housing this community.

What "the ship has not sailed" actually means.

It means 1st & Grant is paused and the City still holds the pen on eligibility, objective standards, and conditions. It means 3rd and 4th & Grant are entitled, but the impacts are still ours to manage. It means 924 Grant is still being shaped. It means the cumulative analysis, the infrastructure plan, the parking strategy, the unit mix, and the fiscal framework are all things the City could and should produce right now, before any more clocks restart.

What residents have been given instead is lip service, and a Planning and Community Development Department that treats state compliance as a ceiling on its ambition rather than a floor. I am running for the District 5 seat on the Marin County Board of Supervisors because that posture is not good enough. Not for Novato's downtown, not for our small businesses, and not for the residents who have been told for years that their concerns are too late.

They are not too late. The ship has not sailed. And the next supervisor needs to know exactly where the leverage is, and how to help the City use it.

Marc Hunter Lewis is a Novato resident and candidate for the District 5 seat on the Marin County Board of Supervisors. He writes on local government finance, transparency, and planning policy. Opinions expressed are the author's own.