Is Marinwood-Lucas Valley the Supervisor's "Diversity Solution" for Marin?

Diversity can be yummy when people are free to choose.

Editor's Note: Is Marinwood-Lucas Valley the "diversity solution" for the County of Marin?  The article below cites an agreement by the County and HUD to improve diversity and receive Community Block Grants.

Why then should the politicians and planners be allowed to concentrate 71% of all affordable housing in the 5.78 square miles in Marinwood-Lucas Valley?   

Isn't the rest of Marin being NIMBY when they do this?

 

 

The Bay Citizen

Marin Agrees to Seek Out Minorities

 By AARON GLANTZ

See article in New York Times 1/8/2011

 

Marin County has agreed to research why it has so few minority residents relative to the rest of the Bay Area and to take specific actions to attract more low-income people and ethnic minorities to the affluent county, which is more than 80 percent white.

      

The agreement, signed last month with the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, came more than a year after the agency found that the county failed to comply with Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and two other antidiscrimination statutes.

      

The review found that Marin County’s federally financed affordable-housing programs failed to reach out adequately to minorities and people with disabilities, failed to adequately track which ethnic groups were benefiting from those programs and failed to take steps to ensure that low-income and minority residents were not pushed out.

      

“The jurisdiction has an obligation to take actions that affirm housing is fair and that there’s choice,” Charles E. Hauptman, regional director for fair housing and equal opportunity at HUD, said in an interview.

      

In its report, HUD noted that “even among its relatively small minority population, persons of black race and Hispanic ethnicity are largely clustered in two minority-impacted census tracts,” blacks in the housing projects of Marin City and Hispanics in the canal zone of San Rafael.

      

Roy Bateman, community development coordinator for Marin County, said the county’s failure to track the race of those who benefited from federal money and to carry out systematic and multilingual outreach campaigns stemmed in part from the relatively small amount of money it received for affordable housing.

      

Last year, the county received approximately $1.7 million from Community Development Block Grants and $1.2 million from the federal HOME program to build and maintain affordable housing.

But John Young, director of Grassroots Leadership Network of Marin, said additional oversight was needed. County officials, Mr. Young said, “have these old-boy networks” resulting in the same people getting the same opportunities.

      

Mr. Young said his biggest battle was with neighborhood groups that did not want affordable housing built near them. “Nobody wants it in their backyard,” he said, and politicians are often willing to placate them.

      

Mr. Bateman bristled, however, at the suggestion that Marin lawmakers were racist because they rarely approved new developments.

      

“We are a slow-growth area where every type of development meets with resistance,” he said. “Right now, there’s a big fight over whether to allow Target to come to San Rafael.”