Construction is underway now at 156 Shoreline Highway in unincorporated Mill Valley, Marin County. Crews have begun assembling prefabricated sections for the five-story affordable housing complex near the Richardson Bay Bridge and Bay Trail. Idaho-based Pacific Companies is the applicant and property owner.
156 Shoreline Highway pre-fab sections on site, image by author
156 Shoreline Highway, image by author
150 Shoreline Highway parking lot view, rendering by AO
150 Shoreline Highway, elevation by AO
AO is the architect, working with Thomas Phelps Landscape Architecture. The exterior is clad in Hardie horizontal lap siding, board-and-batten panels, and asphalt shingle roofing. The 58-foot-tall structure is expected to yield around 32,400 square feet for 32 apartments, with 24 one-bedrooms and eight two-bedrooms. Surface parking will be included for seven cars, with additional capacity for 31 bicycles.
The 0.6-acre property sits just off Shoreline Highway in a small developed neighborhood with a restaurant, hotel, and several commercial spaces. Before work started, the site was a surface parking lot.
156 Shoreline Highway pre-fab sections on site, image by author
150 Shoreline Highway, image via Google Satellite
Local officials expect installation of the project modules to take around two weeks, weather-dependent. Full build-out is estimated to last around a year and a half from groundbreaking to move-ins.
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Thank you for covering this project. It’s a surprisingly good location to access by public transit or bicycle. Flooding might be a concern (and flooding unfortunately closes the nearby bus stop at Manzanita Park and Ride occasionally).
I’m glad it’s not just a tessellated rectangle. Really wish we’d get more of these spanish mission style buildings in SF and the east bay.
Parking nightmare.
Where was that again? Solvang? The Bavarian section of Disneyland? More fake shutters please!
I don’t understand the bicycle thing. How do people get around in inclement weather on a bicycle? Or go to a doctor out of the area, or take their kids to school, or go grocery shopping, or take an aging family member to the doctor? My car battery died the other day a mile from my home and I was in panic mode! I ride my bicycle frequently for recreation but cannot imagine that being my only mode of transportation.
This site is on level ground and less than a 1/4 mile from the main north-south bicycle path in Marin County, which provides a beautiful, flat path connecting Sausalito to Mill Valley. I used it to bicycle to Tam High, in Mill Valley, and many Mill Valley kids use it to bike, roll or walk to Mill Valley Middle.
As to inclement weather, of course on such days bicycling can be a wet event. However, in our climate there are usually breaks in rainfall and inclement weather is realistically a concern less than a dozen days or so a year, from my experience. Of greater or more frequent relevance are afternoon headwinds, particularly as one peddles southbound across the nearby marsh. E-bikes, of course, help to easily overcome such resistance. Cargo bikes or panniers make grocery shopping easy. Buses and taxi (or rideshare) make trips to the doctor easy.
I lived on a houseboat in Sausalito in the 80s. I worked in Mill Valley for a while and used to walk/bike that path to work and to go to Tennessee Valley Beach. It was certainly lovely until one day I saw a homeless man standing underneath the overpass pleasuring himself – in full view of the bike path. I drove to work after that incident but my husband and I continued to run/bike on the path.
Respectfully, I’d argue it’s great that this project is being built, in part to further reduce the rare likelihood of a man choosing to masturbate in view of the bike path. With ever more cyclists and walkers using that path, antisocial behavior becomes rarer.
Every single post has the car brains opining “parking nightmare”. May I suggest you all move to San Ramon or Folsom or Roseville where six lane roads and massive parking lots abound.
Not so much in San Ramon – four lanes. But I will drive there any day over trying to get there on my bike.