San Rafael New Apartments: 2,000 Homes in One Mile

San Rafael took in a formal application on August 28 for 192 apartments on a vacant hillside above Highway 101, and 190 of them would be income restricted. It is the fourth large housing filing along roughly one mile of north San Rafael since December 2024, and together the four add up to about 2,045 homes.

That total is the real story, and it is a good one. Marin builds slowly and unevenly, and one city has quietly become the place where the county’s new housing actually lands. Here is what is proposed, where it sits, and what it means for anyone looking at San Rafael this fall.

What is proposed at 1100 Los Gamos Drive

The project is 192 apartments across seven stories on a 10.24-acre vacant parcel above the freeway, designed by KTGY Architects for Community Development Partners.

The specifics, from the filing:

• 192 apartments, 190 of them income restricted for extremely low, very low and low income households, plus 2 market-rate manager units
• Unit mix of 30 one-bedrooms, 63 two-bedrooms, 84 three-bedrooms and 15 four-bedrooms, which is an unusually family-sized program
• Seven stories and 87 feet, 319,250 square feet total, with 185,900 square feet of that residential
• A two-story podium garage with 230 vehicle spaces and 98 bicycle spaces
• Courtyard, clubroom, fitness room and two podium-top decks, with the massing broken up to read as several smaller mid-rise buildings
• Pre-application submitted July 20, 2026, formal application submitted August 28, 2026, currently listed by the city as under review

The site is on the Los Gamos office corridor, the stretch that holds Kaiser Permanente’s 148,000 square foot building at 1650 Los Gamos and Marin Commons. The developer’s own materials put the site 0.3 miles from the Lucas Valley bus pad on 101 and 0.4 miles from the Freitas Parkway pad, and a bit over half a mile from a grocery-anchored center.

The 2022 approval that the permit write-ups left out

This parcel is not new to the city. The San Rafael City Council already approved 192 units here on February 7, 2022.

That earlier version was a mixed-income project with a 5,574 square foot neighborhood market and a 5,003 square foot community building, branded The Neighborhood at Los Gamos, and it cleared CEQA on a Mitigated Negative Declaration filed in November 2021. It also came with a General Plan amendment, which tells you the entitlement was negotiated on its own terms rather than streamlined through a state law.

What changed in 2026 is the income mix. A project approved four years ago as market-rate-plus-some has come back as almost entirely affordable. That is a different financing structure, a different sponsor, and a different set of residents, and it is worth understanding as a conversion rather than as a brand new proposal. It also means the site has already survived the review that usually kills things in Marin.

Four projects, roughly a mile apart, since December 2024

Put the recent north San Rafael approvals next to each other and the pattern stops being anecdotal.

Two thousand homes is a large number anywhere in Marin. Concentrated within about a mile of the Civic Center and the Northgate mall site, on office parcels and parking lots rather than on open space, it is close to a textbook version of where a county should put growth. The Northgate redevelopment alone replaces a dying mall with more than a thousand homes and 200,000 square feet of commercial space.

And 548 of those 2,045 are deed restricted. Marin has spent decades being told that affordable housing is impossible here on cost grounds. A quarter of this pipeline says otherwise.

San Rafael carries the county’s largest allocation, and is now clearing it

San Rafael’s 2023 to 2031 housing allocation is 3,220 units, the largest of any incorporated city in Marin.

For scale, that is more than Mill Valley at 865, Larkspur at 979 and Corte Madera at 725 combined, and more than one and a half times Novato’s 2,090. Countywide the figure is roughly 14,200, with unincorporated Marin carrying 3,569 of it. San Rafael is one city out of eleven and it is holding close to a quarter of the incorporated share.

The delivery numbers moved with it. The city entitled an average of 188 housing units a year between 2018 and 2023. Between January 2024 and January 2026 that average was 1,402.5 units a year, a roughly sevenfold jump, according to the annual progress report presented on March 16, 2026. Marin’s own housing pipeline tracker lists 86 projects countywide, and 23 of them are in San Rafael, more than any other jurisdiction in the county.

The 190 restricted units at Los Gamos alone would cover about 13 percent of the city’s entire lower-income obligation for the cycle. One building.

What this looks like from the buying side

San Rafael is the most affordable large city in Marin, and it is also the one doing the most building. Those two facts belong in the same sentence.

The citywide median was $1.31 million in August 2026. Mill Valley was $1.84 million and Larkspur was $2.35 million the same month. Novato came in at $1.19 million and has been climbing hard, up from $984,250 last September. So the practical Marin question for most buyers is San Rafael or Novato, and San Rafael is the one with the jobs corridor, the SMART station and the pipeline.

It also holds up on the measures people actually ask about. Peacock Gap and Loch Lomond share the city’s highest safety score at 4.9 out of 5, and Gerstle Park and West End lead on schools. The full San Rafael ranking covers ten neighborhoods, which is a small enough set to read end to end before a weekend of open houses. If you are working the whole county, the 56 ranked Marin neighborhoods and our earlier piece on the most affordable neighborhoods in Marin are the wider view.

The caveat that matters: approved is not built

Los Gamos has been approved once already and nothing has been built there in four and a half years.

That is the honest counterweight to a 2,045-unit headline. Entitlements in Marin have a long history of sitting. Northgate Town Square was approved in December 2024 and the mall is still a mall. Financing an all-affordable building of this size takes tax credit allocations that arrive on their own schedule, and neither cost nor timeline has been disclosed for the Los Gamos application. Anyone using this pipeline to predict prices in Terra Linda next spring is getting ahead of the concrete.

The way we look at it at Houseberry, a pipeline like this is a signal about direction, not about next year. It tells you the city is saying yes, that the sites are the right ones, and that the new supply is going where the freeway, the buses and the offices already are. Those are the conditions under which a place gets easier to move to over a decade.

What to watch

The Los Gamos application is with the Planning Division now, and the case planner is Kristina Estudillo. The next visible step is a Design Review Board or Planning Commission item, and no date has been set. Watch also for whether Northgate Town Square moves from approval to a demolition permit, because that single project is two thirds of the corridor total and its schedule will set the tone for everything else on the road.

Sources

San Francisco YIMBY, Pre-application filed for 1100 Los Gamos Drive, San Rafael, September 8, 2026

City of San Rafael, 1100 Los Gamos Drive project page

City of San Rafael, Los Gamos Apartments project archive

CEQAnet, Los Gamos Mitigated Negative Declaration, SCH 2021110004

San Francisco YIMBY, Housing proposed for 50 Merrydale Road, San Rafael, September 4, 2026

ABAG, 2023 to 2031 Draft Regional Housing Needs Allocation Plan

Marin County, Regional Housing Needs Allocation

City of San Rafael, Annual Progress Report for 2025, March 16, 2026

City of San Rafael, Housing Element certified by the state, July 5, 2023

Call Marin Home, countywide housing pipeline tracker

Press Democrat, San Rafael approves Northgate mall housing plan, December 4, 2024

Houseberry, San Rafael and Marin neighborhood data, September 2026