Years and Millions Later, Binford Road and the Hamilton Marsh Are Still There
A year ago I spent a day cleaning trash near the Binford Road encampment. I went out for the birds and came back convinced Marin needed a tiny home village. I still believe that. But I want to start this with the part nobody running for this seat wants to say plainly, so I will say it. We have spent more than two million state dollars specifically on Binford Road, we have a multi-year grant program running through the middle of 2027, we have competent providers and a county that files clean reports, and the encampments are still there. Binford Road is still there. The Hamilton Marsh is still there. Tents are still pitched next to the skate park where families take their kids. The absurdity is not that this problem is hard. The absurdity is that we keep funding the back end of a system that was never built to reach the people sitting in those vehicles and tents in the first place.
Let me lay out where things actually stand, because the numbers are the argument.
What is actually happening on the ground
The Binford Road vehicle encampment has shrunk, and the county deserves credit for that. As of January 2026 it was down to roughly 65 vehicles and about 45 people, no longer allowed to grow, with the county providing garbage pickup, hand-washing stations, and portable toilets (Local News Matters, Jan. 2026). It is a quasi-sanctioned site that is not gated and not closed. The grant program that is supposed to resolve it runs from July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2027 (Local News Matters). The state has steered real money at this single encampment, including a 2024 Encampment Resolution Fund grant of about $3.7 million on top of earlier rounds (Local News Matters). The original goal, set years ago, was to cut the camp in half within two years and clear it entirely by 2026 (CBS San Francisco). It is 2026. The camp is still there, and the people who remain are stuck behind a Section 8 voucher shortage that has run since 2024, unsure where they stand with the county (Local News Matters).
Across town, the story is worse, because there we made it worse on purpose. On February 11, 2025 the Novato City Council voted unanimously to permanently close the city-sanctioned camp at Lee Gerner Park, posting a notice to vacate by April 19 (Pacific Sun, Feb. 2025; City of Novato). The county's own Health and Human Services advised against scattering residents who were on a documented housing pathway. The council closed it anyway. Thirteen months later, several of those former Lee Gerner campers are living in tents next to the Novato Skate Park, and they are fed alongside roughly two dozen more people from the nearby Hamilton Marsh encampment. About 30 unhoused people now live across those two Hamilton camps (Pacific Sun, May 2026). We did not solve homelessness at Lee Gerner. We relocated it a few hundred yards into a marsh and a skate park, and then we stopped looking at it.
That is the ridiculousness. We spent the money, we closed a sanctioned site against expert advice, and the same people are now in tents in a wetland with no fires allowed, no Coleman stove, no barbecue, depending on volunteers two nights a week for a hot meal (Pacific Sun, May 2026). I have met these neighbors. One of them, Geno Meyer, lived at Lee Gerner and now lives by the skate park, and he will tell you the dinners matter as much for the human connection as for the food. Another resident put it as plainly as anyone could: these are the most vulnerable people in our community, and somehow we cannot find them proper care and shelter (Pacific Sun, May 2026).
The spending paradox, in plain terms
Here is the part that should bother every taxpayer in District 5 regardless of where they land on homelessness politics. The money is being spent competently and the headline number stays small. Statewide for Marin, $22.2 million in Encampment Resolution Funding has served 238 people through June 2025, and $12.5 million in HHAP funding housed 406 people over thirty months. On the 2024 Point-in-Time count, 788 people were unsheltered in Marin out of 1,090 countywide. That is not a story about lazy providers or wasted grants. It is a story about a system that is structurally back-end loaded.
Almost everything Marin funds today serves people who are already in the system. The Homeless Outreach Team is intensive case management for clients who already opted in. Coordinated Entry is a screening tool a person has to walk up to. Novato's SAFE is a crisis team on a fixed schedule. Each one works for the population it was designed to serve. None of them is built to walk up to a stranger living in an RV on Binford Road or a tent in the Hamilton Marsh and start a relationship from zero. That missing function is the front door, and right now no one is funded to staff it.
You can watch the paradox happen in a single contract. On May 5 the Board of Supervisors raised a county homeless outreach contract from roughly $657,000 to about $907,000 with no change to the work being done. Sixty-three percent of that contract is salaries, sixteen percent benefits, thirteen percent overhead. The line for the food cards, bus passes, sleeping bags, and tents that actually reach a person on the street is $8,000, less than one percent. The $250,000 raise alone is thirty-one times the entire direct-aid line. I am not against paying outreach workers well, because underpaying people is how programs collapse. But a contract built that way is designed to keep an existing system staffed, not to reach the people the system is not reaching.
The marsh deserves better, and so do the people in it
There is a second cost to all of this that almost no one is counting, and it sits in the name itself. The Hamilton Marsh is not a vacant lot. It is part of the Hamilton Wetland Restoration Project, one of the largest tidal marsh restorations in the history of San Francisco Bay, a roughly $286 million joint effort by the Army Corps of Engineers and the California State Coastal Conservancy that converted the old Hamilton airfield back into living baylands (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers). In 2014 the Corps breached the bayside levee and opened 648 acres to the tide for the first time in over a century, after placing nearly six million cubic yards of dredged sediment to rebuild the land that a hundred years of diking had sunk (State Coastal Conservancy). This matters because the Bay has lost roughly 95 percent of its historic tidal marsh, and Hamilton is one of the places we are buying it back (Engineering With Nature, U.S. Army Corps).
We did not restore it for scenery. We restored it as recovery habitat for endangered species that exist almost nowhere else, the salt marsh harvest mouse and the California Ridgway's rail, and the site is under federally required monitoring through 2026 and 2027 to make sure that recovery takes hold (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service). That is the same window in which we have allowed an unmanaged encampment to sit in it. Think about what we are actually asking of those residents. We tell people they cannot have a fire, a Coleman stove, or even a barbecue, and then we offer them no real alternative, so human waste, trash, and runoff have nowhere to go but into a wetland we spent a quarter of a billion dollars and three decades restoring (Pacific Sun, May 2026). This is not a choice between compassion for people and protection for the marsh. The current neglect fails both at once. It is degrading to the people we leave there with portable toilets and no path out, and it is corrosive to the habitat and the endangered birds and mammals the rest of us paid to bring back. A county that prizes its baylands enough to spend $286 million reclaiming them cannot, in good conscience, treat one of them as the place we quietly put the neighbors we would rather not see.
Hamilton Bridge, and the front door it needs
I have refined what I proposed a year ago, and I have been honest with myself about what was wrong with it. The Binford photograph that ran with my first column was not a tent encampment. It was a row of aging RVs and trailers parked along the wetlands. Marin's homeless are a mix of people in vehicles and people in tents, and a real site has to serve both. That is Hamilton Bridge: cabins for people without vehicles, serviced pads for people in RVs, shared services on site, and a documented pathway to permanent housing. I have also amended the siting. I once argued for land near the Civic Center. Hamilton is the better fit, because the receiving services already exist there and the utilities, roads, and entitlements are in place from the base reuse. Puett Place opened last year. We should build on what works rather than starting from zero on a lawn in San Rafael.
But I have come to believe a bridge by itself will not work, and I want to be the candidate who says that out loud before we build it instead of after. If we put up cabins and serviced pads and the people we built them for never walk through the gate, we will have empty cabins and empty pads, and Binford will look exactly as it does today. We just watched that failure play out at Lee Gerner. Capacity without trust does not solve anything. Hamilton Bridge needs a front door, and the front door is people.
So the front door comes first, and it does not require a single new building or a single act of the Legislature. It requires a small contracted team of peer outreach workers, people who have been homeless themselves and come out the other side, working daily on Binford Road, at the skate park, and in the Hamilton Marsh, doing first-touch outreach and warm handoffs into the system we already paid for. Three to five positions. A referral list. A public dashboard. An independent evaluation at eighteen months. Not a shelter, not a co-response unit, not a duplicate of anything that exists. Operation Dignity in Alameda runs exactly this model across Oakland, Emeryville, Alameda, and the county at once, and distributed twenty-five thousand units of supplies in Oakland last year. The man I met at the farmers market who told me the only person who ever got him into Homeward Bound was a guy who used to sleep in the same parking lot, that is the entire theory of the case.
The money already exists to do both. A peer-led pilot can legally braid at least five streams: HHAP for outreach and case management, with Round 6 awards flowing now; Encampment Resolution Funding, which has already funded $22.2 million of Marin work; CalAIM Community Supports, where peer support has been Medi-Cal billable since 2022; HUD Continuum of Care dollars administered by County HHS; and bridge financing from the Marin Community Foundation to cover the first twelve months while public procurement closes. A two-dozen-unit Hamilton Bridge site runs roughly two to three million dollars all in. The same number of permanent apartments would cost more than fifteen million and take a decade. This is not expensive in absolute terms. It is a question of will, sequencing, and who is willing to absorb the political cost of saying the current approach is not working.
A word on Sacramento
There is a bill, SB 967, that would let cities count interim cabins like the ones at Hamilton toward their state housing obligations, and I have argued our delegation should be pushing it (Sen. Blakespear's office). I want to be straight with voters about where it stands. SB 967 stalled. It was held in committee on May 14, 2026, and the affordable-housing advocates tracking it list it as effectively dead for this cycle (CalMatters Digital Democracy; Housing California 2026 priorities). I still think the idea is right, and I will keep pushing to revive it. But I am not going to build a District 5 plan on a bill sitting dead in committee. A plan that depends on Sacramento doing us a favor is not a plan. It is a hope. The good news is that the front door does not need SB 967 to pass. It needs a county willing to write a different kind of contract.
The order matters
The difference between the status quo and what I am proposing is sequence, and sequence is everything here. Build Hamilton Bridge first and you risk empty cabins. Stand up the peer-led front door first and you build the trust that fills any bridge you eventually build. The May 5 contract, more dollars on the back end for the same work, will not get us there. A different kind of contract, the kind that pays people to reach the unreached, in that order, will.
Step back and look at the whole picture, because the three failures are really one failure wearing three faces. Fiscally, we spend competently and the camps stay put, because we fund the back end of a system that never had a front door. Humanly, we leave our most vulnerable neighbors in tents in a marsh, told they cannot so much as light a stove, dependent on volunteers for a hot meal. Environmentally, we let that neglect bleed into a $286 million restored wetland we are still paying federal monitors to protect through 2027. The taxpayer who is angry about the spending, the neighbor who is heartbroken by the tents at the skate park, and the birder who went out to Hamilton for the Ridgway's rail are not three different constituencies with three different complaints. They are looking at the same broken thing from three sides, and every one of them is right.
Novato is better than this. We are the city that breached a levee to bring a wetland back to life and built a Bay Trail so our kids could walk out and see it. We are the county that knows the names of the people sleeping by the skate park because we cook them dinner twice a week. We have the conscience for this. We have had the funding, the data, and the providers the whole time. What District 5 has not had is anyone willing to name the gap out loud and build the front door before the next budget cycle closes. That is the job I am asking voters to send me to the Board to do, and I will do it for the people struggling, for the neighborhoods carrying the weight, and for the marsh, all at once, because they were never separate problems to begin with.
What I will do on the Board
I will bring a peer-outreach procurement timeline to my first meeting on the Board, ahead of the next county budget cycle, and publish a quarterly public dashboard before the first cabin or pad at Hamilton opens.
I will push the county to braid HHAP, ERF, CalAIM Community Supports, and Continuum of Care dollars into a three-year peer-led navigation contract for Binford Road and the two Hamilton camps, with an independent evaluation at eighteen months.
I will insist that peer outreach workers be kept out of encampment sweeps, because trust built on Monday cannot survive an eviction on Tuesday.
I will keep pushing Sacramento to revive SB 967 or its successor, while making clear that the District 5 plan does not depend on it passing.
I will coordinate any Hamilton siting and outreach with the Coastal Conservancy and the wildlife agencies that monitor the restoration, so that housing people and protecting the marsh are handled as one plan rather than two agencies pointing at each other.
I will ask the county to publish, in plain language, how many people remain at Binford Road and in the Hamilton Marsh each quarter, so that "the camp is shrinking" is a number the public can check rather than a claim we take on faith.