Only 35% of Larkspur lots comply with the city's floor-area rules. Commissioners are ready to rewrite them.

It was a one-meeting week in Larkspur, but the one meeting mattered. A Planning Commission subcommittee — Commissioners Wagstaff and Campbell, working with Council member Margaliz — reported Wednesday that only about 35% of the city's residential lots comply with Larkspur's current slope-based floor area ratio rules. That single number reframed the whole conversation: when two-thirds of the housing stock fails a standard, the problem may be the standard.

“My neighbors are just incensed and they're going, 'How did you let that happen?'”— a Planning Commissioner, on the fallout from exception decisions

The leading alternative is Corte Madera's model, which drops the slope adjustment entirely and tiers allowable floor area by lot size. Run against Larkspur's parcels, staff said roughly 86% of lots would comply — and under that model, no exceptions would be allowed at all. Commissioner Campbell framed the target plainly: get to a place where 80–85% of lots are compliant, so the city can feel comfortable actually enforcing the rules. Commissioners also floated the more radical option of eliminating FAR outright and controlling bulk through lot coverage, height and setbacks. The safety rationale that produced the slope-based reductions in the first place, several said, has largely been overtaken by modern building and engineering codes.

New Community Development Director Andy Mogensson, at his first meeting in the job, pointed to the structural mismatch: state housing law doesn't recognize floor area ratio at all — not for ADUs, not under SB 9 — which is part of why the local math no longer holds. FAR, he told the Commission, is one of the oldest tools in the box but not the only one, and the best codes are the simplest ones that still work. The recurring worry around the dais was enforceability: a rule most properties violate pushes every decision into a case-by-case 'exception' (staff and legal were careful to note the city says 'exception,' not 'variance,' which has a specific meaning under state law), and exceptions are what bring the neighbors out.

No vote was taken. The consensus direction was that a Corte Madera-style approach looks promising, and staff will return with worked examples. The subject is also expected to feed the City Council's broader zoning code discussion on February 7 — worth watching, because a change here would touch nearly every remodel and addition in town.