On February 25, 2025, the City Council removed the Alta Mira site from Sausalito's Housing Element entirely — ending a proposal that would have put as many as 153 homes on the hill above downtown. The campaign to get there took barely three weeks.
Alta Mira is not just a parcel. High on Bulkley Avenue, the Alta Mira Hotel was for generations the grande dame of Sausalito hotels — Sunday brunches and Ramos Gin Fizzes, Mother's Day with the family, a landmark the city lists on its Historic Resources Inventory.
California requires every city to map where new housing can go, and Alta Mira's size made it look, on paper, like a place for a lot of it — flagged for up to 70 units an acre, 153 homes, more than three times the 605 Bridgeway project, as tall as nine floors over a 350-car garage. But the ground told a different story: a fragile hillside, a single narrow approach on Princess Street, and traffic that made the site unbuildable at that scale. The objection was never to housing — it was to putting the wrong amount of it in the wrong place.
So residents organized. SOS pulled together a coalition of neighbors and a 630-signature petition, asking the Council to remove the site or hold it to Sausalito's 29-unit base zoning. When the City offered only a partial cut — to 49 units an acre — residents made the case in person. Nineteen spoke at the February 25 meeting; dozens more filled the chamber. The Council took Alta Mira off the opportunity-site list altogether.
It was a fast campaign, and a complete one. Thank you to everyone who signed, showed up, and spoke — the hill, and the landmark on it, are still there because you did.