What do you want to see in Tam Junction over the next 10 years?

A small weekend farmers' market or food-truck corner would give Tam Junction an anchor and bring weekend foot traffic to the local shops. Southern Marin doesn't have an easy one, and this is the natural spot for it.

Shoreline already backs up to a standstill every summer weekend. Dropping a few hundred new residents into that junction without fixing the crossing and the Almonte intersection first is putting the cart before the horse. Sequence it: infrastructure, then homes.

The single most important thing is a protected, properly signalized crossing where Almonte meets Shoreline, with a real pedestrian phase. People walk and bike across there now and it's genuinely dangerous with summer beach traffic. Fix this first and everything else gets safer by default.

Fix the pedestrian crossing at Shoreline and Almonte before anything else. It's genuinely frightening to cross on foot or bike with beach traffic backed up, and people do it every day. Protected crossings and a connected sidewalk network should be the first investment, not the last.

Whatever housing gets built here, tie it to genuinely affordable, deed-restricted units — not just market-rate apartments marketed as "workforce" that still rent for $3k+. If the County is investing, make sure the people priced out of Southern Marin have a real path back.

I'm not against housing, but please keep anything new to two or three stories with real setbacks and trees. The whole reason people love Southern Marin is that it doesn't look like a wall of apartments along the highway. Build homes, just don't let it become a canyon of stucco that blocks the ridgeline view of Mt. Tam.

Tam Junction needs a genuine everyday anchor — a market or grocer like a smaller Good Earth — so people run errands here instead of driving up to downtown Mill Valley or over the hill. An anchor that brings people in daily is what keeps the smaller shops around it alive.

Give Tam Junction an actual green — open lawn, big shade trees, a few picnic tables — that a farmers' market or a school concert could spill onto. Right now there is nowhere in Southern Marin between the ballfields and the beach where you can just sit on grass. Make the junction that place.

Add a safe bike connection from Tam Junction to the Mill Valley–Sausalito path and down to the beach. So many cars on Highway 1 are only going a mile or two — give people a safe alternative and you cut the traffic everyone's complaining about.

Build small-scale mixed-use housing above the shops at Tam Junction — homes over ground-floor retail. We need places for the people who actually work here to live, and putting housing above the storefronts keeps the area alive in the evening instead of a dead strip mall after 6pm.

The multi-use path runs right nearby but the connection into the junction is an afterthought. A clear, protected bike-and-walk link from the path into the heart of Tam Junction would let people arrive without a car and would pull foot traffic straight to the shops. It's low-hanging fruit.

A plaza with no shade is an empty hot slab from June to September. Mature trees, a shade structure, and real benches — not the hostile kind you can't sit on for more than a minute — would make it somewhere people of every age actually want to be.

Beyond a morning farmers' market, a recurring evening market with food stalls, local makers, and music would draw people who otherwise drive straight through to the beach. It gives the new plaza something to host and gives local vendors a low-cost way to test a storefront.

A real public plaza — benches, shade trees, room for a few tables and a coffee cart. Tam Junction has no center, just parking lots. Give people a reason to stop and linger instead of only driving through on the way to the beach.

My parents have lived in Almonte for forty years and there is nowhere for them to downsize to without leaving the county entirely. A small senior-focused building near the shops, where you can walk to a pharmacy and a coffee shop without driving, would let longtime residents stay in the community they built.

I'm for walkability, but the shops here live or die on people being able to pull in, park, and grab something. Tuck the parking behind the buildings or under them if you want, just don't design it away entirely or the local businesses we're trying to protect won't make it.

Whatever gets built, set aside ground-floor space at below-market rent for genuinely local, independent businesses, with a cap on national chains. Otherwise the only tenants who can afford new construction are banks and phone stores, and we'll have spent a decade and a fortune to get a strip mall that feels like everywhere else.

Daylight the creek that runs through Tam Junction and build a short creekside walking path. Right now it's a culvert under a parking lot. A restored creek with native planting would handle storm flooding better and finally give people somewhere pleasant to walk.

Daylighting the creek can't just be decorative. Size the channel and culverts so the junction stops flooding every atmospheric river, plant natives along the banks, and you solve the storm problem and create a walking corridor at the same time. Do it as real green infrastructure, not a water feature.