Golden Gate Village

Golden Gate Village, the public housing on Drake Avenue in Marin City, was designed by an associate of Frank Lloyd Wright, won a national award, and is on the National Register of Historic Places, which is not the usual biography of a housing project. Marin City itself began in June 1942 as war housing for the Marinship yard in Sausalito, thrown up in Waldo Valley for the workers Bechtel's recruiters were bringing in from across the country, many of them Black families from Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi. By the end of 1943 nearly 6,000 people lived there, about a thousand of them in dormitories. In 1944 the California Supreme Court ruled in James v. Marinship, argued by Thurgood Marshall, that Black workers could not be excluded from the yard's jobs through a segregated union auxiliary. The shipyard closed in May 1946 and most of the temporary housing was pulled down. White workers moved out into suburbs that restrictive covenants kept closed to their Black neighbours, and Black families stayed in what was left. Supervisor Vera Schultz won federal money for permanent housing, and the architect Aaron Green, Wright's associate in San Francisco, designed the replacement with John Carl Warnecke: about 300 apartments in poured concrete under red tile roofs, opened in March 1960. In 1964 the Public Housing Administration gave it first honours among 700 entries, and in 2017 it was listed on the National Register as a historic district. Black residents were at one time more than 90 percent of Marin City's population. The complex, owned by the county housing authority, was approved in 2025 for the first 85 million dollar phase of a long renovation.