Drive along Larkspur Landing Circle, past the shops and food stalls at Marin Country Mart, and there's a fenced parcel across the way that most people never register. No signage explains it. No listing agent points to it. It used to be a wastewater treatment plant, decommissioned by the Ross Valley Sanitary District, sitting quietly while the rest of the block reinvented itself around the ferry terminal and the SMART station. If you've been comparing Larkspur to other central Marin towns and pricing in its scarcity as a permanent feature, that parcel is the detail your research has probably missed. It is moving through a public entitlement process right now, and depending on how the next few months go, it could reshape what "no new construction in Larkspur" actually means.
The Story the Resale Numbers Tell
Every conversation about buying in Larkspur eventually lands on the same fact: there's almost nothing to buy, and almost nothing has been built here in decades. That's not an exaggeration born of agent enthusiasm. In Q2 2026, Larkspur's median single-family sale price rose sharply year over year even as the average sale price slipped slightly on the same number of closings, which is the signature of a market where the mix of homes changing hands moved upmarket while total buying power stayed roughly flat. Active inventory this past summer sat in the single digits citywide, with only a handful of pending sales behind it. Most of what's for sale was built decades ago, well before anyone was designing for open floor plans or EV charging.
That scarcity is real, and it's the reason Larkspur behaves like a low-volume, high-conviction market where a handful of sales set the tone each quarter. But scarcity framed as permanent and scarcity framed as a phase are two different investment theses, and the second one is closer to what's actually happening on the ground.
The Smaller Signal: Magnolia Village
The first piece of evidence is already visible if you walk downtown. At 1133 to 1169 Magnolia Avenue, on the site of the former Ace Hardware store next to Rustic Bakery, the City of Larkspur approved a 20-unit townhome project back in February 2023. Five parties appealed the decision that April, the City Council denied the appeals, and construction is now underway. The finished community will include 16 market-rate townhomes, four below-market-rate units, and about 1,488 square feet of ground-floor commercial space, with Rustic Bakery staying put on the adjacent parcel. Delivery is expected in 2027.
Twenty townhomes will not transform a city. But in a resale market built almost entirely on homes from the 1960s and earlier, Magnolia Village represents the first meaningful new-construction inventory Larkspur has seen in a very long time, and it's a preview of what happens when new product finally enters a market that has been trading the same aging stock for decades.
The Larger Signal: A Sewer Plant Zoned for Housing
The second piece of evidence is much bigger, and it's the one that doesn't show up on any home search because it isn't for sale in any conventional sense. It's public land.
The Ross Valley Sanitary District has owned 2000 Larkspur Landing Circle since it operated as a wastewater treatment facility. The site sits directly across from Marin Country Mart and a short walk from the Golden Gate Larkspur Ferry Terminal and the Larkspur SMART station, the same transit hub that anchors the Larkspur Landing district described on the Larkspur Chamber's own site. In December 2021, the EPA approved the site's cleanup for unrestricted land use, meaning there are no environmental restrictions on what gets built there. In February 2025, the district's board declared the property exempt surplus land under California's Surplus Land Act, which requires public agencies to prioritize housing when they dispose of land they no longer need.
The city had already set the stage the previous September. On September 4, 2024, Larkspur adopted a new General Plan and Housing Element that rezoned the parcel to Mixed Use and designated it as a priority housing site with capacity for roughly 320 units, a number that could climb further if a developer uses the state's density bonus law.
What happened next moved fast by municipal standards. The district issued a request for qualifications, and 24 development teams submitted by the October 2025 deadline. A short list received a formal request for proposals in December 2025. Five developers responded by January 26, 2026. And on March 18, 2026, the district's board authorized an exclusive negotiating agreement with Brookfield Residential and Carmel Partners as the preferred development team, with a stated goal of bringing a finalized disposition and development agreement to the board in the third quarter of 2026.
That's this quarter. Today.
A public agency's own decommissioned treatment plant, rezoned for up to roughly 320 housing units, is under exclusive negotiation with a national developer targeting final agreement terms this quarter, right beside the ferry terminal and SMART station that define Larkspur's commute case.
Carmel Partners isn't new to this stretch of Larkspur. The firm already owns Larkspur Courts, a 248-unit multifamily community near Marin Country Mart and the ferry terminal, which it acquired in a $131.5 million transaction in 2024. A developer with existing holdings a few hundred yards from the site is a different kind of bidder than one arriving cold, and it's worth factoring into how seriously this timeline should be taken.
What This Actually Changes for Someone Comparing Towns
None of this means Larkspur is about to flood with new inventory. A disposition and development agreement is a negotiated framework, not a shovel in the ground, and projects of this size in Marin routinely take years to move from entitlement to occupancy. Anyone using this to time a purchase around a construction date would be getting ahead of what's actually been decided.
What it does mean is that the scarcity premium currently baked into Larkspur pricing is being paid against a static supply story that isn't quite as static as it looks from a portal search. A buyer comparing Larkspur to Corte Madera or San Rafael today is weighing today's thin resale inventory and today's aging housing stock. A buyer who understands the pipeline is weighing that same inventory against a town where the largest available parcel near its transit hub is actively being negotiated for housing, on top of a townhome project already under construction a few blocks away. Those are different starting assumptions, and they lead to different conclusions about how much of today's price reflects genuine long-term scarcity versus a temporary gap that a public land deal is actively working to close.
If you're evaluating Larkspur as a long-term hold, an investment, or a relocation, the treatment plant site is the kind of fact that belongs in your due diligence conversation even though no listing will ever mention it.
A Few Questions Worth Asking Before You Decide
Does this mean home values in Larkspur will drop once new units are built? Not necessarily, and not on any near-term timeline. A DDA target for this quarter still leaves entitlement, design review, and construction phases ahead, likely stretching multiple years before any units close. What it does is add a data point to how you think about future supply that isn't visible in resale comps.
Is the 320-unit figure guaranteed? No. That number comes from the city's 2024 Housing Element designation for the site, and the final unit count will depend on what Brookfield Residential and Carmel Partners negotiate with the district and what the city approves through its own entitlement process. State density bonus law could push the total higher than the Housing Element baseline.
Should I wait to see how this resolves before buying in Larkspur? That depends entirely on your own timeline and goals, and it's exactly the kind of question worth working through with someone who's tracking the entitlement calendar alongside the resale market, not just one or the other.
If you're weighing Larkspur against other central Marin towns and want a clear-eyed read on what's scarce, what's coming, and what that means for your specific situation, Daniel Nebenzahl can walk through the comparison with you. Request your home valuation to start the conversation.
