How this model was made
Project locations come from street addresses run through the US Census geocoder; heights, unit counts and status come from City of San Rafael project pages, Marin County, CEQA filings and SF YIMBY as of October 2026. Footprints are sized from unit counts and are approximate. Years after 2026 are reported targets where a developer or agency gave one, and model assumptions otherwise; each card says which.
Terrain is USGS 3DEP elevation data, with hills exaggerated 1.6×. Ground cover combines USGS NLCD 2021 vegetation with parks, open space, shopping areas, parking, wetlands and water from OpenStreetMap. The shoreline, streets, landmark and road labels, and existing building footprints come from © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL, July 2026). US-101, I-580 and SMART rail are hand-traced from geocoded points. Heights come from OpenStreetMap where it records them and otherwise from Microsoft's machine-learned estimates via Overture Maps (together about 84% of buildings); the rest are estimated from building type, footprint size and neighborhood.
Where the water goes comes from NOAA's Sea Level Rise Viewer, which maps land connected to the bay that floods at each half foot above today's high tide. When the water comes is set by the exposure points for each named low-lying area in Marin's BayWAVE assessment, San Rafael's 2020 Flood Risk & SLR Adaptation Report and TAM's 2024 vulnerability memo: once an area's threshold is passed, its lowest ground floods first and the water spreads uphill as it deepens. Elsewhere the map shows NOAA's extent at the scenario's bay level, with about 3 ft added for a storm. The Canal and Spinnaker zones add about 0.4 in a year of measured ground sinking. These are approximations for exploring, not engineering flood maps.
Bike routes come from the map behind San Rafael’s draft Citywide Bicycle & Pedestrian Plan (Alta Planning for the City, 2026): today’s bikeways plus the plan’s proposed routes and crossing fixes. The plan was still a draft as of October 2026 and gives no build dates, so its routes appear in every year. A route takes on the flood colour where NOAA’s map puts the ground under it under water.
Trees come from Meta and the World Resources Institute’s 1 m global canopy height map (CC BY 4.0), which estimates tree height from satellite imagery taken mostly between 2018 and 2020. Each tree in town is a treetop found in that map; on the wooded hills only the tallest tree in every 25 m patch is drawn. Crown widths are estimated from height. Tree cover figures are the share of ground under canopy at least 10 ft tall within about a quarter mile of each neighborhood’s center.
Illustrative growth after 2034 fills sites the 2023 Housing Element, Downtown Precise Plan and General Plan 2040 identify for housing, at roughly the pace General Plan 2040 projects. No developer has proposed these buildings.