By Steve Ulvi
It’s been a rancher’s lifetime since Friday Harbor governance focused on simple rural issues, when winters were harsh and everybody knew one another’s business. Those were the halcyon decades of cutting road dust with waste oil, harassing hippies, salmon abundance, madcap bunny buggies, and “wink and nod” development processes.
Town encompasses 787 acres now, a picture book of adaptive island lifestyles; a hodgepodge of structures in undulant leafy neighborhoods, key business monopolies and upscaling tendencies. It is also a faded postcard of a working seaport minus fishing vessels, rank canneries and cyclones of gulls.
The visual and administrative separation of the cheek-to-jowl town and the surrounding bucolic landscape of San Juan Island is, in many ways, a distinction without a difference. We all suffer the in-your-face existential issue; our island community’s lagging accomplishments in greatly increasing permanently affordable housing.
As the salmon hordes became yesteryear, the town threw in for t-shirts, artwork and Orca-harassing summer tourism, but decades later, the many negative externalities of unmanageable tourism, the cycles of hollow-dollar boom and hunker-down winter bust, skips and repeats like an old scratched blues record, with calendar certainty.
I also lament the County inertia in not embracing rural clusters, trailers and tiny houses that are denigrated like “bird shit in the punchbowl” in exurban delusions, by property-flippers and NIMBY notions of self-oriented retirees. Common sense and community needs are the ongoing victims of highly restrictive zoning strategies, self-propagating codes and one-size-fits-all rural policies of the Growth Management Act.
I suspect that most rooted, community-minded island residents are troubled by bubbly gentrification and soaring taxes and our town’s lack of economic expansion, tepid living-wage job growth and backsliding progress in truly affordable housing.
The highly successful Home Fund is our unique money transfusion, matched three or four to one by off-island grants, making permanently affordable housing projects pencil out.
The Community Home Trust, a precious land trust non-profit, works collaborative magic in clawing uphill to create permanently affordable rental and owned housing critical for middle-class expansion.
Most of us applaud them for spearheading the development of the Argyle Project lots to create over 40 badly needed permanently affordable rental units right in town.
I respect people who step up to public service. Especially in this fishbowl. However, Mayor and Town Council support for glaringly counterproductive, reactive staff processes and ignoring the clear fault-finding of the Hearing Examiner, then “same tune, third verse” blocking the recording of HolliWalk homes while also slowing the unprecedented Argyle rental development, are egregious failures in strategic leadership.
These unbending, added-cost processes are clearly on the wrong side of public interest and community vision, as continually affirmed over many years in numerous public surveys, current and past Comprehensive Plans (housing elements) and common sense.
For what purpose, by what fuzzy administrative logic, is our Home Trust held hostage, wasting precious time and resources tilting with paper windmills of after-the-fact site development requirements?
We all hear the growing frustration, sense the quiet lamentations of hundreds of stressed working families barely hanging on without affordable housing, and see the rental vans as good people give up and leave this devolving place.
This is the moment for problem-solving, collaborative leaders to reverse this travesty and instead do everything possible to expedite hundreds of critically needed permanently affordable homes.
