Dear Beloved Community, We need your help.

The Town is blocking our development of affordable housing. For the past two years, we have been diligently trying to satisfy the Town of Friday Harbor’s requirements so that we can sell 8 completed homes to homebuyers in our HolliWalk neighborhood who qualify for our program. During that time, the Town has continued to delay, has escalated its requirements, and has refused to record the Binding Site Plan that would allow the residents to buy their homes.

We are asking you to join us in demanding that the Town record the Binding Site Plan to allow HolliWalk residents to purchase their homes, which were completed 2 years ago and which they have been forced to rent rather than own for the past year and a half.

The Town continues its pattern of adding new demands to our site plan, undeterred by a 2024 Hearing Examiner’s ruling against this. In December 2023, the Town issued a decision requiring the Home Trust to build additional street improvements as a condition of recording the Binding Site Plan. It took seven months to appeal this decision to an independent Hearing Examiner who ruled that the Town could not add new requirements after they had approved the design of the project, after the project was constructed, and after they inspected and approved the construction. Ignoring the Hearing Examiner’s Ruling and the State laws that he cited in that ruling, the Town issued a new decision in January 2025 requiring the Home Trust to meet more new conditions including providing individual water meters for each home at the cost of more than $70,000 after approving the initial site plan with one meter.

Each step of the way, we have tried to quietly and diligently work with the Town to resolve these issues, make changes, etc. All the while, our homebuyers are losing equity, the Home Trust continues to pay construction loan interest, and our mission to create permanent affordable housing goes unfulfilled.

The Town is blocking our other projects as well. It is not just HolliWalk. We are experiencing a similar pattern of delay and changing requirements on our proposed Argyle Project and our other efforts to create affordable housing. Enough is enough.

If you care about affordable housing for our community, please join us in demanding that the Town record the Binding Site Plan for HolliWalk so that these homes can be sold to their resident buyers. There must be a reset in the Town’s practices so that Friday Harbor can see the permanent affordable housing it so desperately needs and deserves and that our Comprehensive Plan calls for. We are in unanimous support of this effort. Please visit our website to learn more and to see how you can help. www.hometrust.org

Signed,

Amanda Lynn, Executive Director; Board of Directors Executive Committee: Paul Fischburg, Jim Goetz, Erica Hamlin, Darcie Nielsen; All other Board Members: Adrian Kilpatrick, Bob Anderson, Chris Pope, Cole Arendt, Elliot Burch, Rachel Brooks, Shauna Barrows