As building grows in Kitsap, county aims for more city density

CENTRAL KITSAP -- Neighbors on Levin Road could only watch last week, as giant cedar trees skirting the area around rural homes not far from the Bangor gate were logged and shorn of their limbs.

The forest has provided a “magical little canopy” where people would walk and ride their bicycles, said John Bial, who’s lived in the area for 30 years. Bial says he would have bought the 28 acres of land himself and kept it in perpetuity, had he known it was up for sale or that the trees would be cut down ahead of possible development.

Barbara Schultz found out about the sale over Memorial Day weekend and said she was given no notification about the future of the property beloved for its trees. After receiving no response to the neighbors’ concerns from the new property owner, Schultz did what many residents in Kitsap have done when they learn of development slated to come to near backyard. She tried to fight back.

Motivated to preserve the aesthetics of their community and prevent environmental impact that she says has driven displaced wildlife into neighbors’ backyards, Schultz tried to piece together a petition to recall the sale, but Schultz came to realize that it was too late. The deal was done. Now, she wants to see the laws change to prevent such logging in residential areas.

“I'd like to see it not happen to somebody else,” she said. “Because we can't save ours, maybe we can save somebody else's.”

Community coalitions like what Bial and Schultz are involved in have risen up several times recently when forests are cleared to make way for housing developments in neighborhoods now growing across Kitsap County. Examples from just the past two years range from Levin Road, in Central Kitsap, to places like the Enetai area of East Bremerton, the southern end of Island Lake, Royal Valley along Waaga Way near Silverdale, and more. But as Kitsap County faces a mounting housing shortage and increasing prices for residential units, the recurring battles seem to pit the environmental concerns of adjacent residents against the community's need to expand its housing stock.

County commissioners are working to strike a balance between the two interests as they steer the county’s growth plan in a new direction. That's been part of the ongoing Kitsap County Comprehensive Plan negotiations, which commissioners have issued a preferred alternative for the 2024 update. And it may in fact preserve some of the forest land that in the past has been cleared for development. Commissioner Christine Rolfes says the preferred alternative is intended to channel new growth upwards instead of outwards, instead of following planning philosophies from 10 and 30 years back, which paved the way for the type of projects that are being protested for extending beyond urban centers into undeveloped pastures and forests.

Alternative 2 of three proposals, selected by the commissioners in March, will act as a blueprint for growth over the next 20 years if confirmed at the end of the year. That plan, essentially a map that dictates what type of zoning and development is allowed in different areas of the county, will champion multifamily building in urban cores by increasing the building height and density allowed by county zoning regulations, rather than permitting sprawl into less dense areas with single family housing. It's an attempt to strike a delicate balance, with residents affected on either side of a decision.

A shortage of the multifamily housing Kitsap will need by 2044

Based on current zoning regulations that allow for certain building heights and density, Kitsap County’s capacity to build multifamily housing is significantly below the projected need, reported the Kitsap County Planning Commission in its preferred alternative recommendation. By 2044, Kitsap County is predicted to need well over 8,000 new multifamily units. Current zoning would only allow for about 2,000 units to be built, if commissioners were to stick with the status quo in the comp plan.

The disparity is not the same for single family housing, however, as the county is estimated to need a little more than 6,000 single family homes in the next 20 years. The existing zoning allows for a capacity for about 7,500, according to the report.

“Older people don't have places they can downsize to. Young families can't afford to buy the housing that's being offered and then low-income people or people who've lost their housing have a hard time finding places they can afford,” Rolfes said.

Different types of housing is necessary to support a diverse job base and people that embody a thriving local economy and community, said Beverly Parsons, a social scientist on the steering committee for the Kitsap Environmental Coalition. The coalition has endorsed Alternative 2, with some caveats about environmental protections.

“If we only have single family housing, we're just going to bring the wealthiest people over,” she said. “We don't have that kind of housing that allows people to be nurses and teachers and fire workers and waitresses and on it goes, if we just bring more and more single family housing instead of multifamily housing.”

But expanding diverse housing options shouldn’t come at the expense of environmental preservation, Parsons said.

“Let's just be careful about what we're consuming and extracting and how we are finding a way to live in relationship to nature that allows nature to have its rights,” Parsons said. We need to “give back more than we've taken so that there's something for future generations.”

Development always has its cost, environmentalists say

The Kitsap Environmental Coalition formed in 2018 when community members coalesced to push back against a timber company’s plans to spray herbicides and pesticides in a wetland area in Hansville, Parsons said.

“Over time, different issues have come to the fore, but a major thing has always been this issue of finding some kind of balance between human life and the life of all of the planet," she said. "And that's all a backdrop to… how we see environmental concerns balanced out with the need for expanded multifamily housing.”

The KEC endorsed Alternative 2 in a letter to the planning commission in February, asking the county to confine growth to its already developed areas to “discourage the sprawl of suburban-like tracts that are threatening Kitsap’s beautiful natural environment.”

For Parsons, development means provision for a basic human need, but it also means an almost unavoidable margin of environmental loss if not executed thoughtfully and thoroughly.

Developers are required by law to mitigate the environmental degradations of their projects with enhancements like wetland planting, to reach a net zero or no net loss for overall impact, but Parsons doesn’t take those protective regulations as 100% assurance. She says that developments achieve what is more accurately described as “‘slow net loss’ because that mitigation never really gets to zero.”

Parsons thinks about nuanced environmental losses that may not be accounted for, such as valuable legacy forests and the unique migratory paths of different animals whose wildlife corridors could be lumped together in mitigation. She also wants to see mitigated areas monitored for a longer time to ensure their long term success.

“Just think about what you're doing in the big picture,” she said. “What species are you losing? What long term impacts are you having on our water supply?”

The integrity of naturally beautiful properties, trees, open spaces and wetlands like those fought for by neighborhoods across the county are at stake for the commissioners, Rolfes said.

“We're running out of land and people value the forests and the open space and the small farms in Kitsap County,” she said, “and if every 10 years we develop a plan that allows more of that to turn into housing developments, where are we in 20 or 30 years?”

The tricky tradeoff

State law requires cities and counties to accommodate population growth within their boundaries, which is the fundamental premise of the Growth Management Act, Rolfes said. But local governments can choose whether to satisfy those requirements by rezoning existing forests and farmland for new housing developments, or increase density in areas that are already zoned residential and commercial.

“There’s a fine line to walk,” said Randall King, executive officer for the Kitsap Building Association that endorsed Alternative 2 as well, albeit with a request to blend some of the elements of Alternative 3, which retains more opportunities for single-family development. “It's ‘save the environment’ or ‘do we build a home so somebody can actually move into an apartment or home?’” he asked.

By choosing Alternative 2, the commissioners moved to strike that balance, rejecting Alternative 1, which would have made no revisions to housing growth in the county, and rejecting Alternative 3, which would pursue more single-family building that would extend into undeveloped land beyond urban areas.

Alternative 2 would promote multifamily building by increasing maximum densities and heights in regional and countywide urban centers like Silverdale or parts of East Bremerton, where housing developments are beginning to transform the once solely-commercial Wheaton Way corridor into a 15-minute city. Each city develops their own comprehensive plan as well for development within their city limits.

The preferred alternative would also encourage denser urban growth by expediting permitting for multifamily projects, revise parking regulations to conserve space with fewer parking spot requirements, and make accessary dwelling units, like backyard cottages or "mother-in-law apartments", easier to build, in order to compound the density of homeowner properties, Rolfes said.

Not only does this type of growth move development away from some green spaces, it also provides better access to resources, Parsons said. In these “livable, affordable communities, there is affordable housing, but there's also easy access to shopping and to jobs so that people could live and work in a pretty concentrated way so that you aren't spending all your time traveling to jobs.”

King, however, warns that the multifamily model doesn’t work for everyone, and more so, it may not work forever.

Does an emphasis on multifamily provide enough housing options?

The Kitsap Building Association advocated for a hybrid comprehensive plan, with a mixture of Alternative 2 and Alternative 3, so that multifamily housing would be accommodated while also providing a sense of upward mobility toward ownership of more traditional homes, King said.

Many buyers may not want a condominium, townhome or apartment, King said, and a shift away from single-family building in favor of multifamily could increase the market rates for those homes as inventory declines. A family may become stuck in a townhome that doesn’t appreciate in value.

Multifamily upzoning is a huge “win” to King, but he hopes the effort will be bolstered by supplemental solutions.

“Hopefully they'll have incentives for builders to build houses that people can actually move into for under $400,000,” King said, pointing to extra-comprehensive plan policies such as tax exemptions. “Nobody's going to build if they make no money off of it, so it has to make sense for them.”

The commissioners will also soon discuss the county’s critical area ordinance, which is set to double the buffer widths around streams, an effort to protect the shoreline environment that also impacts what may be built. King worries that buildable land will decrease even in urban centers due to environmental regulations, as streams and ditches are prevalent among infill lots where new structures would be erected.

Rolfes said that the increased buffers for streams wouldn’t impact buildable space much, as increased height maximums will direct development upward, not out, in clusters.

What protections for forests or farms could come?

The KEC made two exceptions to its endorsement of Alternative 2, asking the county to retain mature trees in urban environments instead of just requiring replacement, and a request that rural areas and open spaces would not be rezoned until a “concentrated look” is taken. KEC asked the commissioners to encourage farming, agroforestry, rural employment and the protection of critical environmental areas as they approach rural area rezoning discussions in 2025.

“We will have the tree ordinance in place before we adopt the comprehensive plan so that… we can better regulate and control what the clearing will look like,” Rolfes said. Developers “will need to identify where the significant trees are, where clearing and grading doesn't need to happen.”

Rolfes hopes the tree canopy rules, along with revisions to lower the requirements for parking and pavement areas, will save developers a cost and serve both housing and the environment.

“I’m hoping that with the focus on densifying the already developed areas… we will have more attractive and livable developments as they come online,” she said.

The commissioners elected to postpone discussions to rezone rural areas in Kitsap County, Rolfes said. Instead of rezoning in the comprehensive plan and then grant or deny rezone requests after speaking with the landowner alone, the commissioners want to have a “more meaningful conversation” with the larger community and consider preservation of the rural character in 2025.

Though rural properties can legally be upzoned upon request of the owners, neighbors would not have been involved in rezoning conversations in years past, Rolfes said. There have been avenues for participation in these discussions, but the opportunities often weren’t emphasized enough that a whole community would engage. The commissioners are hoping to change that aspect of future development too.

Laying the groundwork for more community input

“We really don't have ways for communities to have good conversations with one another before these things happen,” Parsons said, “or to educate the population about how nature is changing, how economic conditions are changing, how the housing situation and so on are changing.”

There was a tone of frustration and shock behind Schultz and Bial’s voices as they recounted the short timeline between their discovery of the property sale, the day logging began, and the day they realized it was too late to do anything about it. The same sense of urgency seems to underlie the resistance of neighbors to the 230-home Spring Hill development Lindvog Road in Kingston, to name another example of where affordable housing and long-time rural areas cross paths.

“We have to live with one another in new ways as the population is expanding and as the economic conditions and environment is shifting,” Parsons said. Communities need to be “able to have situations where people can have those conversations and feel safe in sharing their ideas.”

For Parsons, transparency with the public is key. She wants to ensure developers and local governments release public records so that neighbors can see what agreements are being made for the future of undeveloped properties. Parsons also wants to see local government better inform communities when meetings with councils, developers and hearing examiners are so they have an opportunity to comment and protest. She even posits a county environmental ombudsman role to act as an informational point person for concerned residents.

There is a notification system for citizens to stay up to date on any changes to a permit they’re interested in or an opportunity for public comment, Rolfes said, but the commissioners are working on “a better notification process for the whole system” that would apply to future developments once they begin. The new system would include signage to update neighbors if an application for development has been submitted for a certain property, and a QR code to link to engagement opportunities.

“I think that there's a difference between being surprised that something's happening in your backyard or in your neighborhood and knowing about it upfront and having had an opportunity to provide input to the county government and to the developer as the project is being developed,” Rolfes said.

Community engagement may seem fruitless for some neighbors protesting current development projects, but Rolfes said those comments may help down the line.

“You can't change the law through public process on a specific application, but the experience of being engaged with that application helps inform what laws need to change,” Rolfes said. “The commissioners heard the neighborhoods who were upset about what was zoned 10 or 20 years ago and decided we didn't want to make decisions like had been made in the past.”