Bainbridge Island residents outside Winslow who were reticent to new construction in neighborhood centers may have got their wish.

At the June 24 city council meeting, planning director Patty Charnas shared that her department and the Planning Commission determined that all 1,977 new units of housing required by House Bill 1220 could be accommodated in Winslow by increasing density in the High School Road and ferry district areas.

“This means that we can not have to look outside of Winslow to change capacity in our neighborhood centers or in our vast conservation zone. Instead, we can begin to look at updating selective elements of our Comprehensive Plan, which again, is a periodic update to ‘review and revise if necessary,’ rather than a whole-scale review of everything,” Charnas said. “With these capacity numbers met in Winslow, […] this makes the end of the project at least a little more attainable than it has been.”

Both elements of Bainbridge Island’s long-term planning documents, the islandwide Comprehensive Plan and the focused Winslow Subarea Plan, have been under intense scrutiny by the public, city planners and city advisory groups for about 18 months.

These documents are standard civic guides for a municipality’s growth over the next several decades, detailing changes to infrastructure, development standards, housing, water use and more as a city’s population changes, but this update has been a doozy for BI. The state level HB 1220, the Growth Management Act, has mandated that all cities plan for not just population growth, but adequate housing stock for all income levels, some of which is currently almost nonexistent on the island.

That means out of BI’s capacity, 1,977 housing units, 867 units must be affordable for people making at or below half the area median income for Kitsap County, or just under $50,000 annually. The question that city staff and the public have been untangling since January 2024 is where to put those homes.

Charnas and city manager Blair King were unable to give council an estimate of the exact date of when the Comprehensive Plan will be completed, but confirmed that, given this update, work should progress more quickly. However, councilmember Kirsten Hytopolous and deputy mayor Jon Quitslund were not as certain that the update was all good news.

Quitslund, the council’s liaison on the Planning Commission, said that concentrating all of the island’s growth in Winslow for the next two decades did not seem advisable. The areas noted in Charnas’ presentation are already primed for redevelopment in the next 10 years, and may be redeveloped again in another 20, he said, but the city is beyond overdue for submission of its plan, and any progress is welcome.

“Where does middle housing belong in our future? It doesn’t belong in [residential] zoning, unless we make some big adjustments in what we permit and how we treat housing outside of the higher-density zones. Middle housing, we have to plan for, and I think it’s a mistake to believe we can just focus on the ferry district and High School Road,” said Quitslund. “It’s a mistake to stop short of paying close attention to other parts of the greater Winslow area, but I think we should shift gears for the Planning Commission and deal with things that have been out of reach, because we’ve been so preoccupied with the difficulties of planning for Winslow.”

Hytopolous had other concerns. She said she never thought the city was intending to zone for 1,977 new units, which would include units for 100% and 120% AMI (or households making between $98,500-$118,200 annually), because housing for those income thresholds could be accommodated outside of Winslow.

But simply upzoning an area won’t produce affordable housing, Hytopolous said, and “for the benefit of the public, everybody up here [council] knows that.

“I want to be clear — I am never going to get behind an upzoning, an outright upzoning for 1,400 units with the idea that that’s going to create affordable housing. We all know that will create 1,400 market rate units,” she said.

Her position is not anti-growth or anti-affordable housing, she added, rather it’s disingenuous of council to check off the box of multi-income level housing provisions with just upzoning, and Hytopolous “will fight to the end for any sort of purported new capacity for affordable housing to have teeth that will actually result in affordable housing,” she said.

Councilmember Leslie Schneider had a response to Hytopolous.

“I would like to see us separate the idea of building affordable housing from subsidizing it, with the basic idea that yes, we want to ask developers to pony up some support by getting us at least some middle-income housing that is permanent. Then, we need additional subsidies to bring those prices down. We already have two examples: Wintergreen and The Oliver,” Schneider said. “I think we can have integrity about getting to these lower income levels, we just have to think a little differently about the building of it versus subsidizing of it.”