Developers: your friends and neighbors

Published 7:00 am Wednesday, April 12, 2006

As archetypal tales go, the Port Blakely development holds a privileged place in island lore.

The players and their various roles – big developer as dragon terrorizing a hapless village, community activists as gallant knights on a soul-defining quest to slay the evil beast – were all somewhat larger than life, almost worthy of Joseph Campbell.

The battle over plans to put 843 homes on 1,153 acres around quiet Blakely Harbor defined island politics through the first half of the 1990s – and, we dare say, beyond, to the extent that “developers” are still perceived as marauding capitalists from distant shores come to pillage the island. Never mind that the Port Blakely company was among the longer-tenured property owners on the island at that point (its holdings stretching back into history); the firm’s dubious decision to bring in a slick salesman from out of town had a lasting effect on the local psyche: development suddenly had a face, and it wasn’t from these parts.

Islanders are hardly alone in using “developer” as an all-purpose pejorative. But a quick glance at projects going up around Winslow suggest that the focus of the local resentment over change – and the notion that we’re being ravaged from afar – is decreasingly accurate. All of the partners behind the Seabreeze on Madison Avenue are from Bainbridge, we’re told, while the guy behind the Alliance mixed-use project on Winslow Way has lived here longer than most of the people destined to gripe about it. Even Island Crossings, which brings new condos and a Best Western shingle to High School Road, has Bainbridge money behind it; one of Base Capital’s principals lives at the north end. True, the Opus project near the ferry terminal carries the whiff of carpetbaggery, but even that project started with Poulsbo money and passed through island hands en route to the present ownership.

In short: it appears that Bainbridge growth is being financed largely by Bainbridge itself. That fact may have a certain de-centering effect on the usual rhetoric over physical change to the landscape; when the developers are your friends and neighbors, you may start to wonder who exactly you’re supposed to be mad at.

Things get more problematic still when these projects win awards for environmental sensitivity, as the Vineyard Land project has for its construction techniques. Readers should further recall that on their own initiative, that project’s principals engineered a land swap with the city that put the old strawberry pier property at the Head of the Bay onto the roster of public parks – a fine deal for all of us.

Before we’re pilloried as apologists for growth, we should say that not every new project will or should be greeted with enthusiasm. Some of the buildings going up around town are interesting and distinctive, sure to nestle into the patchwork of styles we think of as “island architecture”; others look like the wrong end of a dog. No doubt there will be disagreement over which is which.

But unlike the Port Blakely days, the dragon now lives in our midst. It’s someone whose community values probably aren’t too different from your own, but who sees in our island some economic opportunity and a way to take advantage of it.

If not distinctly Bainbridge, that mythology at least seems pretty American.