For as long as I can remember, many BI leaders and residents have decried the scarcity of affordable housing in our community. At the same time, many of us, having observed how difficult it has been to actually add such housing, have opined that the process we use to “seek a solution” is at fault.

There has been no shortage of effort or engagement: the work of the city’s Affordable Housing Task Force in 2017-18, for example, produced a list of mechanisms to increase such housing. But one thing it did not produce, namely an island-wide housing strategy, is the one thing we most critically need.

We have witnessed time and again specific proposals — Suzuki, for example — become entangled in controversy, often emerging from the pro-growth/anti-growth divide in the community. This division will continue to present an all-but-insurmountable barrier to achieving more affordable housing absent a housing strategy that emerges from the engagement of the community in its development.

The city’s response to the Bethany Lutheran Church housing proposal, which is to use that proposal to pilot the state law enabling religious organizations to obtain exemptions from local zoning provisions, is yet another example of what appears to be a band-aid approach to solving our affordable housing problems — in this instance through high-density housing on a site neither intended nor suitable for it.

Our failure to craft a comprehensive strategy, while reacting to what is seen as the affordable housing “crisis”, simply prolongs and exacerbates the real crisis, namely our history of poor planning.

State law has long allowed mandated affordable housing with any increase in housing density, but we have failed to take advantage of it. Instead, we have pursued one-off land-use proposals and perpetuated the specious pro-growth vs. anti-growth debate. Rather than take steps that only sharpen the divisions among us, why not develop our own Growth Management Plan to allay this distracting debate?

The state Growth Management Act requires state and local governments to manage Washington’s growth by identifying and protecting critical areas and natural resource lands, designating urban growth areas, preparing comprehensive plans and implementing them through capital investments and development regulations.

While it does not, unfortunately, dictate that we adopt an actual growth management plan, neither does it prohibit our doing so. Such a local plan would determine what our local need is and would integrate a groundwater management plan, a sustainable transportation plan and a sewage capacity plan, all of which are critical to even partially addressing, let alone actually solving, our affordable housing problem.

Some who read this will sigh heavily and think, “We can’t wait to craft our own Growth Management Plan with an integrated affordable housing strategy, while the need for affordable housing is so crushing right now.”

To which I can only respond, look what failing to do this planning has already done to us, rather than for us.

If the Bethany Lutheran project is to proceed, its enabling ordinance should include an assessment of all environmental, social and fiscal impacts. These impacts are critical to any zoning change request but are especially so here where the new dense development would take place in the island’s Conservation Zone.

The discussion to date has not addressed those concerns, other than to suggest overriding them and other applicable limitations in our code.

Such an assessment should include that Bainbridge is zoned for more than the population it is mandated to accommodate. That seems to be overlooked when the city contemplates various means to advance the development of affordable housing, like inclusionary zoning, multi-family tax exemptions and density.

The enabling ordinance could lay significant groundwork for the implementation of other affordable housing mechanisms, as well as feed into the work underway on a Housing Action Plan, and, hopefully, a Growth Management Plan.

I am fully aware of how difficult, complex and potentially controversial nearly all land-use matters are, especially in a setting like ours. Seeing the forest for the trees, however, is essential if we are to move beyond our crazy-quilt approach — and the avoidable controversy it generates — to encouraging, if not mandating, affordable housing while conserving the island.

This is the balancing act required by our Comprehensive Plan, and throwing weights off the scales is not balancing.

Editor’s note: Op-eds are not just long letters to the editor. They need to be pre-approved by the editor and written by people with expertise. Jane Rein has more than 20 years of experience as a city planner, was a professor at the University of Wisconsin, and co-authored two editions of Land Use Planning for Sustainable Development.