After more than a year of efforts to create a 20-year plan to guide development on Vashon, the first draft of the county’s Community Service Area plan has been released and is open for comments. Islanders are making their voices heard, as they have been throughout the process, but there is misinformation circulating that needs to be set straight, particularly around the topic of affordable housing and what the plan calls for.
King County’s process for the creation of this plan has been long and the topics complicated, but officials have not done a thorough enough job explaining what the affordable housing changes contained in the plan will mean for the island and what the island’s old plan — created in the 1990s — entails.
The newly created plan calls for the creation of a special district overlay allowing more units to be built on certain parcels in and around Vashon’s town core as long as those units are affordable (available to anyone making 60 to 80 percent of area median income). Parcels zoned R-4 (meaning they can have four dwelling units per acre) would be allowed to increase to R-8 (eight dwelling units per acre) as long as the units are affordable. The county has estimated that if every R-4 zoned area was developed with affordable housing and increased to R-8, roughly 1,400 housing units would be created. This issue has set off a firestorm among islanders as the 1,400 build-out number has set off concerns about water, wetlands and density.
That number is merely a “theoretical exercise” to illustrate how many units could hypothetically be built if water, wetlands and other limiting factors did not exist, according to King County planner Bradley Clark. In a previous Beachcomber story, he said build-out numbers are normally used to guide needed infrastructure. But the opposite is true in this situation on Vashon.
“The water limitations flip that scenario on its head. Rather that build-outs telling us what infrastructure is needed, really we have infrastructure and water telling us how many dwelling units we are going to have,” he said.
The county is not proposing to build out beyond what the island can handle. It is merely trying to create an incentive for affordable housing that is very much needed on an island that offers few jobs that pay a living wage. Currently, King County offers an identical density bonus (R-4 to R-8 for affordable housing projects), but it has been unsuccessful in creating more affordable housing and has never been used on Vashon.
Islanders need to recognize that the CSA Plan is a guideline that does not change the amount of natural resources or space available on Vashon or the high cost of building on ferry-dependent Vashon and the low financial rewards of creating affordable housing. Development will always be bounded by those constraints and no estimates of hypothetical build-out will change that.
